Two generations of young Millinocket men called him “coach,” and he reciprocated by forever calling them simply “my boys.”
On Thursday, a town and a state mourned the loss of that man, one of few nearly everyone deemed worthy of the prefix “legendary.”
Longtime Stearns High School coach and teacher George Roland Wentworth — or, as he was called in virtually every public reference to him over the final 25 years of his life — legendary coach George Wentworth — was 86.
Wentworth won more than 15 games a year over his 31 years at Stearns High and finished his career with 478 basketball victories against just 152 losses.
His teams won six Eastern Maine titles, four state Class LL (big school) crowns, and the 1963 New England championship.
In his 31 seasons, Stearns failed to make the Eastern Maine tournament only once: in 1960.
Wentworth took tough kids from a tough Maine mill town and convinced them basketball was their game. Players believed. Then a town did. Finally, a state conceded that Millinocket was as famous for its hoops as it was for its paper.
And in spite of that success, the mention of Wentworth’s name to the people who played for him — his boys — shows that wins and losses were only part of the picture.
Give the boys a chance to describe their coach in just one word, and they don’t often mention basketball.
“Father figure,” Dean Chase settles for after a bit of pondering.
Not that basketball wasn’t the figurative blackboard Wentworth chose to teach his life lessons.
“A lot of coaches now talk about having a good time, but you have a good time if you win,” Chase admitted Thursday from his home in Nashville, Tenn.
Chase played for Wentworth when the Minutemen traveled to Boston Garden in 1963 and shocked the high school hoop experts by winning the New England championship.
“[What we learned] has carried on through all of us, through business and through the rest of our lives,” Chase said.
On Monday, Chase and the boys from the Class of ’63 will be called upon to be pallbearers for their coach. Wentworth will be buried along with his wife of 60 years, Hildred, who died in March.
The coach will be wearing his trademark Stearns warmup jacket, just as he would want it, his son Tom said.
Wentworth was born in Bucksport on the 12th day of the 12th month of 1912 and graduated from St. Joseph’s Seminary in Bucksport in 1931.
He went on to graduate from Notre Dame University in South Bend, Ind., in 1936, with a bachelor’s degree in physical education.
He played basketball and baseball for the Fighting Irish and hit .412 for the baseball team as a senior.
While at Notre Dame he fulfilled his student teaching requirement under another legendary coaching figure, future UCLA basketball mentor John Wooden.
Wentworth taught and coached at Lawrence High in Fairfield from 1936 to 1939, where he met his wife, the former Hildred Nelson.
The duo moved to Millinocket, where they taught at Stearns High.
George Wentworth left Stearns in 1944 to serve in the U.S. Navy during World War II.
After the war, it was back to Millinocket, where he coached until resigning in 1971.
Another local celebrity, the late Bangor Daily News executive sports editor Bud Leavitt, served as the master of ceremonies when the state feted Wentworth upon his retirement in ’71.
Among the gifts given to Wentworth that night were a chain saw and lawn furniture he would put to good use at his Millinocket Lake camp.
In Leavitt’s column a day later, the writer painted a picture in his familiar style.
“A nice guy they said farewell to within the shadows of the church spire, a gentleman, a personification of the age of chivalry,” Leavitt wrote.
“That’s George Wentworth, a personality that will live on in Maine sports because it’s so rare, if not unique.”
Tom Wentworth, one of George’s three sons, has little problem picking one word that describes his dad.
“Saintly,” Tom said softly after enthusiastically stringing together tale after tale over the course of a 40-minute conversation.
His brother Joe contributes “caring.”
“He was always my father, but I was always in awe of him,” Tom Wentworth said.
“In [his] 86 years of living, I never heard him say a bad word about anybody, and I never heard him swear. Not once. He’s in heaven. That’s all there is to it.”
Tom played for the 1964 and 1965 Stearns teams — the ones destined forever to follow the special ’63 bunch in the record books.
In Millinocket at the time, basketball was a special sport, and basketball players were treated well. They were expected to hold up their ends of the bargain.
“I never traveled on a school bus in my life,” Tom Wentworth said, explaining that Stearns players always traveled on a B&A bus, with a restroom in the back.
George Wentworth made sure that every player was provided with two pairs of sneakers — a game pair and a practice pair — free of cost.
And every time they got off the bus to eat after a road game, there was George, standing at the top of the stairs, handing out $5 bills to players for meal money.
“You were treated like adults,” Tom Wentworth said. “Everybody in this town, the boys all grew up and that was their dream, to play for Stearns.”
For Jon MacDonald, the star of the ’63 team, putting his coach into a convenient one-word nutshell is impossible.
“I don’t know if I can do that,” he said.
But there are things that stood out to MacDonald, who went on to become a college player at University of Maryland before a career as a Secret Service agent and now, like Wentworth, an educator.
“He was strict, he was stern, and he was a disciplinarian,” MacDonald said. “The thing that I like most was that practices were enjoyable.”
MacDonald and others mentioned that Wentworth did things a bit differently from any other coach.
“In his practices, he combined all of his philosophies in the form of a scrimmage,” MacDonald said.
There were no tedious drills. No conditioning without the ball. And, as Chase recalls, something else was lacking.
“We had no offensive plays, by the way,” Chase said. “He let us free-lance.”
Players say Wentworth was a master motivator, treating players according to their psychological makeup.
“The biggest thing to me is, he never really said to me, `Nice game,”‘ recalls Steve Pound, who averaged nearly 40 points a game for the 1968 state title team.
For Pound, that wasn’t really a problem. He just figured Wentworth trusted the players to figure out who had done what they could and who hadn’t.
He found out how Wentworth felt on the eve of his last game.
“The last time he taped my ankles, for the state championship game, he had a tear in his eye,” Pound says, choking back tears of his own.
“That means a lot to me.”
And Pound has a tough time settling on one word to describe a man he still calls a mentor 31 years after his playing days ended.
“There’s so many that describe him,” Pound said. “I don’t know. I think of respectful. Trust. Honest. All of those things.”
Pound said he remembers Wentworth’s credo that Stearns basketball players didn’t have time for girlfriends.
He recalls sitting in a car outside a store as his girlfriend shopped inside, as Wentworth drove into the parking lot.
Pound backed out and drove off.
“I parked it and walked back — and I didn’t have a license,” Pound said. “Left [the girlfriend] right in the store.”
For Terry Carr, a key cog on the 1963 team, Wentworth’s power was just as influential.
“Outside of my parents, he was probably the greatest positive influence on my formative years,” Carr said.
Carr remembers his coach for his storytelling, among other things.
Like the time he cautioned a young, uptight Minutemen squad as they got off the bus in Houlton.
“`I don’t want anyone to get arrested,”‘ Carr recalls Wentworth saying.
After a pause, Wentworth told one of his patented stories, informing his team that inside the Houlton gym they would encounter a throng of elderly fans whose only purpose for living was to finally, at long last, see a Houlton squad defeat Stearns.
If this team allowed the loss, the unspoken punchline went, the Minutemen would have all of those lives on their heads.
“The thing is, while I was playing, I thought of it three or four times,” Carr says. “I kept looking around for all the old people.”
The Minutemen won, and none was arrested.
For Carr, one word becomes two, primarily because it’s possible for him to separate the basketball coach from the man inside.
“Motivator,” Carr said, describing the coach.
Then, spinning another tale, Wentworth-like, Carr tells of his father’s typically Maine way of putting his seal of approval on a person.
“If I were thinking of him as a human, I would say what my dad used to say,” Carr said. “He’s a good man.”
Carr explains that for him, that says it all.
“That was my father’s highest compliment,” he said.
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