The youngest of eight children, Clyde was born in Petersburg, Indiana, to John and Myrtle Lovellette on September 29, 1929, but he was raised in the manufacturing town of Terre Haute. His father was a New York Central Railroad engineer.
He grew into a gangly teenager, standing 6’4 as a high school freshman, and was painfully awkward and shy because of his height. “I was so awkward in high school; Mom got me a skipping rope and told me to go to it’, Clyde reminisced. By his junior year his coordination was catching up with his enormous frame. “I’d go to bed with the right length of pants.” he said laughing. “I’d wake up and the suckers would be too short.” No longer the self-conscious introvert, Lovellette blossomed on the court, earning All-State honors as a junior and senior.
Basketball was something he always loved. His growth spurt put him at 6’9, 240 pounds by his senior year, and he attracted the attention of many major colleges. He led his high school team to the 1947 state championship game. “You’d go to bed with a basketball. You’d wake up with a basketball. Girls were a foreign object.”
It was assumed he would stay close to home, playing collegiate ball in hoop-crazed Indiana, and he originally committed to Branch McCracken, coach at Indiana University, only to find the environment too large and intimidating for his taste.
“Phog was going to make a speech in St. Louis and then came to Terre Haute to meet with me instead of going back to Lawrence. I really didn’t want to meet with him, because I had verbally committed to Indiana. But I decided to meet him and that’s when he made the one statement that no other coach had ever made – he said that if I came to KU the team would be good enough to with a national championship. He also predicted that we would go to the Olympics together. “It was a beautiful idea,” Lovellette decided. “that had a huge impact on me. I changed my mind because of that talk.”
