Basketball On The Internet.

I KNOW I'd met Ken Cole before 1970 but one of my first conscious recollections of him is sitting in the stands at Apollo Stadium with a stunning mini-skirted young Karin Maar at the Australian Championship.

He was playing-coach of St Kilda in the VBA that year and won the championship, a victory which carried with it the state coaching gig and the bonus of team selection.

From recollection, he picked seven of his St Kilda players in the Victorian team.

Controversial?

Meet Ken Cole, the Master of Controversy.

By 1970, King Ken already had played for the NSW state team, the Tasmania state side and now Victoria, on top of Tokyo Olympic selection in 1964 and selection for Australia's 1968 team.

Unfortunately they never made it to Mexico, bowing out in the qualifying tournament in Monterrey.

That "Olympic'' team was torn apart by infighting, much of it blamed on Cole and his SA arch rival Werner Linde, the pair allegedly having their BA profiles ultimately stamped "Not To Be Selected Again''.

That didn't immediately apply to Cole though and he was selected for the 1970 World Championship team.

In 1971, The King was arguably the best basketball player in Australia.

(By the way, that won't be an argument you'd get from Ken himself, because his self-confidence and self-belief were unparallelled and, for the time, intimidating for the game's rampant conservatives. He wasn't quite Aussie basketball's Muhammad Ali - "I am the Greatest!'' - but he was pretty damn close and it scared some people down to their argyle socks).

Without any question, Ken was a larger-than-life figure with an extraordinary capacity to galvanise opinion.

Family circumstances meant he virtually raised himself in the streets of Sydney, basketball giving him a lifeline away from other treacherous paths. His is a very American ghetto-type story, actually.

He was insatiable for the sport, a 6-4 forward or guard - whatever the moment called for - whose only goal every day, every hour, every minute, every second was to be better.

Cole was absolutely driven to be the best. He wanted to work out with the best - which, in the 60s meant finding the Americans - and to be coached by the best.

He was rebellious and adventurous, traits rarely appreciated by officialdom at the best of times and which eventually saw him quit NSW for a year in Tasmania.

From there, he went to basketball's hot-bed in Melbourne to play with Melbourne Church (now Melbourne Tigers) which was the nation's pre-eminent club of the 60s.

When he wasn't training with Melbourne, he was almost living at Albert Park playing and arranging pick-up games, just getting as much basketball as he could.

Having learned all he could from being inside the Tigers' inner sanctum with men such as Lindsay Gaze and Billy Wyatt, Cole was lured to St Kilda to build the great rival for Church.

AS the self-confessed best, Cole had no fear surrounding himself with great players, from luring Eddie Palubinskas from Canberra, or working to develop the big kid from Brisbane, Brian Kerle.

There were others too, like the silky smooth shooting forward Tony Barnett or the tough-as-teak guard Robbie Johnstone, another hard-a$$ Frankie Massuger, or the David Stiff prototype Russell Simon.

Pretty soon, St Kilda was the LA Lakers to Church's Boston Celtics and the rest of us, away across state borders, could only marvel at the snippets we might read or hear.

Thank heavens for the Australian Club Championship, inaugurated in 1970 and bringing into one city the 24 best teams in the nation for one hell of a cut-throat tournament.

West Adelaide Bearcats, led by the incomparable Werner Linde, alongside fellow Olympian Glenn Marsland, Alan Hughes and Roger King, was the next club in the pecking list, with Sydney YMCA also close to the pace.

St Kilda was mind-boggling to watch - so much weaponry, such great transition basketball and just amazing self-assuredness ... all the Cole philosophies.

The Bearcats made it to the ACC semi-final where their clash with Cole's Saints on Albert Park's famed Court One, was one for the archives, the place packed to the possum poo of the rafters.

Palubinskas went head-to-head on the scoresheet with Linde and, from memory, Eddie had 38 and Werner something like 45. It was just head-shaking stuff.

At one point, Linde was about to shoot free throws when teammate Ricky Peacock, on the bench, swallowed his tongue and was gagging for his life.

Linde, a doctor, handed the ball back to the ref, went to the sidelines, lay Peacock down along the bench and attended to his needs, saving his life. He then walked back to the stripe, was handed back the ball and swished both free throws to the roar of the crowd.

St Kilda won the game but this was drama and theatre of a type I'm pretty sure NBL fans have never really seen. We had it good in them olden days too!

Come the final between Church and St Kilda and it was another classic. Lindsay Gaze and Rocky Crosswhite took turns at swishing shots from the elbows and wily Wyatt handcuffed Palubinskas as Melbourne pulled 19 clear inside the last 10 minutes.

That was when the gangly Kerle stole the ball and went the length of the floor to throw down a slam dunk in the days when dunks were still a thing of myth, whispers and mystery.

The place erupted, Cole got busy and St Kilda came soaring back in the most unlikely comeback.

Melbourne held on to win by two but the writing was on the wall that Church's days at No.1 were numbered. St Kilda won the VBA championship that season which gave Cole the Victorian state coaching job.

SO it came that he was in Apollo Stadium later that year, girlfriend attracting just as much attention as he steered Victoria undefeated into the final of the week-long national championship.

