The Hoop Heads podcast is brought to you by Head Start Basketball.

I worked for two of the great lifers, Lou Henson and Don Haskins.

Of the three Division 1 coaches, I worked for Neil McCarthy as well.

And I think the three of them combined for nearly 2,000 college wins.

And I don't know how they did it.

I think it would have ruined my health because I'm too tightly wound.

I think I was lucky that way in that I always wanted to be a head Division 1 coach and it never happened.

But I think in some ways it was a blessing.

Russ Bradbird was an assistant men's basketball coach for 14 seasons at UTEP and New Mexico State University.

He eventually left the game to pursue a life in writing.

Russ's latest book is the satirical novel Big Time A mirror to the Distorted Reality of Sports on Modern American College Campuses.

All five of his books focus on.

The intersection of sport, social progress, politics and race.

He was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to return to England to work on his next book about refugees in Belfast.

Almost like belonging, Russ has remained connected to the game through his acclaimed Basketball in the Barrio summer program in El Paso, as well as serving as New Mexico State's television color analyst.

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Have your notebook with you as you listen to this episode with Russ Bradbird, author of Big Time and former assistant men's basketball coach at UTEP and New Mexico State University.

Hello and welcome to the Whop Heads podcast.

It's Mike Cleansing here tonight without my co host Jason Sunkel.

But I am pleased to be joined by Russ Bradburn, former assistant coach at UTEP and New Mexico State, current color analyst for New Mexico State, author.

I just could keep going on and on.

But Russ, welcome to the Hoop Head spot.

Excited for our conversation tonight, Mike?

I'm happy to meet the Hoops heads, the Hoop Head Nation.

Well, thank you.

We are out there and listening strong.

So Russ, let's start by going back in time.

Tell me about some of your first experiences with the game of basketball.

What made you fall in love with it?

What was your childhood like in the game of basketball?

Well, I grew up on the north side of Chicago and went to Chicago public schools, but our, our area was not a big basketball hotbed.

And so I got a little bit of a late start.

I, I tried out for the baseball team at Von Steuben High School in ninth grade and got cut.

And so I thought, well, maybe I'll try basketball next year.

You know, in Chicago there's the Froff and the varsity.

There's not, there's not four different teams like there are at many of the suburban schools or Catholic schools.

So it was just the Froff and the varsity.

So that as a sophomore I tried out for the, for the Frostsoft team and was, you know, one of the worst players on the team, but made it.

But a funny thing happened to me then, Mike, is that the assistant, the Frosthoff coach said to me, he pointed down at the other end of the court and there was a little, little kid on the varsity who was a starting point guard.

He's a white kid, but with a big red afro.

And he said if you practice these ball handling drills the way that guy does, you could learn to do the ball handling drills like that.

And it really stuck with me.

And that moment was really a key moment even for me as a coach and a teacher is that, you know, what we say to kids can really stick with them.

You know, we, you know, you've coached thousands of kids and I've probably coached hundreds of kids and but you know, those kids remember what you say to them, and I remember his name was Harvey Brouse.

And I'm still, I'm back in touch with him after, after years.

But he said, you know, we, you know, the ball handling drills were a big part, so a big part of practice.

And so he said that to me and it really, it really stuck with me.

But, but the hard part for me is after that sophomore year, it was a Chicago public high school called Von Steuben, but there was only 800 kids at the school.

And we moved.

My father took a different job in the suburbs of Philadelphia to Abington.

And that was 4,000 kids.

And they were defending state champions when we got there.

And I wasn't good enough to make the team.

I got cut from the varsity two years.

But it sort of set something off in me.

It sort of, I was, you know, I wasn't too good at reading, reading the room or reading the tea leaves.

I thought, well, I'm going to keep.

And make my team in college, which is, well, first.

And I kept getting cut.

I got cut my two years at Abington High School.

And they were good, there was a good team and they were sent guys at Division 1, none, I don't think anyone to Ohio, but you know, the Philadelphia, the Big Five and that kind of thing.

It was, it was a dominant high school team and I just wasn't good enough to be on the team, but went to a small school called north park, which your Division 3 listeners would, would know the name North Park.

And I wound up making the team there for three years.

And when I was a sophomore, I was just on the junior varsity, but we won the national championship.

And then the next year I made the varsity team.

Scored 13 points in my entire career.

And Mike, I was, you know, this crazy, practicing my dribbling drills all the time.

But then it was bad enough that I got cut as a senior and we, when we won the national championship my junior year, there were no seniors on the team.

And as you know from your experience, it's those senior dominated teams that are often the, the, the Fab Five at Michigan was a, that was a freakish thing that doesn't happen very often in college sports.

But at, at north park, we won the national championship without a senior.

And the next year the coach said to me right before the, the day, the day I was going to get cut, he had a couple coaching shirts in the wrappers, you know, bright gold and bright blue in north park colors and said, you're not going to make the team today.

You're Going to.

This is your last day, but we want you to be the student assistant.

But I wasn't smart enough to take that opportunity.

And so I was so determined and so focused on practicing and practicing and making the team was this holy quest for me, and I.

And I just could not bring myself to do it.

And of course, they won the.

If your Division 3 fans might remember this, they won three national championships in a row.

I was only on one of the teams, but they won the.

I would have been a national championship coach at age 21, but I was too hurt.

And you know how sometimes this happens to me?

Even today, Mike, if my wife says, we're going for pizza tonight, I'm getting pizza in my head.

