Hutton: Final buzzer sounds for former Wirt coach McDonald

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Updated: March 1, 2012 9:49AM

This is a story I wish I had written sooner.

Fiery, crusty disciplinarian with a huge heart, an unbridled love for basketball and a wealth of knowledge arrives at Valparaiso High School coach Bob Punter’s office door and sheepishly asks if he can scout.

Punter always knew how to look a free gift horse in the eye and say yes.

Jim “Mac” McDonald scouts for the Vikings that year. They make it to the state championship game and finish 28-1 in 1994.

The next year, McDonald asks Punter if he can come to practice and help out.

Again, Punter knows how to say, “Yes.”

For 13 years, McDonald is a regular on the Vikings bench, the veins on his forehead turning bright red and bulging out spontaneously when one of the kids did something stupid. Or there was the occasional, muted foot-stomp and brief muttering to himself at a bad call. Old habits are hard to break. Assistants are supposed to be seen but rarely heard. It was McDonald being a coach, which is what he was. McDonald knew the rule. Sometimes it’s hard not to go back to your roots.

“He was into every game,” Punter said. “His famous line was: That guy is going crazy. Get him out of there.”

McDonald was the perfect assistant. He never said too much on the bench, but he would always offer something and then move on. In practice, he worked diligently with the Vikings’ big men.

He was also an unusual assistant. Once a rising star in the high school coaching ranks, McDonald won 179 games and a sectional title in a 16-year career at Wirt High School in Gary. His teams were regularly undersized and overmatched physically against schools like Roosevelt, Lew Wallace and West Side.

Wirt was the perennial underdog in the Northwestern Conference, but McDonald was a game-changer. His teams always played hard, usually kept it close in conference play and regularly won games they had no business winning because they played a rigid, controlled style of basketball.

It was a matter of survival for them.

Gary Hayes, an assistant with McDonald for three seasons at Wirt, said McDonald was fanatical about doing it right.

“One of the strongest things about Mac is that he would just not give in,” Hayes said. “You always had to do the little things right as far as fundamentals right. He was also a great defensive coach.”

McDonald parlayed his success at Wirt into a coaching job with Chesterton. He was hired partially to instill a sense of discipline into the program, according to Omar Vasquez, who followed McDonald as coach in 1989. He was fired after three seasons and a 36-32 record after his form of discipline was judged too harsh by the same people who had hired him in to make the kids more accountable.

It was a bitter blow for McDonald at the time, according to Hayes.

“He was going to stick to his principals and do the things that were right no matter what,” Hays said. “He knew he wasn’t going to make everyone happy.”

The dismissal led to a better job for McDonald.

The year after he was terminated, McDonald had a cancerous lung removed. He lived less than a mile from Punter in Valparaiso. He could stop by Valparaiso after school finished in Chesterton and make it to practice before he went home.

“With him having the health issues, it was going to be difficult for him to make the whole commitment to being a head coach,” Hayes said. “It couldn’t have worked out any better. It was a great fit with Punter.”

He worked with Punter for 14 seasons, 12 of them unpaid. Now that’s a love of the game clause Michael Jordan couldn’t rival. Punter, another assistant Bob Barthold and McDonald all retired in 2007 — the year Scott Martin and Robbie Hummel graduated and went off to Purdue.

The three of them made regular trips to Mackey arena, first to watch Martin and Hummel play and then just Hummel after Martin transferred to Notre Dame. They made it just once this year with McDonald’s health failing. He died Thursday at 64 after just “running out of energy,” according to Punter. Somewhere, I’m sure, McDonald is trying to find a team to coach.