South Australia prevailed 77-70 in the final and my last impression is the siren sounding and guard Alan Hughes running to leap into my brother Geza's arms, elated with the unexpected victory.

A year later, Cole would be the MVP of the Victorian Championship, leading St Kilda to another title and again being named state playing coach. This time he shocked the nation by playing all week, the Vics undefeated, but leaving for the USA before another Victoria-SA grand final, this time at Albert Park.

SA won and many in Victoria could not forgive him for leaving. But Cole had been invited to tour the USA with the New York Nationals, one of two teams which toured with the Harlem Globetrotters.

That's right. He had the chance to tour the US playing against the Globetrotters and he took it, having informed the VBA of his intent before the nationals.

It was too much of an amazing career opportunity to pass up and few would blame him today, the experience invaluable.

"Whenever I look back on that, we had beaten every one and dominated all week so my leaving really should not have made that much of a difference," he told me.

It did though. When he returned from the US, he was branded a "professional" in our amateur sport and his whole future slipped under a cloud.

One way or another, he wasn't going to be an Olympian again.

COLE played state for NSW from 1961-64, Tasmania in 1965, Victoria from 1966-71 and South Australia in 1972.

It is a feat unequalled, The King coming initially to SA to coach South Adelaide Panthers in the finals when then player-coach Don Shipway thought Cole could give his team the sideline nouse it needed.

The Master Motivator thrived again in SA, though we would have our first run-in when he lost a summer season game to West Adelaide.

I was critical he had played zone - I remember this like it was yesterday - which West's shooters exploited. South had the talent to match West man-to-man and I wrote the strategy appeared flawed.

Holey sheets!

Do you reckon he came after me the next time he saw me in the stadium? With his bench coach Mike DeGaris in tow, he cornered me and gave me a five-minute lecture pointing out how South had kept West X amount of points below its season average, lost by the least amount of points etc etc blah blah.

"I didn't realise you were trying to keep them below their average and to lose by the least amount," I said. "I thought you were trying to win."

He thought about that for a minute. "Yeah, I guess we were. OK," he said, laughing. And that was the end of that.

COLE became a South Australian seamlessly and was uber critical when Lindsay Gaze selected 10 Victorians on the 1976 Montreal Olympic team, with two South Aussies, Andris Blicavs and Andrew Campbell.

Retired as a player but no less colorful or vocal as a coach, Cole was part of a challenge issued to Lindsay to bring his 10 Victorian Olympians to Adelaide to play South Australia.

Lindsay, probably thinking it would be a quality practice match for his Montreal-bound boys, foolishly accepted and 4,000 people packed into a venue which could only take 3,000.

It was one of the most memorable nights in basketball folklore, SA prevailing 87-83 and state captain Werner Linde stepping up to the microphone to accept the winners' cheque.

Linde the captain and Cole the coach had orchestrated some form of "revenge" on an Australian program which stamped them as "uncoachable" eight years earlier when they were made scapegoats for Australia's failure to qualify for Mexico.

Linde ripped into the program and when Gaze tried to respond, he was booed and clapped off the court.

Yep, there was as bit of passion around in the 70s too.

MOVING to the United States having won Australian National Championships, the Australian Club Championship, New South Wales Championship, South Eastern Conference, the Sydney Championship, Tasmanian Championship and numerous Victorian Championships, he was back in 1982.

When West Adelaide won the NBL title that year, playing-coach Ken Richardson moved on and Cole was appointed.

He held the reigns for two years but the Bearcats were struggling financially as a club and at the end of 1984, made the decision to merge into the already established composite team Adelaide 36ers.

Cole was appointed coach of the 36ers and captured the public's imagination as he took the team to the grand final in that first year, losing to Brisbane, coached by one of his former players at St Kilda, Brian Kerle.

It was an amazing time in Adelaide, the Apollo Stadium bursting at the seams with fans, queues for tickets leading out through the carpark and down into the sidestreets, celebrities from football and other sports all wanting to be seen with The King.

In 1986, he was named NBL Coach of the Year as his team posted a 24-2 win-loss record and BOTH losses were on a last second buzzer beater. Adelaide in 1986 was about six seconds short of a 26-0 season!

As it stands, 24-2 will likely never be matched, his "Invincibles" going on to win the championship from arch rival Brisbane.

Of course, that wasn't without its controversy, Cole sacked by the Sixers board for smoking a marijuana joint on a road trip late in the season.

Under pressure from the team and the public, he was reinstated for the finals on the proviso he would walk at the end of the season.

Walk he did and it would be 12 years before Adelaide again would taste NBL championship glory, ironically under the guidance of Phil Smyth, a Cole disciple and member of his 1976 SA team which beat the 10 Victorian Olympians.

With his wife Pauline at his side (and as his rock through all the highs and the lows), daughter Kimberley in London and son Stacey with him, Coley lives in San Diego now.

A better motivational speaker would be hard to find.

A more deserving Australian Basketball Hall of Fame member also would be very hard to find.

The fact he is not in the BA/NBL Hall of Fame is not only a disgrace, it is shameful.

Let's hope BA can get that one right soon rather than have to award it posthumously.

He did more for the game and the profile of the game in this country than any three other people you can rub together.