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Profile: Maurice Robinson
By John Antonik

Maurice Robinson had all of the necessary ingredients to be a terrific college power forward: strength, speed, quickness, agility and intelligence.

The only problem was the 6-foot-7 Robinson never got a chance to play forward in college at West Virginia University. Instead, a lack of big men forced him to be the school’s starting center on the 1977 and 1978 teams.

Despite his size the Welch native was a monster in the paint for the Mountaineers, particularly his senior season in 1978 when he averaged 20 points and 12.1 rebounds per game. Almost 30 years later he is still the last WVU player to average more than 20 points and 10 rebounds per game for a season.

Production like that was exactly what Coach Joedy Gardner was looking for from Robinson when he recruited him out of Welch High School in the state’s southern coalfields.

Robinson became a top recruiting priority for West Virginia after he made the all-state team as a high school sophomore in 1972. WVU coach Sonny Moran began recruiting Robinson that spring and kept after him right up until the time he was forced to resign after a 10-15 season in 1974.

“We were on a trip to see Maurice when we got a call to come back to Morgantown,” recalled former assistant coach Gary McPherson. “When we got back we were out of jobs.”

The powers that be had decided to find a replacement for Moran and Joedy Gardner eventually became the choice.

Gardner, fresh out of Arizona Western Junior College, picked up where Moran left off and made signing Robinson his top priority. Landing a player of Robinson’s caliber was essential for Gardner to get his program off to a good start.

For a short time during the basketball job search West Virginia lost touch with Robinson and his two top two college choices became Maryland and Wake Forest.

Robinson says a recruiting trip to Hawaii wound up costing him a scholarship offer to Maryland, “Lefty Driesell spoke at our all-sports banquet and I was supposed to sign that night and I didn’t because I told him I wanted to go to Hawaii,” Robinson recalled. “I’m just a 17-year-old kid and I came back and they had given my scholarship to someone else. He didn’t hold it for me.”

Maurice also took trips to Oregon and Michigan.

“Back then you could take as many visits as you wanted,” he said, “and I took all that I could.”

It’s hard to blame Robinson for wanting to see different places. By the mid 1970s McDowell County had one of the country’s highest unemployment rates. The coal companies were either using fewer workers because of modernization or leaving altogether.

Twenty years prior, McDowell County had about 18,000 men working in its coal mines and a population of about 80,000. Just 10 years later almost half its work force was gone and the county lost almost 30 percent of its population. The trend accelerated in the 1970s and 1980s. Today there are about 3,000 people left living in Welch.

Working in the coal mines was actually a better alternative for many African-American men 50 years ago. Maurice’s father Joseph moved his family to Welch from Alabama because the mines offered a certain independence that working on the farm didn’t. It was sometimes called “miner’s independence” and it meant having pay days more frequently and the freedom to quit one job to take another.

African-American men could also become debt-free in a shorter period of time by earning as much a $6 more a day.

That’s what brought Joseph Robinson to Welch to become a bone picker: one of the most difficult jobs a miner could do. A bone picker separated the coal from the slate and rocks. Every day 6-foot-6 Joe Robinson made his way down a narrow mine shaft to work in three feet of coal. It was an extremely tough life and it was something he didn’t want for his son.

A college basketball scholarship was going to be Maurice Robinson’s ticket out of the coal mines.

West Virginia got back into the picture for Robinson when its coaching situation became settled. Gardner pulled out all of the stops to land a player who once scored 52 points in a game against Oceana. Gardner had former WVU teammate Jerry West place a call on his behalf, and Gov. Arch Moore had Robinson up to Charleston for a personal meeting.

“We ate dinner at the Capitol. It was pretty impressive,” said Robinson. “I got to eat as much as I wanted to eat and they treated me like royalty. He made his speech and I ended up going there.”

Robinson says he doesn’t recall the encounter being awkward, but it’s hard to imagine a 17-year old being at ease around a bunch of politicians.

“They pulled out all of the punches,” he said.

