Gene and Ruth Bartow wave to fans at the Bartow Classic on Dec. 4, 2009. (The Birmingham News/Frank Couch)

Former Birmingham News staff writer Wayne Martin covered UAB athletics for 20 years, and came to know Gene Bartow in both his public and private lives. Martin shares some memories of Bartow, along with some recent conversations with the former UAB basketball coach and athletics director. This was published in The Birmingham News on Jan. 4, 2012.

In 35 years of coaching college basketball, Gene Bartow won 647 games, and loved every win.

During that time he lost 353 games, and hated them all — except one.

That loss came two days before Christmas in 1979 at Lincoln, Neb. Bartow’s good friend, Joe Cipriano, who had agreed to provide the fledgling UAB Blazers a marquee opponent in Birmingham the year before in UAB’s first basketball game ever, sat on the Nebraska bench when the Blazers returned the game. But in this game, Cipriano was in the midst of a battle with cancer and had already turned much of the coaching over to assistants. Showing the effects of the disease and its treatment, Cipriano came back to the Devaney Center one last time to sit on the bench and coach against his friend.

“We had our chances, but we lost in four overtimes,” Bartow recalled not long before he died. “As we walked off the court, I told (assistant coach) Lee Hunt I was kinda glad we lost that one. Joe got to go out a winner.”

Less than a year later, Cipriano was dead at just 49 years old.

The wins measure the kind of coach Bartow was. But his memory of that Nebraska game shows the kind of person he was.

The 81-year-old Bartow, who succumbed to stomach cancer, as did his mother and a sister, came to Birmingham in 1977 and stayed, even commuting to Memphis in the last four years of his life when he served as president of Hoops LP, the parent company of the NBA Memphis Grizzlies. “Ruth liked Birmingham,” he said recently, “and I did, too. We’re comfortable here. It’s home.”

There were many opportunities to leave. I asked him once how many offers he had had. “I don’t know how many, but a lot, especially in the early years,” he said. “And a lot of ‘feelers’ that might have become offers if I had shown any interest at all.”

Solid offers came from Wake Forest, Texas A&M, a couple to go back to Memphis, and some to move back to the West Coast. One offer came, through some boosters, to coach at Auburn.

“The first thing I asked them was if Pat (Dye) knew they were in my office,” Bartow said. “But I never considered it. Ruth (his wife) wouldn’t have moved down there.”

The most publicized of his offers was probably Kentucky early in his UAB career. “I should have put Kentucky on my resume,” Bartow said of that one. “I was actually the coach there for about four hours.”

The official publicized reason the deal fell through was Bartow’s promise to UAB President S. Richardson Hill that he would return to Birmingham and talk to him before accepting, but Kentucky’s president’s refused to allow the delay.

“There was a little more to it than that,” Bartow said. There was also a teenage daughter back home. “I called home and Beth was almost hysterical,” he said. “She said I stayed for (older brother) Murry to graduate from high school, but I was going to move right in the middle of her high school years.”

There was still more to it. “There was also the little matter of Dr. Hill’s promise to sue me for breach of contract if I went to Kentucky,” Bartow said.

He paused to reflect. “You know, I wish I had had the chance to coach at Kentucky. I wanted to win a national championship, and I think I could have done it there. But I’m not really sorry I stayed here. Birmingham has been awfully good to me.”

Bartow was known nationally as “Clean Gene” when he came to UAB, but those close to the program dared not call him that. It was a nickname he disliked, and he made his feelings known. On one of our late-night rides from Memphis — after knowing him for 30-plus years — I got up enough courage to ask how he got the nickname. “Some people on the staff at Valpo (Valparaiso University) invited me out for a beer after practice one day and I declined,” he said. “They started it, and it followed me.”

He drank only water and orange juice, but one night we did go to a bar in Memphis. “Let’s go down to the Lexus Lounge,” he said, referring to an upscale watering hole on the ground level at the FedEx Forum, accessible to those patrons who can afford the high-priced courtside seats.

But the visit to the lounge wasn’t for a drink.

Bartow walked in and was warmly greeted by the two guys tending bar, getting a promise from him for lunch soon at a favorite catfish place nearby. Moments later, Bartow was courtside, visiting a couple of fans who owned a pair of those $500 courtside seats, plus an upstairs luxury box for entertaining. He was as much a friend to those who tended bar, or sat guard at lonely arena access doors, as he was to Memphis’ rich and famous. And to them all, the Grizzlies executive wasn’t Mr. President, or even Mr. Bartow. To all, he was simply “Coach.”

Bartow stayed in touch with players and assistants from throughout his career. He took pride in their accomplishments, and fretted over their failings. On a ride into Memphis one night, he mentioned a former player and said, “You may see him along here under this bridge. He’s homeless now and hangs out around here a lot. He was one of my failures.”

Bartow said after the death of former player and assistant coach Larry Finch that Finch was the best basketball player he ever coached. But Finch wasn’t his favorite player.

His favorite player was a high school player from Galt, Mo., whose team played at Bartow’s high school in Browning, Mo., in the late 1940s. It’s not known how impressed he was with the player, but it is known that he was smitten with the person. The player’s name was Ruth Huffine, and she was smitten, too.

“We were married on Christmas Eve of 1952,” said the former forward for the Galt High School girls team. “By then I was teaching school in Iowa and Gene was in the Army at Fort Bliss, Texas. We wanted to get married, but the only time I had off was Christmas break. So I rode the train to El Paso, and we were married on Christmas Eve.”

Bartow and his best player were together for just four years at Memphis State. He and his favorite player were together just short of six decades. For more than three decades Alabama has been home, and soon he will be laid to rest here, with a spot beside him for his favorite player.

Former Birmingham News staffer Wayne Martin reflects on Gene Bartow