Clarence Doninger

Before he fired IU’s beloved basketball coach, before he promoted gender equality, before he won IU’s collegiate cycling race, Clarence Doninger won a trip to see an IU football game.

That was about 1950. Sixty years later, Doninger doesn’t remember the score, but he knows IU won.

It was then that he fell in love with the campus, the school and the athletic
program.

“It was the ideal place to go,” Doninger said.

Through years of titles and trials, friendships and firings, Doninger’s time as an IU basketball player and a former athletic director will be honored. On Friday, he will be one of six contemporary inductees of the 30th class inducted into the IU Athletics Hall of Fame.

“He’s the quintessential gentleman for this era,” IU Athletics Director Fred Glass said. “He’s just such a gentleman and so kind and civil and thoughtful. As you dig beneath the surface, you find out what a competitor he is ... I admire that combination and I hope I can emulate his approach because I think he did a great job.”

In the 1950s, Bloomington was such an ideal place to Doninger that he decided to stay in school for seven years, starting in 1953 with a bachelor’s degree and finishing with a law degree by 1960.

During that time, Doninger was the freshman and sophomore student body president and a member of Sigma Nu fraternity. By the time he was a senior, he was student body president, a member of the IU men’s basketball team and a part of the Sigma Nu Little 500 championship team.

“I had very little free time because I was also working and I was involved in campus politics,” Doninger. “It was a busy time in my life but a very interesting time.”

That interesting time included when he was cut by legendary IU Coach Branch McCracken his sophomore year, then helped the team to a co-Big Ten championship that season.

Or when he helped IU Coach Bob Knight 22 years before he fired him.
“In 1979, Bob Knight was the coach of the Pan Am team and had gotten in a little trouble down there with a police officer,” Doninger said. “I’m the one who went down who tried to sort things out.”

In 1991, then-IU Athletics Director Ralph Floyd passed away. At 55 years old, the University approached Donginger with the position.

“I originally had indicated I didn’t want to do it,” Doninger said. “I was right in the height of my legal career.”

But Doninger said he loved Bloomington, IU Athletics and volunteering at the University too much. He eventually accepted the position.

He served as IU’s athletics director from 1991 to 2001, collecting 27 Big Ten regular season or tournament championships, winning two NCAA team titles in men’s soccer and adding four women’s varsity sports to the department: water polo, field hockey, soccer and rowing.

“We had to tighten our belts to do it,” Doninger said. “You add four sports and that’s a lot. See, some schools cut on the men’s sports end. We didn’t do that. We wanted to have the good balance. We kept the men’s sports and the women’s sports we already had and added those four.

“I joke about this. My daughter was a scholarship tennis player there. She graduated the year before I started and my wife taught tennis here in Indianapolis for over 20 years, so I had to be involved in gender equity or my wife and daughter would never have forgiven me.”

But they were stressful times. This was the Bobby Knight era.

On Sept. 10, 2000, Doninger had to say goodbye to the friend he had saved in Puerto Rico and the coach whose methods would no longer be tolerated at the University.
Doninger admitted 11 years later that there were times when being athletics director was beyond frustrating.

“Yes and ... yeah,” Doninger said as he carefully constructed his response. “The answer is ... in running a program, everybody has to work together, and that was difficult.”

The man who handled more than can fit in one article said he doesn’t regret a
moment.

“Even though some of it was very stressful, I loved the whole thing and I wouldn’t trade it,” Doninger said. “No, the answer is no. In fact, I’m just sorry it all ended.”