Soon afterward he picked West Virginia and Maurice Robinson became Joedy Gardner’s first key block in rebuilding the WVU program. Gardner also mined the junior college ranks and came up with some very good players like Tony Robertson, Russell Chapman, Stan Boskovich and Ernie Hall, but it was the elusive big man that always slipped his grasp. Gardner could never land that one big space eater that could match up with some of the post players on West Virginia’s schedule like Roosevelt Bouie, James Bailey, Bruce Flowers and Pat Cummings.

During his Mountaineer career Robinson was asked to guard all of them, “I was undersized at times but I felt comfortable in there,” said Robinson. “Being undersized I can’t remember being taken totally advantage of. There were no big centers that really dominated me that much as far as that goes.”

Gardner’s best team was the 1977 club and it didn’t have a starter standing taller than 6-foot-7. There was Robinson, 6-foot-7 Russell Chapman and 6-foot-6 Sid Bostick inside, 6-foot-4 guard Bobby Huggins running the point and athletic 6-foot-5 guard Tony Robertson on the wing.

“We all jumped pretty well,” remembered Robinson. “The only thing was the size. You could get beaten down a little bit but we were pretty tough.”

At one point in ’77 it looked like West Virginia was going to have a team good enough to make the NCAA tournament for the first time since 1967. The Mountaineers began the year 9-2 and then hit a five-game skid when they lost consecutive games to Villanova, Syracuse, St. Francis, Pa., George Washington and Duquesne to drop their record to 9-7.

A five-game winning streak pushed WVU’s record back up to 14-7 before a pair of losses to Rutgers and Penn State left the Mountaineers with a record of 14-9 before facing No. 17-rated Notre Dame at the Coliseum. Notre Dame was riding a nine-game winning streak.

Robinson made 9 of 19 field goal attempts for 21 points and also grabbed 15 rebounds to lead West Virginia to an 81-68 win over the Irish. To this day, most Mountaineer fans believe his double-double effort against the Irish was his best game.

Robinson isn’t sure that’s accurate.

“Everybody wants to talk about the Notre Dame game my junior year,” he said. “But no game really sticks out as my best. I thought I was pretty consistent in my play throughout my career. That game had all of the hoopla surrounding it because they were rated and it was on national TV.”

After beating Notre Dame, WVU was able to win its final two regular season games against Cleveland State and Buffalo to complete the regular season with a 17-9 record.

A win over Pitt in the first round of the ECBL tournament in Philadelphia followed. Then the Mountaineers dropped back-to-back games to Villanova and UMass in the semifinal and consolation games to end the year 18-11. Despite finishing in a tie for first place in the ECBL West, the Mountaineers failed to get a bid to play in either the NCAA or NIT.

“That was an excellent team,” said Robinson. “We didn’t have a whole lot of size but we had all of the other ingredients. We hit a bad spot in the middle of the year but up to that point we were playing really well.”

The optimism created by the 1977 team had completely vanished by the middle of Robinson’s senior season in 1978. Near the end of February the rug was completely pulled out from under Gardner. His team slipped to 7-14 after a one-point loss at Penn State. The players were starting to hear rumors that Gardner was going to be replaced after the season.

“Everybody had things to say but it wasn’t necessarily tough,” he said. “The bottom just fell out on us. I don’t know whether guys got discouraged or what? It wasn’t any more difficult than in any other years because I didn’t get involved in that kind of stuff.”

But some of Robinson’s teammates did read the newspapers and the news wasn’t good for Gardner. One columnist wrote that the only chance the coach had of returning for the 1978-79 season was if his team won the Eastern 8 tournament championship and made the NCAA tournament. Another referred to the West Virginia coaching job as the “electric chair.”

Amazingly West Virginia almost pulled off one of the most remarkable post-season runs in school history. The Mountaineers beat an excellent Rutgers team in the first round of the Eastern 8 tournament in Pittsburgh, and followed that up with a very tough win over Duquesne in the semifinals.

In the championship game, West Virginia nearly overcame a nine-point halftime deficit to beat Villanova. Forwards Alex Bradley and Keith Herron combined for 33 points to lead the Wildcats to a 63-59 win 

Robinson played 39 minutes in his final WVU game, scoring 17 points and grabbing six rebounds. The game was also Gardner’s last at WVU. He was fired just days after the loss.

“He really didn’t have all of the experience he needed to come to a program like this,” Robinson admitted. “That had to be kind of overwhelming for him.”

