ORR — The obituary said nothing about basketball. No mention of his 400 wins, no nod to the state tournaments, no hint that this quiet Hall of Fame coach had once turned a small northern town into a hardwood hotbed.
It simply listed William E. King’s birth in Cloquet, his passing on Oct. 6 in Virginia, and the names of those who survived him and passed before him.
The simple writeup felt quite right to longtime friend and fellow Hall of Fame coach Jerry Chiabotti.
“I noticed that,” he said, “and I think that’s what Bill would have liked.”
And maybe he would have. Bill King wasn’t the type who coached for headlines or chased awards. What he did chase, day after day, was effort, improvement, and belief. And in Orr, that turned out to be enough to build a legend.
Bill King coached Orr’s boys basketball team for 30 seasons, not including four earlier years as an assistant. His teams won 405 games, 19 conference titles, six district championships, and reached the state tournament three times, in 1976, 1978, and 1984.
He was selected for the Minnesota Basketball Hall of Fame in 1994.
But statistics never really captured what King meant to his players, the school, and Orr.
“The players that he coached, some of them didn’t like him, some of them loved him, and some of them weren’t sure,” said Tim Olson, a standout team leader on King’s 1976 and 1978 state squads. “But yet, everybody respected him.”
And from the Bigfork bench, Chiabotti saw King return that in kind.
“He treated people with the utmost respect,” he said. “He was admired by all.”
No basketballs to trophies
When King first arrived in Orr in the 1950s, the program didn’t just need building, it needed a basketball.
“He told me when he first took the job, they didn’t even have a basketball in the school,” Chiabotti said. “He went out and purchased a couple.”
By 1960, he was the head coach, and he never stopped building, always kept his players working, but it wasn’t all sweat and drills.
“We had fun nights during the week where we just scrimmaged,” Olson said. “But Saturdays were for fundamentals, from nine ‘til noon. First two hours were drills, last hour we got to play. That’s why we were so sound. We weren’t more talented, we were more prepared.”
King also ran an intramural league at the school for students who weren’t on the basketball team, Olson said, with lunchtime games between eight to 12 teams, and a championship game for the whole school.
“He had everybody believing,” Olson said. “The whole school, the whole town.”
Chiabotti noted that King truly built the basketball culture in Orr, and he did it the right way.
“Bill surrounded himself with good people, and he worked it,” Chiabotti said. “He knew success started with the youth. You get the kids, you get the families, and pretty soon you’ve got the whole town. He was hard-nosed on the court, no question, but the kids bought in because they saw how much time he put in. He made them better than they were, and that’s the mark of a great coach. Bill put Orr on the map.”
The wheelbarrow express
When Orr qualified for its first-ever state tournament, the rest of Minnesota started paying attention. The Minneapolis Star Tribune came calling, dubbing it “Orr Mania.”
“This town went crazy,” King told the paper.
That year’s team called itself the “wheelbarrow express to state.” One local doubter said he’d push the school custodian down Main Street in a wheelbarrow if they won the district.
“So, after we won,” King said, “he was out there at three o’clock Friday afternoon in a driving snowstorm pushing the custodian down the street. They even blocked off the highway for it.”
Coaching without compromise
King was a master tactician, but his greatest skill may have been seeing something in players that others couldn’t.
“There were some players that might not have played elsewhere,” Olson said, “but under him, they started because he designed a spot for them.”
King’s teams weren’t flashy. They were built around repetition, perseverance, and belief.
“He used to say coaching was like putting a coffee pot on the stove,” Chiabotti recalled. “It seemed like it took forever to boil, but when it did, watch out. He lived in the gym. He did it the old-fashioned way.”
King scrimmaged his teams against powerhouse programs, including Hibbing when future NBA star Kevin McHale was a senior. Orr beat them in that scrimmage, Olson recalled.
“He used that all season,” Olson said. “He told us, ‘You guys can’t be beat.’ And we believed him.”
Chiabotti saw a lot of King from across the court, and it was a friendly but intense competition between the two.
“Whenever we played Orr, whether it was at their place or ours, I told my players, ‘You better strap up and be ready to play, because I don’t know if I can out-coach that guy.’ That’s the respect I had for Bill. His teams were always prepared, always tough, and he always had something up his sleeve. You knew it wasn’t going to be easy.”
Principle before
popularity
King wasn’t afraid to take heat if it meant standing by his players.
During a teacher’s strike, he crossed the picket line to keep coaching, drawing plenty of criticism but standing firm in his conviction.
“He felt the players had worked for years to be able to play,” Olson said. “They deserved the opportunity to be coached.”
The team made the state tournament that season. King never wavered.
A legend honors a legend
In 1981, King announced his retirement due to health reasons. His team reached the Region 7A championship, facing powerhouse Chisholm, led by coaching icon Bob McDonald.
Chisholm won, but McDonald wasn’t celebrating, according to an interview after the game.
“This win is equal to our other region championships (in 1973–74–75) except for one thing. That guy had to lose,” McDonald said, indicating King. “That takes the gloss off. I told him after the game (while hugging) that I felt as bad for his losing the game as I felt good about winning. I think the world of him.”
That was supposed to be King’s final game. It wasn’t. A change in diet and fitness routine restored his health, and in 1983 he returned to the bench. That season he led Orr to a stunning upset of defending champion Barnum to return to state, ending Barnum’s 50-game win streak, the sixth longest in state history.
Still in the stands
Even after he finally left coaching for good, King never really left the gym.
He became a fixture at North Woods School games, a living bridge between the past and present.
King and former assistant Don Ranta came to game after game. On nights when he didn’t have a ride, Chiabotti’s wife would pick him up herself.
At one halftime ceremony, North Woods players handed King a school sweatshirt as thanks.
“The smile Bill had on his face — I’ll never forget that picture,” Chiabotti said.
A lasting legacy
When Orr Center, located in the old school, created a museum last year to preserve its memories, there was little question that a central feature of the museum would be a tribute to Orr’s basketball heritage and King’s legacy. King not only donated a large amount of his basketball memorabilia to the display but also donated $5,000 to assist with ongoing development of the museum.
Wendy Purdy said that they also have King’s scrapbooks filled with newspaper clippings about his teams, and that they hoped to eventually laminate them so that people could sit down and flip through them.
The Orr Center display is fitting, a quiet corner of memory for a man who never needed applause. The photos and clippings speak to the games, but the real story lives in the players he taught, the coaches he inspired, and the town he put on the map.
“Bill’s just one of a kind,” Chiabotti said. “They’re not going to make any more Bill Kings.”
And no headline could have said it better.