Coach Jim Hulsman's trademark crew cut has gone to white and the years have added furrows to a brow already worked over by more than three decades of tough wins, tougher losses and "bad calls."

He's 77 now but looks fit at about 5-foot-8, 150 pounds — the same size he was when he lined up at halfback for the Albuquerque High Bulldogs in the late '40s.

His blue eyes are still bright and lively, just like they were when he worked courtside for 34 years as Albuquerque High's head basketball coach.

Hulsman led the Bulldogs to 660 wins and seven state titles and for decades was as vital to Albuquerque High basketball as the hoops on the backboards. The school even named its basketball court in his honor.

But when he retired five years ago, he put his years in the Albuquerque High Dog House behind him. He hasn't been back to the school much since.

And although he keeps up with Bulldog basketball, he doesn't attend the games.

"I don't want to be looking over anybody's shoulder," he said. "I'm better off going my own way.

"I gave (Albuquerque High) the whole thing for 41 years. I felt I had paid my dues, and it was time to go."

So he did, leaving behind not only a legacy of winning but also putting a leash on a competitive spirit that was the driving force in his life for decades, his very reason for being.

He doesn't miss that life much.

At least, that's what he says.

Barnburners and heartbreakers

Sitting in his handsome, orderly Northeast Heights home, dressed in a bright yellow windbreaker, dark blue turtleneck, crisp chinos and white tennis shoes, Hulsman looks as if he needs only a whistle to take to the practice court.

But the gym that was a familiar haunt for so many years is alien territory now.

Now he goes there only in memories of games played — especially the thrillers between his Bulldogs and coach Ralph Tasker's Hobbs Eagles.

Tasker won a whopping 1,122 games and 11 state titles. Like Hulsman, he is a coaching legend.

And the showdowns between their teams were classics, matching Tasker's speedy, hard-pressing, well-conditioned athletes with Hulsman's scrappy, hard-working, well-disciplined players.

Hulsman counts his first state championship victory — a one-point win over Tasker's Eagles in 1971 — as his most memorable win.

"It was significant because it was Albuquerque High's first state (basketball) title since 1946 and because the year before Hobbs had clobbered us in the championship game," Hulsman said. "It was a breakthrough for our program and carried us (to success) for many years on."

Hulsman's most memorable loss?

Forget it.

He'll tell you winning is not everything, but he doesn't like to remember losses.

Others, however, might flag Hulsman's most unforgettable loss as the 1981 state title game played in front of more than 17,000 fans in The Pit. Tasker's team beat Hulsman's Bulldogs in a heartbreaker that was closer than the 93-85 final suggests.

In the Albuquerque High locker room afterward, kids cried while Hulsman, his raspy voice cracking, told them how proud he was of them, how proud they should be of themselves.

Between 1981 and his retirement in 2002, Hulsman would coach the Bulldogs to five more state titles.

But times change. When Hulsman graduated from Albuquerque High in 1949, it was the only public high school in Albuquerque. There are 12 now, most with enrollments larger than Albuquerque High's.

It got to a point where not even Hulsman could mold a winning team out of a dwindling pool of athletes. In his last four years as coach, the Bulldogs failed to make it into the state tournament.

"One day I went out to practice, and I was the tallest one on the court," he said. "I decided then it was time to leave. I looked at the declining enrollment, and I couldn't cope with that."

He retired in fall 2002 and left Bulldog City without fanfare.

"I don't get to the games because I don't want people coming up to me and saying, 'What would you do?' " Hulsman said. "They (the Albuquerque High coaches and players) have got their thing to do. I've got mine."

Moving on

Hulsman denies it, but Mary Lois, his wife of 42 years, said he misses coaching.

"He misses the kids," she said.

The daughter of a Uvalde, Texas, ranching family, Mary Lois met Jim Hulsman at Albuquerque High in fall 1962. A recent graduate of the University of Texas at the time, she was teaching history and physical education. Jim, a 1958 University of New Mexico graduate, had joined the AHS staff in 1961 as a physical education teacher and coach.

"I'm kind of a conservative girl from south Texas, and Jim never meets a stranger," she said. "I thought he was a little too fast for me. The first time he asked me out, I wouldn't go."

But that next spring, she accepted a date. They went up on Sandia Crest to look at the city lights.

"He proposed to me on our fourth date, but that was moving way too fast," she said. "I like to take my time with things."

Soon, however, Mary Lois said she came to see Jim's caring and concern for the young people they both worked with.

"I got to know him as a person, to see that he had good, moral qualities, character values that fit with values I had," she said.

They were married in Juarez on July 31, 1965. Jim became Albuquerque High head basketball three years later.

Mary Lois attended nearly every one of the 883 games Jim handled as head coach — including road games. She misses them.

"I miss seeing the kids grow up and develop over four years," she said. "I miss the parents and the fans. It was very social, because you visited with them all."

If they went to games now, Mary Lois thinks Jim would find it difficult to sit in the stands after so many years pacing in front of the bench.

"I think he would be tempted to coach," she said.

Nowadays, the Hulsmans are more likely to watch sports on TV, following the Dallas Cowboys, the Texas Rangers and the Sacramento Kings — the team Kenny Thomas, one of Jim's former Bulldogs, plays on.

Both stay active.