Robinson says there was a considerable gap between Gardner and his players. Gardner went straight from college to the Marine Corps and later flew A-4 jets in Vietnam. Many of the players he coached at West Virginia didn’t want anything even remotely to do with Vietnam and they could never get a grip on his military mentality.

“It was like soldiers: ‘Do this and do that.’ (Center) Warren Baker really was the one that suffered from Joedy’s presence. For some reason they didn’t click,” he said.

Robinson says there were others, “Larry Carr and Rick Coles were West Virginia kids and they were late for the first meeting and he just put them out. They went down hill from there.”

Robinson also ran afoul with Gardner. He remembers school being closed because of a snow storm and the players were all at Towers waiting to get a ride for practice. Robinson says he called Gardner to see if someone could come over and pick them up.

Gardner refused and told them to walk to the Coliseum.

Maurice got the rest of the guys together and said they should remain at Towers until someone comes over and gets them.

“They didn’t agree with me so they walked on over to the Coliseum,” he said. “Later on I figured I better get over to the Coliseum, too."

Robinson arrived just before the start of practice and walked out to the court just as practice was getting started.

“I get to the floor and he says, ‘Where are you going?’ I said, ‘I’m coming out to practice.’ He says, “No you’re not, you’re going to start running.’ I had just walked from Towers to the Coliseum in the snow and I said, ‘I’m not running.’

“But that was the way he was. He was a straight-line coach,” Robinson added.

After that Robinson says their relationship was never quite the same.

“With him being new and me being so highly recruited he needed me to be here so it was a great relationship to start off,” said Robinson. “It kind of soured off a little bit at the end but I always respected the man.”

Despite not always seeing eye-to-eye with Gardner, Robinson still managed to have one of the most productive careers in WVU history, particularly his junior and senior seasons. In his final 55 games, Robinson scored 969 points and grabbed 597 rebounds to average a double-double (17.6 points and 10.8 rebounds).

His senior year he shot 52.9 percent from the floor and he was a career 52.8 percent shooter. His career highs were 34 points at Penn State and 25 rebounds against St. Francis, N.Y., during his senior season.

Robinson is one of just a handful of players at WVU to score more than 1,300 points and grab more than 800 rebounds.

In the spring of 1978 he was a ninth round pick by the Atlanta Hawks but was cut during the preseason.

“It was a bad situation for me,” said Robinson. “They had Jack Givens coming out of Kentucky and they had made a couple of trades for some bigger guys. I went through preseason and then got cut. I went to Cleveland and played in a few preseason games there and got cut again.”

His professional basketball experience left a bad taste in his mouth. Robinson was all set on giving up pro basketball for good when teammate Russell Chapman talked him into going to Cincinnati for a tryout to play overseas.

Robinson wasn’t impressed with many of the players working out, “I’m not being cocky but I was watching some of those guys scrimmaging and I was like, ‘You mean to tell me I’ve got to try out with these guys?’ I had a sprained foot and I didn’t need to go through all of that. Russell went ahead and tried out and went overseas and stayed for quite a few years.”

After that Robinson put away the sneakers for good and went back to WVU to complete his degree in business management in 1979. Maurice got a job working at Hecks Department store in Morgantown and has lived here ever since.

“I’ve worked out of town for a couple of different jobs but not for very long,” he said. “My family has always stayed here.”

For the last 12 years Robinson has worked for CVS Pharmacy and has also remained close to basketball as a high school referee. He has three children all living in Morgantown: 28-year old son Marcel, 21-year old daughter Martine, and 16-year old son Marlon who is a sophomore on the Morgantown High basketball team.

Maurice sees a lot of himself in his youngest son, “He’s got a lot of talent. He’s going to be special I think.”

Robinson says the only relative he has remaining in Welch is a sister-in-law. His mother moved back to Alabama after his father died in 1975.

Maurice doesn’t get back to Welch much but he did visit the town he grew up in a few months ago. To his amazement, he could barely recognize the neighborhood where he grew up, “There are dilapidated old houses and empty houses where we used to live,” he said. “The town was such a booming place when I was young growing up there. It’s sad to see what has become of it.”

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