A recent deep dive into the background of Richard Chinen, one of Hilo’s legendary leaders in community-wide athletics, unavoidably crossed paths along the way with one of the most decorated coaches Hawaii has ever known.
His name was Ung-Soy Afook, but everyone he knew called him Beans, owing to his elementary school days when he discovered he could grow string beans like no one else.
One could say he had a green thumb for green beans to the extent that the young fruit enclosed in pods took over his identity, and yes, that’s a little odd when you stop to think about it.
It was a compelling career nonetheless that wound to a close when Afook passed away in 1991, a day apart from the death of Chinen, with whom he will be forever connected as the namesake of Hilo’s Afook-Chinen Civic Auditorium.
On the surface, the name itself is a rarity in a couple of ways, starting with the unusual nature of sports venues named after two people. In Knoxville, Tenn., they named the University of Tennessee’s building Thompson-Boling Arena after a politician and a coal magnate, but for the most part, doubling up on names is uncommon.
The other oddity is that they circulated around Hilo in different spheres, Afook the driven, demanding, tightly focused basketball coach, Chinen the egalitarian, big picture guy who wanted to encourage all sports and all youth.
Carnegie-Mellon, the Pennsylvania school, was founded by Andrew Carnegie, an industrialist, who bonded with industrial researchers Andrew and Richard Mellon. Johnson and Johnson is a multi-national conglomerate in medical devices, pharmaceutical and consumer packaged goods that was formed by brothers.
Unlike Afook-Chinen, most things named after two individuals indicates a closeness, even a family connection, but not here.
It required some consideration from Hilo’s leaders back in 1983 to come up with a proper name for the new building that would essentially replace the Armory, downtown, which lacked adequate parking for major events and was in a vulnerable location for hurricane and tsunami damage. You can hear stories about acrimony among the two families over the naming, and while some of that may have a basis in fact, it is wholly irrelevant to the fact that these two fairly summarized the forward progress of athletics locally, by naming the structure after Mr. Outside, Chinen, and Mr. Inside, Afook.
There’s no better time to recall the achievements of Beans Afook, who was born on this day 118 years ago and has left behind a record of achievement in high school basketball that it says here will never be duplicated.
The history shows that Ung-Soy Afook was consumed by athletics as early as age 6 or 7, possibly predating his proficiency in growing string beans. He played everything he could, year round, but by the time he got to Hilo High School, he paid less attention to baseball, football, track and swimming — all sports in which he enthusiastically participated — and began to concentrate his abilities in basketball.
More significantly for the future, he developed the idea that one day he would like to coach the sport he loved so much.
He was awarded the Hilo High coaching opportunity in 1935, with an inherent element of pressure in that the previous season, the Vikings had gone undefeated — not counting the loss to the Hilo Alumni, 46-42 at the Armory — for coach Roy Lee Roberts, winning the school’s first Territorial Basketball Championship.
Sure, the school board seemed to be saying, you want to coach? Let’s see how you can do.
The answers came quickly. During his 15 years of coaching at Hilo High, Afook’s teams won 13 consecutive Territorial Basketball Championships. It began with a powerhouse team Afook knew from the previous year when his Senior Men’s League team, the Spartans, were defeated by the Vikings 49-31 in Roberts’ first game of his final season with the school.
When Afook took over in 1935 and implemented his pressure defense and fast breaking approach offensively, there wasn’t a great deal of competition, save for that Vikings alumni game that went again to the alumni, 39-33. But that result in no way reflected what was to come.
Archives from Hilo High, graciously gathered by school librarian Amy Okuyama, show that Afook combined the efforts of Ah Chew Goo, team captain Oscar Okamura and others who formed the core of the previous season’s champions to develop a real high school power. Afook used the alumni game as a testing ground for his roster, playing everyone in uniform to get a better gauge on how they would perform against top competition, which, in those days, the alumni team clearly was.
They practiced for a full month before playing the alumni and in the process, Afook saw what he needed to see. In their first game against high school competition, Hilo crushed Kohala, 67-19 and over the course of the season, the Vikings throttled opponents by an average score of 47-27. It was supposed to be tougher at the inter-island tournament, but Hilo opened with a 73-10 win over Roosevelt en route to a victory over Kauai in the title game, winning the Alexander House Settlement perpetual trophy.
For Afook, it was just the start. They won again in 1936, with Goo, a senior, receiving Most Valuable Player recognition in the tournament, and it wasn’t until Afook’s third season at Hilo that the Vikings did not win the territorial title. Roosevelt finally got to them, winning a 37-30 title game in 1937, but Hilo came home with another MVP, this time it was Kazuma Hisanga.
The record books are far from complete, but he started his Hilo High coaching career 84 years ago, so there’s no internet click-click tricks to bring back those moments, to see individual game scores, individual points leaders and all the rest.
But there are some big, jaw-dropping numbers that tell you all you really need to know about this man’s abilities. He won eight consecutive high school boys basketball territorial titles streak (1939-1948) and 10 territorial titles won in 15 years at Hilo (1935-1949, with two war year seasons of no games). It all adds up to a career record of 193-15 with all those championships that will never be matched.
That figures out to winning 93 percent of his games, and if you can find another coach in this part of the world who can match those numbers, let’s hear about it.
Until then, birthday boy Beans Afook can only be considered the most successful high school basketball coach you ever heard of.
Happy birthday, Coach.
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