John Chaney’s death on Friday at age 89 reminded me that I have held onto a cassette tape of a telephone interview I did with him in July 1999, when he was 17 years into his 24-year run as the men’s basketball coach at Temple.
Took some rooting around to find it, but I finally did. “CHANEY (SAVE),” it says at the top, next to the date and two crossed-out names — “Ganter” and “Casey,” i.e., Fran Ganter and Rashard Casey, then the offensive coordinator and quarterback at Penn State, respectively.
Their space on the tape had been ceded to Chaney, and to our conversation about a player named John Miller, who Chaney had recruited out of Solanco High School five years earlier. Miller spent two years on North Broad Street before transferring to Clemson, where he played out the string until his unceremonious dismissal from the team his senior year (1998-99). So now I was working on a retrospective of his career, and Chaney was talking about accountability and responsibility and a player’s obligation to meet his coach halfway.
The crescendo was a single quote, and, really, the primary reason I have saved that cassette all these years: “When you leave a kid in charge of a candy store, he eats up all the fuckin’ candy.”
Reading the quote doesn’t quite do it justice; hence the tape. It can only be appreciated when you hear it in Chaney’s characteristic rasp, when you fully understand the passion and conviction of the speaker. Listening to it, really, gives you a clear understanding of where he was coming from — where he was always coming from — and what an anachronism he was.
It is no exaggeration to say that he was the last of a breed, a one-of-a-kind figure. Where other members of the coaching fraternity chose their words carefully, Chaney spewed his artfully. Where they engaged in double-speak, he engaged in straight talk. Where they were solicitous, he was scrappy. (Of course. He was born during the Great Depression, played in the old Eastern League and coached at Simon Gratz High School and Cheyney State before Temple.)
Those other coaches wooed blue-chip recruits. Chaney settled for second-tier misfits, guys he would whip into shape during his legendary 6 a.m. practices. (Picture that for a moment: John Bleepin’ Chaney jumping your ass for missing a defensive rotation after you’ve abandoned a warm bed on a lovely February morning and made your way down North Broad Street to McGonigle Hall, and later the Liacouras Center. Where does one sign up?)
Those other coaches would also play wide-open, crowd-pleasing styles, while Chaney’s teams gummed up the works with a stodgy offense and a sticky matchup zone. Only thing that was pretty was the final score, more often than not; he won 516 games at Temple, 225 more in 10 years at Cheyney. His respective winning percentages were .671 and .792, and his teams played in the postseason in all but three of his 34 seasons. He also won a Division II national championship at Cheyney.
It took but a glance at the sideline during a Temple game to understand that this guy was not your standard-issue coach. Where his opposite number would be strutting in a tailored suit, he would be slouching in a Blue-Light Special — tie undone, sleeves of his rumpled shirt rolled up. If he found a referee’s work wanting, he would bestow upon that unfortunate soul his One-Eyed Jack Stare, which was described as follows by Tony Kornheiser, in a Washington Post column about a long-ago Temple-Georgetown game:
After (referee) John Clougherty slapped a technical on (Chaney) for overly boisterous protesting midway in the first half, Chaney used an entire 90-second TV timeout to stare crookedly at Clougherty, an Owl Scowl from across the court. Hands on hips, his left knee slightly bent in one of those c’mon, make my day poses, Chaney gave Clougherty a dose of the most concentrated malocchio since Sonny Liston’s baleful stare-down of Floyd Patterson. We’re talking Big Time Sneer here. Gary Cooper in “High Noon,” Clint Eastwood in “Hang ‘Em High,” Evil Eye Fleegle in “Li’l Abner.” If looks could kill, Clougherty would be a long time dead. (On the other hand, give Clougherty a nod for staring right back at Chaney. Dueling eyeballs at 40 paces. Is there an optometrist in the house?)
Clougherty got off easy compared to then-Massachusetts coach John Calipari, who Chaney infamously threatened during a postgame news conference in 1994, or St. Joe’s forward John Bryant, who wound up with a broken arm when Chaney sent in what he described as a “goon” to commit intentional fouls during a 2005 game against the Hawks. Chaney served suspensions for each of those stunts, and retired after the 2005-06 season.
But here’s the thing: Calipari and Chaney eventually mended fences, and Calipari, now at Kentucky, mourned him as “the ultimate competitor and a dear friend” in a series of tweets Friday. It’s unclear if a similar truce was ever reached between Chaney and Phil Martelli, the St. Joe’s coach at the time of Goon-gate, though Martelli did offer lavish praise of his late rival following his death. What can be said with certainty is that on balance, everyone knew that for all his bluster Chaney was coming from a genuine place, a good place.
Which brings us back to “CHANEY (SAVE).” The story that resulted from that tape came after an extended back-and-forth between Chaney and Miller regarding his departure from the Temple program. Miller, Chaney said, couldn’t handle the coach’s discipline. Miller denied that, saying he wanted to play in a more up-tempo system, and that he wanted to play point guard, something Chaney hadn’t allowed him to do. Chaney said Miller would have been a fine point guard, but had his own ideas of how to go about things.
Which led to the candy-store quote.
There was one other thing, too: Chaney told me he had paid $4,000 for Miller to go to summer school at one point during his Temple tenure, and Miller, claiming he had to remain with his asthma-afflicted girlfriend in New York City, never showed up. Miller denied all that at the time, too.
“If that’s what he said, that’s what he said,” Miller told me.
John Chaney said a lot of things, to a lot of people. And maybe you had to sift through some of the bombast and blue language to understand just what he was getting at. But there was a lot there. A lot to remember, and a lot to hold onto.