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FEATURE STORY |
PEARL VISION
by John Ackers, editor of Basketball Times
This story was originally published
in Basketball Times.
CLICK HERE to subscribe to BT.
Bruce Pearl was back on the bicycle again, the very same
stationary bike that he used to wear out on Southern Indiana
game days. A man could work himself into quite a trance on that
bike, and the memories were coming back to him now.
He was back on the Evansville, Ind., campus to celebrate the
10th anniversary of the Division II title won in Pearl’s third
season there. The Screaming Eagles came back from an impossible
30-8 deficit that day, beating UC Riverside, 71-63, before some
five, six-thousand Southern Indiana fans who made the 100-mile
drive to Louisville’s Kentucky International Convention Center,
where the title game was held for the first time. Oh, the
memories.
This is where he took a program that won only10 games the year
before he got there and turned it into a 20-game winner in each
of his nine seasons, becoming a 200-game winner sooner than any
coach other than the legendary Clair Bee or Jerry Tarkanian.
Sooner than any coach who ever chose to stay in one place for so
long.
“Man, I feel like I’m home,” Pearl said as he peddled away from
that bike’s comfortable old saddle. “This is unbelievable. I
remember raising the money to buy some of this equipment.”
Tennessee’s new, enthusiastic coach has been a regular commuter
down Memory Lane lately, especially during UW-Milwaukee’s
unlikely Sweet 16 run last March.
Chance match-ups led Pearl, 45, to revisit such a diverse array
of emotions, he was practically starring in his own personal
video of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” a movie that
took place almost entirely inside Jim Carrey’s character’s mind.
Sea shells and balloons? That would be a second-round game
against his alma mater, Boston College. Razor blades and boogey
men? Pearl had to face up to those, too, against an Illinois
program that he had long ago accused of cheating.
First, the Panthers had to upset Alabama in the NCAA
Tournament’s first round. Four years ago, that would have seemed
not just improbable, but impossible. UW-Milwaukee, a commuter
school of about 25,000, was located just six blocks from
Marquette but was worlds away from either Marquette or Wisconsin
in terms of recognition. The school joined the Division I ranks
in 1988XXX and never finished better than 15-13 until the
2000-01 season, the year that Bo Ryan left there to become head
coach of the Badgers. Ryan had built his reputation at
UW-Platteville, winning a higher percentage of games there
(.822) than any coach in Division III history. UW-Milwaukee then
turned to Pearl, who in nine years had won a higher percentage
of games (.834) than any coach in Division II history. And now,
just four years later, the 12th-seeded commuters of UW-Milwaukee
had upset the SEC-powered Crimson Tide, 83-73, in the NCAA
Tournament.
Which brought Pearl to those memories of skydiving kites and
brilliant rainbows with a second-round game against BC, his alma
mater.
Boston College is where an assistant director of admissions
pointed the enthusiastic young basketball lover out to Tom
Davis, who was entering his second season as the Eagles’ coach
in 1978. As the program’s “administrative assistant,” Pearl
tried to drum up student support during those pre-Big East days,
practiced when the Eagles were short of bodies, officiated
scrimmages, recruited and even wore the mascot’s uniform for a
game.
About the only thing Pearl didn’t do at BC was to consider
coaching a career plan.
“I loved the game. I loved to play. I loved to be around it. I
loved being around coach Davis and helping him build the
program,” Pearl said. “At the same time, as I was a young
student-athlete in college, I always coached little kids. I
coached baseball. I coached football. I was one of those college
kids who would go home on weekends just to coach. And I wasn’t
doing it as a profession.
“There wasn’t a bone in my body that thought I was going to do
that. I was just going to go into a regular profession.”
That changed late in his senior year, when Davis asked him to
come to his house. Pearl drove there from his future wife’s home
in Nashua, N.H., wondering what he might have done wrong, when
it dawned on him that maybe Davis was calling to offer him a
job. He was. Davis was moving to Stanford and wanted Pearl to
come along as his restricted-earnings coach. Davis flew to
California the next day, actually completing his degree at
Stanford.
Pearl, promoted to associate head coach the next year, at the
age of 23, spent the next 10 years at Davis’ side, at Stanford
and Iowa.
“Bruce literally worked his way through the ranks,” Davis said.
“You see that a lot in businesses, where you work your way up
from office boy to manager. That’s in essence what Bruce did. He
started at the bottom of the profession.
