Editor’s note: This story on Lewiston-Porter coach Jim Walker was initially published on Oct. 16, 2021. Walker, who graduated and coached at the school for 33 years, died at the age of 83 on Sunday.
Dave Clawson’s favorite Jim Walker story is also a Christmas story. Lewiston-Porter was playing in the opening game of a holiday tournament in the 1984-85 season and basically went through the motions in a listless, uninspired first half .
“At halftime, he lit into us,” said Clawson, who was a senior point guard on that ’85 team and is now head football coach at unbeaten Wake Forest.
“I’ll paraphrase here because you have to print this,” Clawson said by phone from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. “Coach Walker could be pretty fiery. He said, ‘Guys, I live for this stuff. All I do is think about you guys and how to make you better. If you don’t have the same passion for it, then you’re wasting all of our time.’”
Clawson said the Lancers snapped out of their funk. They hit their stride that year and went 18-3, winning the Niagara Frontier League championship and advancing to the sectional finals before losing to Lackawanna in the Aud.
That was Jim Walker at his best — passionate about the sport of basketball, tough and demanding, determined to give his players the discipline and commitment to make something of themselves when their high school days were through. And yeah, the man lived for the game.
“Somebody said to me not too long ago, coaching wasn’t what you did, coaching was who you were,” Walker said Wednesday. “That makes life kind of boring now.”
At 82, he still misses it. But people haven’t forgotten that Walker was a giant in local hoops for half a century — for 33 years as a coach at Lew-Port and for 22 years as the man who made the playoff games at Buffalo State a communal event when he served as Section VI basketball chairman.
Friday night, Walker was inducted into the New York State Basketball Hall of Fame during a ceremony at the Lew-Port gym. Walker was supposed to be enshrined last year in Glens Falls, but the pandemic intruded.
Walker had the choice of being inducted next March in Glens Falls or doing it locally. He decided to stay home, partly because of his health. It’s only fitting that he be honored in the village where he has spent his entire life, where he raised eight children and touched the lives of hundreds of others over his career.
“He lived basketball,” said Matt Bradshaw, who played for Walker on that ’85 NFL title team in the same backcourt with Clawson. He became as assistant under Walker after playing ball in college and later was head coach at Lew-Port for 22 years. Oh, he’s also Walker’s stepson.
“He was never not thinking about basketball,” said Bradshaw, now the first-year head coach at Nichols. “He was very prepared — very prepared. Very good with the Xs and Os. I think what made Jim the coach even more so was his ability to be there as more than just a basketball coach for his players.
“You’ve got to build relationships with the players. You’ve got to show that you care about them, in all avenues of life. I think Jim was really good at that.”
Walker, who played basketball at UB, was a large, loud, looming presence. Bradshaw and Clawson said he could be intimidating, and profane. But Walker said the most important thing was putting kids on the road to being “successful human beings.”
“Looking back at over 200 kids, some of the success stories are amazing, doctors and lawyers and coaches,” Walker said. “That’s probably the most gratifying part of the whole thing.”
A few years back, he had lunch with a former player who was passing through town and said Walker should have a reunion. Walker asked, ‘Why now?’ The former player said he might not realize it, but it had been 50 years since he started coaching at Lew-Port.
Walker, organized as ever, arranged a reunion. Some 150 former basketball players showed up. They had a dinner and a game pitting guys from the Sixties-to-Eighties against a team from the Nineties. He fixed it so Jim Johnstone, who starred on his 1978 sectional champs and went on to play at Wake Forest and briefly in the NBA, would make the winning free throw.
“It was a great weekend,” he said, “and fun to see all the kids — well, all the grownups — and hear all the success stories. It was a great evening.”
Walker had some mentors of his own. He said he was lucky to play at UB for Len Serfustini, though he hated it at times. Harry Blakeslee, principal and later athletic director at Lew-Port, was another role model.
“Harry was a strong, tough disciplinarian,” he said. “So I learned discipline from those guys and the importance of hard work and diligence and so on.
“I learned so much from other coaches and doing all the scouting. I learned every offense and defense, then adapted it to the kids that we had.”
Major college coaches would visit to recruit Johnstone in the 1970s. Walker would pick their brains. He went to Indiana and persuaded the legendary Bobby Knight to let him watch practice for three days.
“I learned so much, sat down with their assistant coaches and went through film for hours and hours,” Walker said. “So I tried to learn from everybody, and hopefully it all came together and worked out.”
