Longtime Texas A&M women's basketball coach Gary Blair, a Dallas native who also coached at South Oak Cliff High School, is being inducted into the Naismith...
Last year his Aggies reached the Elite Eight for the first time in the program’s history, falling to eventual champion Tennessee. This year, No. 2-seed A&M is in the same regional as unbeaten Connecticut. Ouch.But that dilemma is a blast of Texas sunshine compared with Aggie women’s basketball’s grim pre-Blair days. When A&M athletic director Bill Byrne hired Blair in 2003, the Aggies’ all-time Big 12 record was 22-90.
South Oak Cliff High was starting a girls basketball program. The two girls P.E. teachers were doubling as cheerleader and drill-squad sponsors. Three girls knocked on boys P.E. teacher Blair’s gym door and asked if he would coach them. Most major college coaches would deem such access unthinkable, but Blair clearly relishes the chance to espouse A&M women’s basketball and share his folksy witticisms.
“He opens the can and he’s sipping and reading,” Nan says. “There’s a lady in the car. He looks over, introduces himself and stays about five minutes.”Gary and Nan met during his high school coaching days. They lived in the same apartment complex. She was a nurse in Parkland Hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit.
The son of a plaster foreman, Lee, and housewife, Jean, Blair grew up on one of the three “working-class” streets, as he calls them, in East Dallas’ Forest Hills neighborhood.Gary grew up playing baseball in the streets and going to Cowboys and Texans games for $1 at the Cotton Bowl. He made all-city as a Bryan Adams center fielder in 1963 despite weighing just 128 pounds.
It has plush locker rooms, hydrotherapy pools, an Aggie Salon and a players’ lounge, among many other spoils. But long before the women’s team moved into the facility in December, Blair and his staff drew recruits to the once-dead-end program.
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