“One of the things that helped me was that he didn’t know
anything else, from the standpoint of being exposed to a lot of
other coaching styles or systems. He just knew the one system,
the one style, and he got to where he knew it pretty doggone
well. As a result, his mind wasn’t cluttered with a lot of other
things.”
Two moments before that BC game really brought the significance
of facing his alma mater in an NCAA Tournament. He felt a
momentary tug when he heard the school fight song, “For Boston,”
for the first time in years. And he was honored that Boston
Globe columnist Bob Ryan had remembered Pearl’s days at BC and
was asking questions about UW-Milwaukee’s fullcourt pressure,
the hockey-line substitution patterns, the occasional zones –
all of his team’s similarities to Davis’ days at BC.
“If you want to give me a compliment,” Pearl said, “tell me that
my teams play the way that Tom Davis’ teams played.”
Though Pearl understands that it sounds like coach-speak, he
swears that he was so focused on BC the day that his Panthers
beat his alma mater, 83-75, he didn’t know who or where his team
was playing next. Or that a 16-year-old memory, just as soon
forgotten, was about to get dredged up again, in a big way.
*****
What were the odds? For the Panthers even to reach the Sweet 16,
that had to be about a thousand-to-one, right there. And for the
next opponent to be an Illinois program whose fans will never
forgive Pearl? Take it up to 10,000-to-1. And then, for the game
to be played in Chicago, before thousands of those angry fans?
It would take Danny Sheridan to figure out that one.
In case you missed it: As a 29-year-old Iowa assistant in 1989,
Pearl had turned in to the NCAA a two-minute tape-recorded
telephone conversation with an 18-year-old Deon Thomas from
Simeon High of the Chicago Public League who had committed to
Iowa but wound up at Illinois. Thomas, who didn’t know he was
being taped, agreed that coaches had offered him $80,000 and a
Chevy Blazer to attend Illinois but later said he was set up and
was merely trying to get Pearl off the phone. Recently, he said
of Pearl, “It’s hard to forgive a snake.”
The Illini was cleared on that matter, though it triggered a
lengthy NCAA investigation and the university was found guilty
of a lack of institutional control, placed on three-year
probation and prohibited it from post-season competition in
1990-91. Jimmy Collins, the Illini assistant mentioned in the
allegations, became coach at Illinois-Chicago rather than Lou
Henson’s successor at Illinois and refused to shake hands with
Pearl during their Horizon League games the past four seasons.
Pearl, in turn, was painted as an overzealous young recruiter
who wasn’t innocent enough to be throwing stones. The situation
was so combustible, Davis did not bring Pearl to Iowa’s game at
Assembly Hall the next season.
Now, 16 years later, there could be no sitting this one out.
UW-Milwaukee was eliminated, 77-63, without a major incident,
Pearl believes, because of comments by Illinois coach Bruce
Weber that defused the situation and because the Panthers, if
not Pearl himself, commanded respect from the Illini faithful.
But the debate was stirred again. Bruce Pearl: Whistle-blowing
man of honor? Or self-serving rat fink?
This time around, the reviews outside Illinois were largely
favorable. Back then, not so much.
“I was an easy target,” Pearl recalled. “Discredit the witness.
That’s the classic defense. My methodology could be questioned,
but I was trying to right a wrong.”
Many of today’s columnists concluded that Pearl became a pariah
in the business and that all his integrity had earned for him
was a nine-season “exile” in Southern Indiana. It was an easy
line to draw, since Pearl seemed to go from the fast track to
oblivion. Except that Pearl and Davis say that isn’t how it was.
“I did not get one negative phone call or letter from any member
of my profession,” Pearl said. “Not one AD or coach.”
Pearl was 32 when he took the Southern Indiana, young for any
level. Despite his hard-charging reputation, Davis said he
doesn’t recall Pearl pursuing many head-coaching jobs while he
was at Iowa. In fact, it was Southern Indiana that came after
Pearl, sending administrators to the Iowa City campus. While at
Southern Indiana, Pearl interviewed for Division I jobs at
Middle Tennessee State, Winthrop and Brown. That might not sound
like much, but few Division I schools were hiring coaches
directly from the D-II or D-III levels. That might change soon,
however, thanks to last March’s Sweet 16 appearances last March
by D-II and D-III graduates Pearl, Bo Ryan and John Beilein of
West Virginia.
“This is a hard place to leave,” Pearl said of Southern Indiana.
“I had a Division II job that is better than half the Division I
jobs out there. It really was. About the only thing that’s
better at the Division I level is the way you’re compensated.”
