Meyer taught Mikan every aspect of the game and made him take hundreds of hook shots, both right-handed and left-handed, every day while keeping a towel wedged under his opposite arm to maintain proper form. "I was a slave driver, and he was a willing slave," Meyer recalled.
Mikan would rule the college game over the next three seasons and would then lead the Minneapolis Lakers to dominance in the National Basketball Association. He was voted the greatest basketball player in the first half of the 20th century in an Associated Press sports media poll.
With Mikan playing alongside his 6-foot-7 brother Ed, DePaul won the 1945 NIT championship.
During the 1950s, Meyer achieved a national presence by coaching the college all-star teams that toured each spring playing the Harlem Globetrotters.
In the early 1970s, DePaul's basketball fortunes declined. Joey Meyer was captain of his father's worst team, the 1970-71 squad, which went 8-17. But Ray Meyer's career flourished in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the arrival of the outstanding players Dave Corzine, Mark Aguirre and Terry Cummings.
In February 1979, Meyer joined John Wooden, Adolph Rupp and Frank McGuire as the only active coaches elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame. DePaul went to the NCAA tournament's Final Four that season, losing to Larry Bird's Indiana State team, 76-74, in the semifinals. Meyer's teams lost only one regular-season game in each of the following three seasons but never advanced beyond the first round of the NCAA tournament.
When DePaul opened the 1981-1982 season against Illinois-Chicago Circle, the Meyer family made sports history. Ray Meyer was coaching against his oldest son, Tommy, in what is believed to have been the first coaching meeting between a father and a son in college basketball. The elder Meyer's team prevailed 78-53.
Tommy, joey and bobby
Meyer is survived by three sons, all of whom played for him at DePaul -- Tommy, of Michigan, and Joey and Bobby, both of Chicago; and two daughters, Barbara, of Elk Grove Village, Illinois, and Patricia, of Chicago. His wife, Margaret, died in 1985.
Meyer left DePaul in September 1997, resigning as special assistant to the university's president as a protest to the forced resignation of his son Joey as DePaul's coach the previous April following a 3-23 season.
"I live with my family, and my family is kind of bitter about this whole thing," Ray Meyer told AP.
Meyer observed how the university would go on nicely without him. "I was only an employee," he said. "I wasn't the university."
But DePaul did not forget him. In June 1998, the university broke ground for a US$12 million Ray Meyer Fitness and Recreation Center. And a stretch of Belden Avenue outside the Meyer Center was renamed Ray Meyer Drive.
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