Most mornings, the two of them and their dog, Khan — a tall, blond, elegant, very unbulldog-like Afghan — go for a four-mile hike in the Sandia Mountain foothills.

And, except for a brain seizure a couple of years ago, Hulsman has been in good health.

"I blacked out for about 30 seconds," he said of the incident. "I got hit in the head too many times over the years. I think I must have had about seven concussions between taking hits in high school football, getting my head banged on the basketball court and taking pitches to the head when I played semi-pro baseball in the Greater Albuquerque League."

Hulsman hasn't had any seizures since he started taking medication for the problem.

He fills his days doing board and committee work for a whole alphabet of organizations such as the New Mexico High School Coaches Association, the New Mexico Activities Association, the University of New Mexico Alumni Letterman's Association, the New Mexico High School Athletic Directors Association and the Albuquerque High Alumni Association.

He gets together regularly to reminisce with cronies at Paul's Monterey Inn, the Barelas Coffee House and the Sheraton Old Town.

And since 1999, he has been teaching a theory of basketball class at the University of New Mexico.

Teach and demand

The UNM course covers sports psychology and program management as well as the particulars of the game.

Hulsman said some of his students, all juniors and seniors, have stars in their eyes, dreaming of careers in the NBA or NFL.

"But I say, 'Hey, get your degree. You have to have something to fall back on,' " Hulsman said.

Hulsman got into coaching because the men he admired most were coaches who were also teachers.

He's talking about men such as as Pete McDavid, Jack Rushing, Tony Valdez and F.M. Wilson, all coaches at Albuquerque High when Hulsman was a student there; and UNM trailblazers such as Woodrow "Woody" Clements, Lobos basketball coach in the '40s and '50s, and Roy Johnson, who served UNM as a multisport coach and athletics director from 1920 to 1959.

He's talking about contemporaries such as Charlie Renfro, an Albuquerque High coach who became supervisor of APS physical education; Mickey Miller, a Highland High baseball and basketball coach who became APS athletics coordinator; and Bill Gentry, who coached football at Highland and Eldorado and won three state gridiron titles.

The main things he learned from these men, Hulsman said, was the importance of discipline and teamwork. And that you can't coach until you can teach.

"I think if you can teach in the classroom, you can probably coach," he said. "But not necessarily the other way around. To coach, you have to be able to teach and to demand."

It was Elred R. "Doc" Harrington, an Albuquerque High science teacher and assistant coach, who got Hulsman interested in history and writing about it.

Harrington, something of an eccentric, had several academic degrees, played the piccolo, rode Harley-Davidson motorcycles, and wrote textbooks under his own name and Western fiction under a pseudonym.

"He would tell me stories about all these things, all these people," Hulsman said.

Inspired by Harrington, Hulsman started many years ago to write about and collect materials related to the history of Albuquerque High and the history of sports in the city.

In 2005, he donated 47 loose-leaf binders and 37 scrapbooks worth of news clippings, photos, biographical sketches, sports facts and statistics, plus 52 Albuquerque High yearbooks and seven AHS literary magazines to the Center for Southwest Research at UNM.

Hulsman looked at first baffled and then a little bit hurt when asked who'd care about all that.

Instead of saying anything, he retrieved one of the loose-leaf binders he still has from a closet in his den. He flipped to a letter written to him by Doc Harrington on Feb. 4, 1966, not long after Harrington had read an early sample of Hulsman's history writings.

In a raspy voice cracking like it had in the Bulldog locker room back in 1981, Hulsman referred a guest to the last sentence of the letter, a sentence Harrington had typed in all caps.

"Don't ever let this work of yours get lost. It is something of value and the Albuquerque High School and the Albuquerque Public Schools should do something about this."

Maybe the young people today don't care about it. Maybe their parents don't either.

But Doc Harrington cared. That's good enough for Hulsman.

Old dog, old ways

Hulsman concedes that he may have outstayed his era as a coach. He was 72 when he retired and as old school then as his crew cut is now.

"I think I may have been the only coach still insisting on personal appearance, (proper) uniforms and sportsmanship," he said.

"To come out for my teams, you had to have a haircut and pull up your pants. The boys would not wear earrings. If a kid came out with tattoos on his arms, I'd probably tell him to cut off his arms and come back out for the team after they grew back."

He said he does not understand the poor sportsmanship demonstrated these days not only by athletes but by parents and fans.

"I had one technical foul in my 34 years, and I didn't deserve it," he said. "It was a game at Manzano — after a bad call. I got the T and I said, 'What was that for? I didn't say a word.' The official said, 'Coach, it's not your mouth, it's your feet. You're standing in the middle of the court.'"

He grinned then, savoring his own story.

Four classes of students have come into and out of Albuquerque High since Hulsman, Mr. Bulldog basketball, was a fixture there.

Do Albuquerque High students today know who he is? Do they appreciate his legacy?

"Maybe," he said. "I think so."

"Absolutely," said Ron Estrada, AHS athletic director. "Especially the basketball players."

Estrada, a 1975 Albuquerque High grad, played basketball for Hulsman, was his assistant coach for 11 years and succeeded him as head coach.

"The basketball court is named for him" Estrada said. "When I coached, I told the kids to do things right on the court and off the court. I told them no excuses and no alibis.

"I told them that's what my high school coach stressed to me, and I told them my high school coach is the man that floor's named after."