Coach Shug Jordan’s Basketball Beginnings

In his sketch on Auburn basketball he included in a historical assessment of the game in the SEC—“Underachiever Alley” as he called it. Forde didn’t hold back. Auburn was bad. In his mind, save for those Charles Barkley years and that 1986 regional final appearance, and maybe that time Chris Porter popped up on the cover of Sports Illustrated, they’d almost always been bad. And they probably always would be.

The reason? Obvious “institutional indifference” toward the sport. There were, Forde said, “clear signs” of it everywhere, none of them clearer than this: Auburn’s head basketball coach from 1933-1942 (and again for the 1945-46 season) was—brace yourself—an assistant football coach named Shug Jordan. He didn’t have to spell it out.

If you wanted evidence that Auburn would forever remain a football school lacking any real roundball ambitions, there it was. The Tigers’ legendary football coach, of all people, had helmed the hardwood for a decade, surely without any real qualifications, surely without any success—a glorified babysitter.

Yeah, about that.

Sure, Ralph “Shug” Jordan ’32, the winningest coach in Auburn football history, is known almost exclusively for what he did on the gridiron. As a player, he anchored the 1931 “Iron Men” at center. As a coach, there was a national championship, a Heisman Trophy winner, “the Amazins.” All that stuff. But there was other stuff, too.

In addition to lettering in football, Shug the Auburn student-athlete lettered in baseball (on the mound and everywhere else) and basketball (at forward). But the sport that the Glomerata called his “first love?” It was the one you didn’t play on a field.

As a senior, he was voted the school’s Most Outstanding Athlete. “Lefty,” wrote the Glomerata, “is truly one of the greatest forwards ever to don an Auburn uniform. His left-hand pass work has constantly proved a stumbling block for all Tiger opponents.”

David Housel once put it this way. Shug, he wrote in a 1968 profile, was the “Pete Maravich of 1929.”

All of which is to say that when Auburn placed Ralph “Lefty” Jordan in charge of the Auburn cagers (that was the nickname du jour for basketball players) in 1934, it wasn’t just because he knew coaching. It wasn’t just because he was a great leader and a great motivator. They put him in charge because he knew the game.

At the end of his first stretch as head coach, Auburn boasted the conference’s top scorers in back-to-back seasons. Before being called into service (along with nearly every other Auburn coach) in the summer of 1942, he took the Tigers to the semifinals of the SEC tournament, beating Vanderbilt and Tulane before losing by nine to a powerhouse Kentucky team.

That Kentucky team was coached by the legendary Adolph Rupp. The two coaches befriended each other over the course of Shug’s courtside career. Shug respected Rupp. Rupp respected Shug.

“Associations with men like him,” Rupp told Housel in 1968, “are what make coaching worthwhile.”

After storming Utah Beach during D-Day and taking part in three other World War II invasions with the Army’s 1st Engineer Special Brigade, Shug returned to the Plains to salvage the 1945-46 basketball season before joining his former football head coach, Jack Meagher, for a short stint as an assistant for the professional Miami Seahawks.

Jordan’s overall record as Auburn’s basketball coach was 95-77, good enough to make him the sixth winningest among Auburn’s 20 coaches.

The rest of his 136 total career wins? Don’t tell Pat Forde, but they came at Georgia, where he pulled the same assistant football coach and head basketball coach double duties from 1946 until Auburn athletics director Jeff Beard called him home in 1950 for gridiron duties only. Auburn fans were thrilled. Adolph Rupp wasn’t.

“When I took over as head football coach and gave up basketball, Coach Rupp wrote me and told me it was the worst mistake I’d ever make,” Jordan told Housel.

Rupp was, obviously, very wrong. But he didn’t mind admitting it. The SEC’s greatest basketball coach was the only coach in the conference to congratulate Shug on Auburn’s 1957 national championship in football.

It turns out, Rupp said, that his old friend was “as fine a football coach as he was a basketball coach.”

Maybe do your homework next time, Pat.

By Jeremy Henderson ’04