Pizza.

And then, oh, the pizza place is closed.

I can't.

I really have trouble dealing with.

I set a goal, and if it doesn't happen, I really struggled, so.

I really struggled.

And.

But I think in.

In retrospect, the getting cut in high school and in college, I think it made me a better coach.

I didn't know Rick Majeris well, but I know you played against him, but I remember him saying.

I remember him saying that it's really important to coach your 11th and 12th man.

Well, I was the 13th man or the 14th man, but I really took that to heart.

Always tried to coach every kid on the team.

And even if it was what we would call garbage time, I still tried to coach them, because I know for me, garbage time was everything.

I scored the 100th point twice at north park, you know, where we'd be blowing somebody out, and I'd.

I'd get the call and went in and scored the 100th point a couple of times.

So anyway, it was.

It was mostly.

Mostly a sad story, and it prepared me for a writing career and a coaching career.

But.

But.

But maybe the takeaway was that I figured I knew at 5 foot 11, I had to do something to separate myself and those dribbling drills.

You know that I got a booklet from my brother from Crazy George Shower that your Ohio listeners would remember.

But I never met Crazy George.

But my brother came back from one of those basketball camps, it might have been the Pocono Mountains camp or something.

And came back with this booklet, and I read that book, and that was like the Bible to me, you know, about how this idea that when I'm not practicing, somebody else is out there practicing.

And so I stopped watching television.

I was an odd kid that way.

You know, all the programs that kids of our generation grew up with I never saw them.

I never saw the Love Boat or Eight Is Enough or I stopped.

I think partly in retrospect I was too hyped up to sit still and watch television.

But I spent a lot of my teenage years and even into college at north park blindfolded with gloves on, you know, trying to do, you know, doing ball handling drills and those eventually.

But that was sort of my ticket into coaching was the, that I was going around to.

At one point, I remember I went to Eldon, Eldon Miller's camp.

If you're old enough to remember Eldon Miller.

Absolutely.

Yep, yep.

Yeah, a guy named Todd Landrum was his assistant.

I remember Todd invited me to the camp.

It was a big thrill to do a dribbling show in front of.

So I was going around the country doing my, my dribbling shows and that was sort of my ticket into, into college basketball.

So who did you meet that helped you to get your foot in the door as you're going around and doing that ball handling stuff?

Well, I, I met all kinds of, I, I went all around the Midwest doing it.

So I was at the Rich Fall camp at Northwestern.

And do you remember Evansville?

You had had the, this All American camp in Evansville.

You probably got invited to it.

But there was one in Evansville that Nike or somebody put on and I went, I went to that one as.

So I went all around the Midwest and I remember I would charge $250 for a college and $100 for a high school.

But I did all the travel on my own in a little Datsun.

But there wasn't really anybody that opened the door for me.

But I had a network of coaches, particularly in Chicago, that had seen me do this dribbling show.

And I'd come out there looking like Peewee Herman.

I'm not the most impressive looking guy.

But then I could come out and really blow your doors off with, with dribbling doors.

But it was, but more than anyone, it was Dick Versace and Tony Barone, they were the Bradley coaches and Versace went on to the Pacers and they both wound up working for the Memphis Grizzlies for a long time.

But they were the one, they were the ones that really built my confidence up and really helped me to promote myself and going around.

And so I started writing letters to.

You know, I was a security guard in Chicago at Glenbrook North High School.

It's where John Shire went well before I was there.

And Jerry Sloan's son was a star player before I got There.

And I'm trying to think of other famous players that went to Glenbrook north, but the Duke coach is the.

Probably their best known.

Well, Chris Collins, who's the Doug son, the Northwestern coach.

But I wrote letters to every major school in America.

And I was already.

At the time, I was probably already a better writer than a coach, because one day Tim Floyd called me.

I was a security guard at Glenbrook North High School.

But after.

After school, I would help coach the kids.

I was a security guard.

And it was an important year for me, Mike, because as a security guard, the first day, I thought, this is great.

It's so easy.

Okay, it's a minimum wage.

But I just sit here.

And they were nice kids.

Glenbrook north is a very suburban high school.

But after a couple days, I thought, I gotta bring a book.

And for that year, I read 50 books during the school year.

And I'm not a fast reader.

And so that was a lot of books.

And it really got me interested in books.

And, you know, for somebody who left coaching to become a writer, it was really an important year for me.

But.

But Tim Floyd called me and said that, you know, that Don Haskins was looking for.

Don Haskins was the head coach.

And Tim, of course, would wind up as the head coach at Iowa State and the Chicago Bulls and that kind of thing.

And then.

And then he eventually went back to utep.

But.

But Tim had called me, and I knew I used to keep a notebook of all my dribbling drills.

And on the front of that notebook was Nate Archibald.

Just a photo I'd cut out of Sports Illustrated.

And I had my list of dribbling drills.

And so I knew when.

When Tim called that I.

I knew that that's where Nate Archibald had gone.

And it.

You know, and I knew they'd won the National.

They'd had that landmark national championship team.

So I went down there at Glenbrook North.

You'll laugh like, we were 4 and 27 the year I was there because Brian.

Jerry Sloan had been fired.

And so Brian Sloan left for, you know, left and was no longer the start.

So just the one year there, I was 4 and 27 and then went to UTEP, and we were 27 and 4.

And so it was, you know, for a Division 3 bench warmer to go now, we were good.

I don't want to belittle the north park team.

We.

