WARNING: Never go to lunch

with Bucky Waters when you're hungry.

I made that mistake recently when the former

Duke University basketball coach and I went to a fine

Italian restaurant in Durham, and I realized that after

almost an hour, I'd only eaten a couple of bites.

Once Waters starts talking about his life, fork and

food may go untouched.

I picked him up at his home in Durham,

and when he sat down in my untidy car, he saw

on the floor a lone tennis ball. That led to a

hilarious story about the times football star Franco

Harris and he played tennis with

Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert.

Waters, at 82, is still fit and elegant, with a

bearing befitting someone with

the government handle Raymond Chevalier Waters.

As my buddy Dwayne Ballen and I discuss often

when making up lists on this and that, there are

only two men who've ever worn a turtleneck and

sport coat as well as Waters - Richard Roundtree

and Steve McQueen. That's Shaft and Bullitt,

respectively. (See the above picture if you think I'm

jivin'.)

After we got to the restaurant, he told about his

hardscrabble childhood in Camden, N.J., and an

early encounter with his high school basketball

coach, Jack McCloskey.

"He grabbed me by the collar one day and got

right in my face and said 'You've got enough talent

to get out of here, and I'm not going to stop until you

do,'" Waters recalled.

After the waitress brought our food, he asked if I

minded if he blessed it before we began eating.

He then unleashed into the heavens a short,

powerful grace that had even the people at the next

table staring, mouth agape.

He told me about one of his

childhood friends, Eugene Maurice Orowitz:

"We called him 'Oogie'," Waters said. "In high

school, he was one of the best javelin throwers in

the country. [Oogie held the national high school

record for years.] One day, when he was in

junior college, his roommate had a tryout for a play,

but the person who was supposed to read lines with

him didn't show up. He asked Oogie to go read

with him."

He did, and he impressed the director: Oogie

became Michael Landon.

Even though I was enthralled, Waters

would occasionally apologize for monopolizing the

conversation: I assured him I had no stories

to rival his.

If you're really hungry, you don't want him to

start talking about the great basketball players he

coached at Duke and West Virginia universities -

and certainly not two he almost coached.

"Bill Bradley had already signed a grant-in-aid to

come to Duke; we didn't find out until the first day of

school that he had enrolled at Princeton," he said.

It was such a last-minute decision, he said, that

the school didn't even have a dorm room ready for

the future Rhodes Scholar and U.S. Senator when he

arrived from Crystal City, Mo.

"He spent the first week or two sleeping in the attic

at the basketball coach's home. I asked (Duke head

coach) Vic Bubas if he wanted me to go up

to Princeton and get him. He shook his head and

said 'That's a family matter.'"

Turns out that Bradley's father, a high school

dropout - who nonetheless became a bank

president - "thought of college as Harvard,

Yale and Princeton," he said.

It is impossible to imagine a college head coach

today being so magnanimous that he'd let a two-

time high school All American player change his

mind like that without kicking up a fuss and

possibly preventing him from playing elsewhere.

He then told about how, as head coach at West

Virginia, he'd recruited Pete Maravich.

"We were talking on the phone," Waters recalled,

"and he said he really wanted to play for me. His

father, Press, came in, took the phone from him

and hung up."

Maravich ended up at Louisiana State University,

where he averaged more than 40 points per game

during his collegiate career.

How did LSU snatch Pete from Bucky?

Simple: by naming Press Maravich its head

coach.

There was not a smidgen of bitterness in his

voice as he told of losing two of the greatest

college players to ever lace up a pair of Converse.

Indeed, because of his fondness for telling a great

story, there was a twinkle in his eyes as he related

two stories that would've had some coaches trying

to overdose on Gatorade.

Perhaps because he lost two players such

as Maravich and Bradley, Waters said some fans

would tell him that he wasn't a good recruiter.

"I'd point to Dottie" - his wife of 62 years - "and

say 'I recruited her.'"

Swish.

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