Pearl hopped on the Division I coaching carousel again in 2001,
still second-guessing himself for leaving a sure thing for the
uncertainty of UW-Milwaukee.
*****
The Alabama game wouldn’t seem as significant for Pearl as his
two other NCAA Tournament opponents, but in retrospect, it was
maybe the most important of the three.
“For (the Tennessee job), there couldn’t be a better opponent
for me to play than Alabama, other than maybe Kentucky,” Pearl
said. “What better match-up than Alabama?”
He recalled, in fact, a pre-game conversation with Alabama coach
Mark Gottfried, whom he had gotten to know from their days as
Pacific 10 Conference assistants and because of their geographic
proximity when Gottfried was the head coach at Murray State and
Pearl was at Southern Indiana.
“He says, ‘Bruce, you’ve been doing this for a lot of years.
I’ve been following you. When are you going to get a big-time
job?’
“And I said, ‘Maybe if I beat you tonight.’”
They both laughed, right up until Pearl proved to be prophetic.
Pearl might seem out of place at Tennessee, as a Jewish man and
Boston Red Sox fan from the Northeast whose identity was forged
mostly in the Midwest. Rick Pitino isn’t a Southern man, either,
Pearl points out, but he is accepted because he won at Kentucky
and now at Louisville.
Of course, Pearl could also have as easily dismissed Tennessee,
a place that has gone through coaches Wade Houston, Jerry Green
and Buzz Peterson in the past 11 years. The top of 25,000-seat
Thompson-Boling Arena is curtained off, and only about
two-thirds of the remaining 18,000 seats are filled. Men’s
basketball ranks no better than third among a typical Vol’s
priorities.
“It’s not even third. Let’s say it’s seventh,” Pearl said. “It’s
where it is because we haven’t won. It’s where it is not because
they don’t love basketball. Is there anyone who loves basketball
more than the fans of the Lady Vols?
“I remember that going to Milwaukee was really scary, because we
had it going at Southern Indiana and just knew we were going to
be good every year. Milwaukee had been so down, I didn’t know
what the potential was. I know what the potential is at
Tennessee. It’s written all over the campus. It’s written all
over every other single athletic program. Clearly, clearly, if
you had to sit down and do the math and took in the facilities,
the fan support, the tradition, winning championships at both
the conference and national level, Tennessee could be in the top
five in the country. I just think you’d be hard-pressed, men and
women, not to put Tennessee in the top five.”
The state’s geography has proved to be one of the program’s
greatest challenges. Knoxville is located in the eastern third
of the state, some 350 miles from Memphis, a basketball hotbed
tucked in the state’s southwest corner. Four of the nation’s top
25 rising seniors – forward Brandan Wright, wing Thaddeus Young,
center Pierre Niles and point guard Willie Kemp – are from
Tennessee, and all but Wright, of Brentwood Academy, near
Nashville, are from the Memphis area. Besides the University of
Memphis, players from Memphis are actually closer in distance to
the campuses of Vanderbilt, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi and
Mississippi State.
Pearl has addressed that issue by hiring Scott Edgar, a longtime
Arkansas assistant under Nolan Richardson who regularly
recruited Memphis and is familiar with the breakneck style Pearl
hopes to bring to Tennessee.
“Memphis is still Big Orange country,” Pearl insisted. “They
love Tennessee football in Memphis. But they have a lot of other
basketball options, pro and college, rather than following the
Vols.
“Why do you choose to go to your state school? You choose, for
one, because it’s closer to home. That isn’t the case with
Memphis. But still, there are other reasons why you choose to go
to your state school. One is life after basketball, as far as
perhaps being a hero. If those kids from that area go to
Tennessee and we go to a Final Four during their career, and
they go back to that area for the rest of their lives, they’re
going to be known. They will have made history in that state for
the people of that state.”
Pearl took a recruiting hit already when Tyler Smith of Pulaski,
Tenn., asked to be released from the letter of intent that he
signed with Peterson. Pearl had refused his request, and Smith
is expected to play next season instead at a prep school.
Columnists have pointed out that UW-Milwaukee granted a release
when Ryan Childress indicated a desire to follow Pearl to
Tennessee. Pearl has countered by saying little other than that
Smith “has an agenda.”
Pearl has taken a P.R. hit on the Tyler Smith situation, but he
has been through worse and survived. Over the past few months,
he has been reminded of that often.
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