We beat the Division 1 teams.

We played.

We snuck up on them, I'm sure.

But to go, you know, suddenly we're playing in front of I'm in front of 12,000 people and with Don Haskins, one of the.

I hate the word legends when it gets applied to everybody.

Like, you know, this guy, you know, this guy's a legend and that guy's a legend.

Don Haskins really was a legend.

He was really.

And even then he was, you know, he was younger, 10 years younger than I am today.

But we were all very enamored with him and it was really a magical time because he had great teams in the 60s, but then he had a lull in the late 70s until Tim Floyd got there and then we became good again.

And so I was there for eight years with Don Haskins and it was really a remarkable experience for, for a guy that, you know, couldn't, could hardly get in the games in Division 3.

What did you like about coaching right away?

Because obviously coaching wasn't necessarily in your background.

It didn't sound like you had any necessarily coaching role models or people that you looked at and said, oh, this guy kind of showed me the rope.

So when you got into it and you got that opportunity, what was it that you really liked about it that got you hooked?

I think for me it's an easy question, Mike.

I was single and I wasn't close with my.

You know, we have a complicated family.

They're all good people.

We, we have, we, we, we.

But it was a complicated family situation.

Nothing, you know, criminal or anything.

Nothing, nothing.

You know, the, the worst thing that ever happened to me as a, as a young man was I got cut from the high school team and then I got cut from.

So if that's the worst thing that happens as a kid, there it is.

But you know, as a kid everything seemed, is so intensely important to us.

You know, the, with the girlfriend breaks out.

Not that I had any girlfriends in high school, but the girlfriend breaks up or whatever it is.

So for me it was the sense of family.

And because I wasn't close with my own father, the coaches always took that place.

So Dan McCarroll, he's the only coach besides John Wooden to win three NCAA championships in at the man for men's.

He did it in Division 3.

But I really wanted to please coach McCarroll.

And then don Haskins was such an, you know, impressive person.

It was like he wrote off the page.

You know, he wrote off of a John Wayne.

He was like John Wayne.

You know, he's very, very macho guy and very gruff but, you know, kind hearted.

If you could get past the gruffness, but just wanting to impress the coaches.

And I think, you know, it's part of the.

You know, the guys who excel in basketball often have.

Have complicated relationships with their fathers.

I mean, you could.

Even the same is true of Bruce Springsteen.

You know, I love Bruce Springsteen, and he always talks about the complicated relationship he had with his own father.

But for me, it was.

It was a sense of family and a sense of belonging.

And I was never married.

When I was coaching in my 14 years in Division 1 and then a couple years in Ireland, I was never.

It wasn't until I came back from Ireland that I got married.

And I don't know how.

I don't know how you do it as a married guy, like the time commitment and that kind of thing.

But for.

For me particularly, it was the.

The family.

And also.

I didn't know this at the time.

I didn't know any of this at the time.

But also, looking back, I was very.

You know, it was at a time in the 1960s and 70s, and, you know, the black players had big Afros.

And Chicago was very segregated at the time.

It still is, of course, but Von Steuben had something called the permissive transfers, where kids from the west side could transfer to Von Steuben if they.

If their school was overcrowded.

And those guys, it almost set an unrealistic expectation rate because those eight or ten African American kids that were in my class at Von Steuben, they were the greatest guys ever.

They've all been huge success stories.

And I got.

And it really opened up this.

It really opened my head.

The church we had got when I went to as a kid was integrated, but that was just an hour on Sundays.

But suddenly I was around these.

These African American kids and they were cool.

They had the big Afros and the platform shoes and they listening to the Spinners and the Stylistics, you know, and, you know, what was.

What was my culture, you know, like half Swiss and half Ukrainian.

And it was all very organic.

But I think in retrospect, the window into black culture and the way that it bridges again, you know, music does it also, and food can do it.

You know, like, let's stop here.

This is the great barbecue place, or this is a great Chinese restaurant.

But in my experience, the three great bridges from one culture to another are music and food and sport.

And I don't know that.

I don't know what your background enough, Mike.

But, you know, if I think of the.

I know hundreds and hundreds of black people, and they're nearly all from basketball or basketball related or Somebody's sister or a cousin, you know, like, you know, I can count on two hands the number of black writers that I know, but I couldn't begin to count the number of people.

The black people I know from basketball, parents and cousins and everybody else.

And so for me, it was a window into.

Into a culture.

And at that time, you know, at that time, it seemed very cool.

I was interested in black music.

I loved Al Green and the Spinners and James Brown and the Temptations, and.

And here these guys were, like, living it, were part of that life, and.

And they were willing to accept me.

And one of the things that I love about sports is that it's probably the most, you know, equal and, you know, most equal part of society.

Like, if you're good, like, what happened with LeBron James's son, that's really unusual in sports, that somebody's gonna get something because, like, I don't know.

I want to argue about LeBron.

I actually, I'm a big LeBron admirer, but.

But I.

I wonder, would that kid have been on.

On the Lakers if he wasn't LeBron's son?

And I have to think.

But that's one of the really feeling, even in.

In coaching, like, maybe you.

You might get a break, you might get your foot in the door.

You know, my dad.

My parents were not at all interested in sports, and neither were any of my siblings.

But I think that it's one of the few places where it's totally equal and everybody's equal.

And the acceptance I got from the black players, even though I wasn't a good player, I think they sense this guy's trying really hard and he's dedicated, and it's important to them.

And that's always been my experience.