Those were some golden years in local hoops. Some of the finest high school coaches in Western New York history were roaming the sidelines when Walker was in his prime. He battled them and learned from them.
“I’ve been around him since 1978,” said Bradshaw, whose mother, Gail, began dating Walker when he was around 10. “I was so fortunate to grow up in the Niagara Frontier League in an era when you had Jim Walker, you had Pat Monti, Jon Roth, Dick Harvey, Marv Matteson.
“So, when I’m coaching the JV and sitting on the bench for the varsity, I’m watching in my opinion some of the best coaches ever in Western New York. I was given a great education in the game of basketball.”
Of course, the rock of the family was back at home. Gail had four children and Jim had four of his own. They merged into a Brady Bunch-like clan with eight kids.
“She took care of raising the kids, took care of the household,” Walker said. “She was up every morning at 6 o’clock, put in a load of wash. All 10 of us lived in a story-and-a-half Cape Cod in Lewiston — with one bathroom, by the way. She got the first group ready for breakfast, then put the second load in and get the second group, the elementary kids, ready for school.
“By noon, she had everything done and ready for everybody to come home for dinner. Yeah, it was a team effort because I was never home.”
Walker laughed at the memory. Coaching was who he was, remember. That meant long nights spent scouting and getting his team ready. Lew-Port was generally the smaller, less-talented team from a smaller school. You needed to find any edge.
Bradshaw would find pieces of paper around the house, with Walker’s scouting notes on them. Names of players, drills, diagrams of plays. He remembers how fretful he was the time Walker assigned him to scout an opponent because Jim had more pressing duties.
“I’m all nervous,” Bradshaw recalled. “I’m writing and writing and writing.” He put the notes on the counter for Walker to see when he got home. He can still hear his step-dad’s voice in the other room, scanning his report and saying “Wow!” in approval.
Clawson, who has led 16th-ranked Wake Forest to five straight bowl games, said Walker is one of the two greatest coaching influences in his life. The other is his college football coach, Amherst College legend Dick Farley, who is in the College Football Hall of Fame.
“Two things about Coach Walker still have an impact on me,” said Clawson, who was a UB assistant from 1991-92. “One, how passionate he was about what he did. He loved it. You could tell in the way he organized a practice, the way he would game plan and the thought and time he put into it.
“Two, tactics and strategy. Every game we played, I felt we had an advantage because we had him on the bench with us. He demanded that we care about what we did, and he spent time at it and was an expert at it. He was very dedicated to the profession. He was going to tell you the truth, and if you couldn’t handle it, that was your problem.
“He was old school in a very good way.”
Walker’s heart was in the game, sometimes to his detriment. Bradshaw remembers two of three times when Jim had to be hospitalized because his heart was racing. He recalls it happening just before the start of basketball season, because Walker was so excited. It happened in games, too.
“I had atrial fibrillation (an irregular, often rapid heart rate), which I still do,” Walker said. “I was kind of verbal during a game and really into it. Every once in a while, come the fourth quarter of a close game, I’d have to sit out, because the heart would get to racing. I’d get light-headed.
“It was nothing serious. It seemed the games were always close. We weren’t blessed with tremendous individual talent, so we had to make it work as a team.”
Other schools had more talent in later years. Niagara Falls became a power. Lew-Port went 34 years without an NFL title until 2019, when Bradshaw’s team beat Niagara Falls to win it behind Ohio State-bound Roddy Gayle.
“When we won, I made sure I brought Jim into the locker room after the game,” Bradshaw said. “I thanked him for the opportunity to get me started and the impact he had on me as a coach. I said, ‘Is there anything you want to say to the players?’”
Walker put on his best curmudgeon face and joked, “You guys screwed it up for me. Every championship on that banner, I had something to do with as a player or a coach. Now you screwed it up for me.’”
Bradshaw smiled and told his old coach how wrong he was. He told Walker he was as big a part of that championship as anyone. Coaching isn’t what you do, it’s who you are, and Bradshaw wouldn’t be what he is if not for the example Walker set for him when he was young.
“In my opinion,” Bradshaw said, “Jim Walker IS Lew-Port basketball.”
Jerry Sullivan is a sports columnist with over 30 years experience in Western New York. Follow him on Twitter @ByJerrySullivan or respond via email at scoreboard@gnnewspaper.com.