And so, anyway, that's how I got interested in the game.

Well, I think it's interesting, for sure, when you talk about just being able to bridge that cultural gap.

There's no question that where I grew up was a primarily white suburb of Cleveland, Ohio.

And to your point, a lot of the experiences that I had interacting with African Americans was through the game of basketball.

And conversely, to go along with that, certainly the music.

I'm a little bit younger than you, so my experience when I start thinking about.

I'm thinking about the early days of rap music and how much I listened to that and R and B and all the way through college.

And again, I always say that I knew a lot about pop culture and music and those types of things up until my kids were born.

And then Once my kids were born, all my pop culture knowledge and everything kind of falls.

Completely falls off the.

Completely falls off the map.

And I also can relate to a couple other things that you said that I want to pull out of that part of the conversation.

One, just in terms of how coaches do it when they're married, it's certainly one of, I think, the biggest challenges that when I've talked to coaches, Russ, that people are always trying to figure out, how can I balance my desire to be a great coach and give everything that I can to the players who are a part of my team and my basketball family?

And then how do I again, balance that with my quote, unquote, real family, whether that's just a spouse or whether that's a spouse and children.

I think it's something that coaches struggle with.

They struggled with it when you were coaching.

They struggle with it today, and they're going to continue to struggle with it because, again, the bar for how much time you have to put in as a coach, I don't care what level you're coaching on, the bar for what it takes to be successful in terms of time is really high.

And then the last thing that you said that really struck a nerve with me, that I've said a ton of times on the podcast to lots of different people, is something that sticks with you, that a coach says that.

I'm betting that if you went back and you asked that coach, hey, do you remember when you told me that I should be like this kid with the red hair who has the big Afro and that you should be a ball handler like him?

I would guarantee that has no recollection of saying that.

Of course.

Yes.

And here you.

And here you are 45 years later, and you still remember it like it was yesterday.

And I have things that are exactly the same.

There's things that coaches said to me that I know they would have no idea they said to me that I still remember that carried me that have fueled me in different parts of my life.

And conversely, I'm sure that there are things that I've said to, whether it's my students or whether it's players who have played for me, that I have no idea the impact.

And that's why I always say it's important to think about.

You want those things to be positive, right?

You want the things that you said to be remembered to be something that steers somebody in a positive direction instead of a negative.

And so it's always important as a coach to remember that your words, they last and man, when you think about something that you're talking about 40 years later, I mean that's, that's pretty incredible.

The power of what, of what somebody can say to you.

For sure.

Yeah.

And Mike, you know, I was such a bad player even as a sophomore in high school that I, he only said two things to me all year, really.

I mean, you know, the other one was what do you know, I was trying to try.

I was having trouble getting the ball past, you know, making the first pass, you know, as like I'm supposed to be a point guard.

And he said, well, what are you afraid of?

You know, if you throw, you don't worry, you know.

And that was actually, that was good advice.

But you mentioned that stuff about the family and I want to sort of push you on that.

The, the real, one of the big influences in my life, you know, I worked for Don Haskins and sat on the bench for Dan McCarroll.

But I, at my last three years of coaching, I worked for Lou Henson.

That would have been the Illinois coach when you were, when you were, when you were at State.

And Lou was such a fine gentleman.

It really changed.

I think about Lou Henson and Don Haskins all the time.

When I was teaching writing classes, you know, I became a writer as you know.

And when I taught writing classes at New Mexico State, I thought about them all the time.

The way they dealt with people, the way they, both of them, they were very different in some ways, but they were similar in many ways.

In one way was not.

They didn't go around making enemies.

And Lou Ensen in particular said would say 95% of the problems in the world are caused by the tone of voice people use.

And he would say just like that, with a big smile on his face.

And I do think I try to use that with my, you know, my daughter is 18 now and you know, you know how that, you know, you'll see when your ears turns 18.

She, she can be a little.

I got, I got a 20, I got a, I got a 20.

I got a 20 year old daughter and an 18 year old son.

So.

I know, I know, but I just.

Thought, you know, Lou was really unflappable that way.

Like he was going to, he was going to talk in a nice tone of voice no matter what.

And the worst, I remember the worst he would say to players would.

I remember one time him saying to Divino, Divino had trouble remembering whatever out of bounds playing.

He said to, you know, you're so sloppy.

He said, I bet you don't even make your bed in the morning.

And I think one of the.

That was the worst thing.

You could make my bed.

And we all looked at each other.

But I think that from people of our generation, you know, I'm an admirer of Bob Knight.

I didn't, I didn't worship him, but I was an admirer that I think he ran a clean program and his kids played hard.

But I think that one of the things that happens to us as young coaches is you think that you have to drop F bombs all over the place or that you're not coaching.

And one of the things I learned from Lou, Now, Lou never said to any of us, you know, when he, I was with Lou, when he came, when he left Illinois and retired, and then they pulled him out of retirement at New Mexico State.

And Lou never said, I don't want to hear any swearing.

It was just one day, one of the play.

He would look, give you a look if you swore.

And one day, one of the players, now, Billy Keys, denies this, but our best player was Billy Keys.

And Billy said, I swear.

He said, hey, you guys, Coach Ensign, don't swear.

We ain't swearing either.

And that was it.

Everybody stopped swearing.

And I, I, I, I, honestly, as a, I'm a writer now, and I think, you know, I remember my, my father saying to me, well, you gotta, you should, you're a smart kid.

You should be able to come up with better words than f this and, you know, BS that.

And, and I, and I think that, you know, I think that as a writer and, and as a coach, you know, we're, I, I want.

You might not remember Tim Jankovich.

He wound up as the SMU coach for a while.

But Tim told me, and this, this struck home with me, too, and I think it was something that Lou took to heart is I.

He said, I never want the players to see me lose my cool.

And I thought, wow, that's quite a thing to say because, you know, coaches lose their cool all the time.

And he said, well, how can I expect them to keep their cool if I lose my cool?

You know, And I know that.

And so I tried to take that, you know, take that to heart.

But with, particularly with Lou, once the game ended, I, I, I struggled with this.

Mike, I don't know how you are.

But once the game ended, Luke could completely turn it off.

He was, he was like George Foreman, you know, like, remember George Foreman?

He would try and knock your head off.

But once it was over, it's a big smile and It's a hug and is everything great?

And it was remarkable how he could change gears.

Like, for me, like, I'm still mad at my college girlfriend.

How did, how did these guys get over it so quickly, you know, And I.

But I think that's, that's admirable.

Can you get, after a tough loss, are you able to smile and talk nice to everybody at courtside and that kind of thing?

Well, that's a really good question.

So I have to phrase it, I have to put it into categories.

So as a player, the answer to that was definitely no.

So if I lost a game and I was on a bus or I was driving home or I was interacting with people, I was not happy.

And you weren't going to be able to make me happy as a player after a loss.

Then when I was his assistant coach, I found it to be much easier to put a loss behind me as an assistant coach.

I'm not sure why that was, but I can definitely say that I wanted to win and winning was important to me.

But when that game ended, I could go home and I could go to sleep and I could kind of put the game out of my head.

Anytime I have been, anytime I have been a head coach, and I have never been a head coach at any real level because I was only an assistant high school coach.

But I've been the head coach of plenty of my kids.

Recreation, travel, AAU teams.

And no matter how unimportant any of those games may be, I would sit and sleep with those games until we played again, regardless of the outcome.

So if we lost and I was the head coach, I can only imagine when I'm losing a fourth grade girls rec basketball game and I can't sleep because of what I think I did wrong in that game or how I could have helped us.

I can't even imagine what it would be like to be a head college coach or a coach in the NBA where again, my livelihood was dependent upon my ability to win games.

So to answer your question, I think I probably tend to the side of.

Yeah, I can't really put that behind me.

I would, I would carry it with me, which probably isn't a healthy way to do it, right, Russ?

I think I may a bit more the same in that regard.

When I was at UTEP and New Mexico State, you know, I was in eight NCAA tournaments as an assistant.

And if we lost in the.

Of course we never won the championship, we'd lose in the NCAA tournament.

And you know, I, I'd be sad for A couple hours, and then I'd never.

But when I went over to.

I coached in the Irish Super League, which is the.

One of the lowest levels of pro basketball in the world.

And if we, you know, in front of 400 people, if we lost, I could not sleep.

And, you know, Tim Floyd used to say that it's the longest 18 inches in the world from the head coach to this.

Like when.

When it's all on your shoulders, boy, even.

Even in the Irish Super League, I really were, you know, at utep, we'd be playing and we'd lose, and, you know, we had 12,000 fans at the game, and it was a bummer, you know, but, you know, I don't see.

I don't see.

You know, I worked for two of the great lifers, Lou Henson and Don Haskins, you know, with a lot.

A lot of.

A lot of, you know, something like six of the three Division 1 coaches.

I worked for Neil McCarthy as well, and I think the three of them combined for nearly 2,000 college wins.

And I don't know how they did it.

It just.

It's.

I think it would have ruined my health because I'm tightly.

Too tightly wound, you know, and I had.

Even as a kid, I had too much energy and had to go out and, you know, practice my, you know, trying to dribble three basketballs at the same time.

I think I was lucky that way in that I always wanted to be a head Division 1 coach, and it never happened, but I think in some ways it was a blessing.

Tell me a little bit about what it was like being on a staff during the time when you're coaching.

Obviously, what people see today, especially at the Division 1 level, is they have large, Large staffs where guys are very.

Their roles are pretty well defined.

So what was it like for you on the staff in terms of your responsibilities at utep, New Mexico State, under each of those coaches?

Just give me a little idea of kind of what your roles were and how that may have differed from what we see today in terms of a Division 1 coaching staff.

Yeah, well, when I.

That's a good question.

When I got to utep, it was Don Haskins, and there was a man named Jim Forbes on the staff.

He's passed away now.

He's one of the nicest people that ever.

But he was the night.

The guy in the 1972 Olympics, you'll remember that Alexander Belloff elbowed him, grabbed the ball and laid it in.

That was Jim Forbes, and I think it really damaged him emotionally in Some ways he's tightly wound and he was having health problems.

When I was.

My first year, he was having health problems.

So he didn't, he wasn't doing much.

And Coach Haskins showed up for practice in the games and that was it.

He didn't do it.

So there I.

And Tim Floyd had essentially been doing everything by himself.

So I think, I don't think Tim had that great of esteem for me.

He was just happy to get somebody who could roll up his sleeves and work.

So it was essentially Tim and I running the office that first year.

Then Jim Forbes took a high school job and we'd hired somebody else.

But.

But that first year, boy, it was a tremendous workload.

And one of the things I think that was good for me at that, at that stage was if you do a little bit of everything, you know, like I imagine if you're the, if you're the Ohio Wesleyan coach, you've got to sweep the floor, get the towels.

You're doing a bit of everything.

You don't have everybody.

You don't have these specialists.

But I look at the staffs now where there's eight or nine people, and I think it's a mistake in that I don't think there's that much to do.

And I think that, you know, egos would get in the way then.

I'm into longevity.

You know, I worked for, you know, my, my college coach, Dan McCarroll was at North park for 20 years, and then he was at Mankato State for 20 years.

And Don Haskins, of course, was 40 years at the same school.

You know, that, that, to me, that's what I was interested in.

Legacy, you know, legacy and guys who had legacies.

And I, I just think when you have that many people on your staff, you're going to have guys arguing and wishing they got more credit.

And how come he makes more money than I do?

By, by the way, Mike, you'll laugh, but my average salary at UTEP, we went to seven NCAA tournaments in eight years.

My average salary was 17,000.

Now, El Paso doesn't surprise me.

If you could, if you.

Now you could, you could get by in El Paso on that.

Because El Paso had, at that time, it's still pretty cheap, but he was a border town and, and really cheap.

But, but I, I just, I think.

I think it's the same with.

There were times at UTEP when we had 10 and 11 guys on the team and we were good.

And I think it's to.

To.

For.

For me, I'm a Bit of a minimalist that way.

Like, I don't want 22 guys in the team and I don't want a staff of nine people.

And I, I know that Mike Shashewski and Bob Knight, they have all these managers and this and that, but I just, I just feel like, you know, if you've got, if you got.

It just seem it goes against my grain, I guess.

I, I know there's different.

One of the things also I think to keep in mind is, as you know, there's more than one way to skin a cat.

And what, what Don Haskins was doing, you know, Nolan Richardson, who I wrote my book about, Nolan played for Don Haskins.

And they couldn't be more different in terms of, you know, coaching philosophy, in terms of personalities, they were very similar, but coaching one was run and gun and trap.

That was Nolan Richardson.

And Coach Askins was, you know, we slowed things down and very selective and it was going to be a defensive battle.

So I think there's more than one way to be.

And, and, and, but the other thing for me, Mike, I don't know if you could, could you copy Jim McDonald?

Like, I can't imitate Don Haskins.

I'd have a, I'd have a deep.

Because he's a big, intimidating guy.

I'm, you know, I'm 5 11, 160 pounds now.

I, I could imitate Lou Henson a little bit.

And I just thought I, I, he rubbed off on me personally more like I'm going to be in a good mood, I'm going to be upbeat and I'm not going to swear my head off like I did when I was younger.

And I think, you know, but, but I mean, were you, were you able to imitate Jim McDonald when you were.

So that's a good question.

I mean, I think from a, from a personality standpoint, I think there's, there's some part of it that probably when you play for somebody for four years, I think there you can't help but sort of absorb a little bit of, sort of the way that they coach.

So for me, what's interesting, Russ, is as a high school player I played for.

So in my era, in my community, the ninth grade was not at the high school.

So we were at a junior high when I was in ninth grade.

So I played for a ninth grade team when I was in ninth grade at my junior high school.

So then when I went to high school, I played for the same high school coach for three seasons and then I played for Coach McDonald for four seasons at Kent, and we're talking about a completely different era where there isn't the Internet, where you're not going on.

And I wasn't studying YouTube videos or looking at this drill that this trainer was putting together.

I wasn't going to other schools practices or watching.

I had no idea what other teams and coaches may have been doing.

So when I got my first coaching job as a junior varsity basketball coach in Bay Village, Ohio, the only thing I really knew was what I had done as a player, which again, was completely uninventive and unexciting.

And I did the same thing probably for seven years.

The same drills, the same, you know, I had like two workouts, and that was pretty much it.

And then the rest of what I knew in terms of me being a coach was what my high school coach did and what my college coach did.

So when I ran drills or I set up a practice, I mean, I didn't know anything other than what those two guys had done.

And so I look back on that as probably one of the regrets that I have in my coaching career, and I just wonder that had I poured myself into it more in those first couple years in terms of me learning the game instead of just sort of relying on, hey, I was a really good player.

And I know I.

That should make me a really good coach, which again, now I would have been disavowed of that notion probably pretty quickly, but back then, there just wasn't as much information out there.

It just wasn't as available.

And so I really do feel like I'm not so sure from a personality standpoint necessarily, that I took on from my high school and my college coach, but I definitely took on the way that they went about doing their drills and putting that.

Putting a practice together and running a team.

Those are things that I definitely took from my high school and college, because I did, because I didn't have anywhere else to go.

I didn't have anything else to draw on.

Yeah, well, there's nothing worse than a guest coming on and contradicting you, Mike.

But I will.

I will say, I don't know if it'd be a direct contradiction, but what I see happening with particularly young coaches today is, I think.

I think you'll agree with this, is I was sort of grounded in Dan McCarroll and then Don Haskins and Lou Henson, and they're.

They weren't playing exactly.

But the.

One of the.

I guess the point I'm getting at, my old friend Larry Gibson, you might remember Larry Gibson he's the.

He was the University of Toledo coach, but he's from Ohio.

And I can't think of.

I can't remember if he went to Ohio Wesleyan or what his.

What his small college was, but anyway, he.

He would call being a cesspool of knowledge.

And I think one of the things that happens more to young people, I think you're better off at what happened to you.

You're better off doing that than trying copy eight different coaches like you cannot.

Right.

I agree with that.

Yeah.

You can't play like, like Don Haskins and Nolan Richardson.

You can't do both of those.

You can't press and trap all the time and then have a great half court offense and a great half court defense.

It's just not so.

One of the things I, that I would.

If I were to encourage a young coach, if you were to ask me, I would say, you know, get grounded in something and try.

Now, I say that I'll contradict myself here.

I went over.

When I went over to Ireland, you know, the first year I tried to coach, you know, more of a Don Haskins, Lou Henson style.

And the second year I thought, screw it, nobody's scouting.

There's no scouting in Ireland.

At that time, no one was filming the game.

And so we started trapping, trapping all the time.

And it would just disrupt what everybody did.

And I was very successful with that.

But I don't think even you could do that today in Ireland.

That I think you have to be able to adapt.

But I would caution, I think it's the same in music.

Like, you know, if you go here, George, I don't know, you'll outdate myself here, but you go, if you go hear George Strait, you don't want to hear him do a reggae song, you know, and if you go see Taylor Swift, you don't want her.

You don't want to hear her do a rap song like the Wu Tang Plan.

And it's just like, you know, I think you have to.

You have to sort of.

Sort of stick with, you know, in some ways.

And so that was the biggest lesson I got from Haskins and Lou Henson, Don Haskins and Lou Henson was when to bend and when to.

Like.

I remember Coach Haskin saying, don't ever get me a.

I'm not gonna ever have a guy with a tattoo.

Don't ever recruit a guy with a tattoo.

Well, you wouldn't have a team today.

Yeah, good luck today.

Good luck with.

Good luck with that one today, Russ.

Yeah, you would.

You would.

You wouldn't have.

You wouldn't have a team today.

And I think there's time, you know, and.

And he wound up Tim Floyd talking, talked him into playing zone some when I was there, which you would have never thought that a guy who played for Henry Ivo, whatever plays on.

So I think that's a big thing too.

When do I bend?

And I think that happens with us at parent.

With parents too, don't you think?

Like, are you really going to holler at your daughter to clean up her room today?

Like her, her dog died yesterday.

So this isn't the time to, you know, to, you know, that kind of thing.

It's.

It's what I think.

Go on.

Sorry.

So I think that what you're saying.

I agree 100% that you have to figure out right.

Who you are as a coach, as a human being, as a parent, whatever.

But I also think that to some degree what you have to do.

And this is where I feel like my experience where I would have benefited from seeing how other people did things just so not necessarily so I could say, okay, I'm going to take from six other coaches and try to combine those all into whatever Mike ends up becoming as a coach.

But I do feel like because I didn't have any other experience with other coaches, I almost didn't realize that, hey, there are other ways that you can go about trying to do the same thing.

And so I feel like I would have benefited from seeing.

How did Russ Bradberg coach?

How did Lou Henson coach?

How did Tom Izzo coach?

How did Eldon Miller coach?

And then looking at those and going, okay, does that fit what I believe or does that fit how I want to coach?

Or does that fit the style of play that I want?

Or does that fit my personality?

And I feel like I just kind of was, okay, this is what I was exposed to.

This is just the way it is.

This is all I know.

And I didn't really go out and explore, not necessarily to copy everything, but just to make myself a more well rounded.

I think again, it's just like right when you read or you listen to music, the more that, you know, you turn, you start to figure out this is what I like, this is what I don't like.

Whereas for me I had such a narrow view, I think of experiences that it kind of put me in.

I don't know if a box is the right way to say it, but I just was sort of.

This was.

This was the way I knew.

And so that was kind of the walk that I walked if that makes sense.

Yeah.

But I would say, I would ask you, like, I don't know that you can learn.

Like, I was very interested in Pete Carrill at one time.

Not that I could tell you the first thing about, you know, I couldn't drop his plays, but just the back cuts and that.

And I.

But I got where I thought.

I don't think you could.

I think you'd have to.

I don't think you could get it from a YouTube and I think you could get it from a coach.

I think you'd have to be around Kirill for a couple of years maybe.

Maybe other coaches are smarter than I am, but after being around Haskins for two or three years and Lou Henson for a couple years, I knew what they were going to say before they said it.

And that's just for.

The only way to get that is like, I'll go to practice now.

We have a great young coach at New Mexico State.

You know, I do the TV for and it's Jason Hooten and I go to watch his.

You know, he worked for a man who'd worked for, you know, who once been around one of the Ibis.

So he's very Mr.

Iba influenced and that kind of thing.

But I don't always.

I don't always know.

Like, sometimes he'll.

They're doing things at practice and I've been going to practice every week and I'm still not entirely sure what they're doing.

I think the only way to do it is you really have to be.

I had a fiddle teacher in Ireland and he said, and I think this is true, he said, all of the great knowledge in human history has been handed from person to person.

You know, whether.

Whether it's.

Whether it's music or art or literature or coaching, you know, I think there's a reason Bob Knight had a lot of guys from his coaching tree.

And I think the other thing, Mike, I wonder about this for you is I was lucky enough to be around winning coaches and, you know, even though I never got in the games at north park, we won the national title.

I had an expectation that we were going to win.

And I know after two years at Kent State, well, you guys were on the verge of being, you know, going into the NCAA tournament and winning a few games, but then it didn't happen.

And they.

But did.

Did that.

I mean, that must have been hard.

Was that hard to swallow your junior and senior year?

So that's tough.

I mean, I think when I look back at our experience at Kent.

So the group that I came in with as freshman Russ, we had seven.

We had seven freshmen.

And I was definitely guy seven in that recruiting class because I only got an offer, which was my only Division 1 offer after somebody else transferred.

And so I was a very, very late signee.

I was a kid who was determined.

I was a kid who was determined to be able to go and play Division 1.

Like, you hear a lot of advice.

And Mike, sorry, no, go ahead.

Where would you have gone if you didn't go to Kent State?

I mean, that's a very good question.

I mean, the honest truth is that I was so focused on.

So there was just, there were guys that I played with again and with and against all summer long that got scholarships and had signed early and all these different things.

And I really felt like I was as good as they were.

And so my, my really, my only focus was how am I going to get a Division 1 scholarship.

And at the time when I signed with Kent and that was again, like I said, my only, my only offer, I still was talking to St.

Francis of Pennsylvania.

My dad was a professor at Cleveland State, so I could have gone to Cleveland State and Ben, I would have been able to go to school for free because of my dad.

And I could have been a met a walk on there.

And Coach Mackey at the time said, well, if you come and it works out, then, you know, we'll, we'll put you on scholarship your second year.

But by no means was any of that guaranteed.

I mean, I very easily could have been that I wouldn't have had a scholarship.

And to be honest with you, you know, you always hear about don't be a Division one or bust person.

And, and back in the day, that's kind of, that's kind of what I was as I think back to what I might have done and who was recruiting me.

I think that I was being recruited pretty heavily by at Wooster.

Steve Moore, who was, you know, he was, ended up, I think as the winningest, maybe the second winningest coach ever in Division 3.

And he was there a long time.

So that was at the very beginning of his tenure at Wooster.

And I remember I really liked Coach Moore and he came to a ton of our games.

And so I think I would have had a lot of different places.

Case was really recruiting the Case Western Coach Sudak at the time.

And so, you know, it just, I, I ended up again getting very, very lucky to be able to have an opportunity to go to Kent.

So my first two years we were very, we were very good.

My sophomore year, I think, as I told you in our pre pod call, was probably our best team.

We went 21 7.

We split with Ball State, who ended up going to the Elite Eight and losing to the Larry Johnson Stacy Augment UNLV team.

And you know, we went to the NIT that year and then my next two years as a junior and a senior.

To your point, I think when you're winning and again as a high school player and as a player in the summertime and all the things, I mean, you know, again, if you're a good player at that level, you tend to win a lot.

And so it was tough.

We started out my junior year, Russ, we were seven and four and we were playing three guards.

So I was basically our small forward at six three, 175 pounds and battling guys who are much, much bigger, taller, stronger, faster than me.

But it got our best players on the floor and we were playing which nowadays would look like a ridiculously slow pace and not shooting any threes, but for us at the time, we were pushing the ball up the floor and shooting far more threes than I think Coach McDonald was comfortable with.

And so we went into the.

We got through the non conference part of our schedule.

Like I said, we were 7 and 4.

And he decided to go back to the way we had played previously.

And it put one of our bigger players back on the floor, took one of our guards off the floor and we just never really recovered from that.

And it kind of just went downhill from there.

We won two games the rest of that year.

We only won two games in the league when I was a junior and then as a senior, my backcourt mate who I had played against in high school, and then he and I had been together as sophomore and junior, he ended up getting a blood clot in his leg and missed 18 games.

And we just kind of never got.

We just kind of never got it on track.

And you know, I look back on it and we had in our class of those seven guys, the three of us that made it all four years, all of us scored over a thousand points.

And you know, it felt like we had.

It felt like we had enough talent that if we had figured it out or maybe another piece, one more thing together, that it didn't feel like we were that far away.

But it was definitely, it was definitely an adjustment.

I mean, it was tough.

When you go from.

You win in high school, you win your first two years in college.

And again as a freshman, I Didn't play a whole lot, but you still were winning.

And then to go through and, and experience what losing was like for everybody.

I mean it's stressful for coaching staffs.

It was hard on players.

And again, you just, you look back on it, you.

I guess I always look at the sort of, the what ifs of what could we have done, what could I have done to, to make that more of a winning environment.

And you know, again, you can't, you can't go back and change it obviously.

But man, there's times where I still again to this day as a 55 year old man, thinking back, you know, whatever, 35 odd years ago, what, what could I, what could I have done differently?

Yeah, well, and I do think, you know, we talked about early in the, in the program, we talked about, you know, the thing that that coach said to me.

The one thing he said stuck with me and it was a positive thing.

I could do that.

But I do think that, you know, I was interested in what you said that these other guys in Cleveland, they were getting scholarships and I, and I didn't get a scholarship.

And I do think there is something to that is, you know, like having a bit of a chip on your shoulder and having, you know, the best player I ever recruited was mostly luck.

But Tim Hardaway was completely overlooked in high school.

These other guys were all getting much more publicity than he was, but he was, you know, to my eye, was, was better.

And he's never gotten over, he has never gotten over that feeling of I'm, you know, you know, you don't think I can play.

I'll prove to you I can play.

And I do think there's something about that.

But, but, but all, but also just that idea that, you know, I am, I do find that interesting, your career where you guys were winning and you're on the verge of being, going deep into the NCAA tournament and then think, you know, you've been on.

I, I do think it's helpful to be on both sides of things and, and do, you know, to, to experience.

It when you see that?

Yeah, you do see that as a coach.

And so I'll tell you my thing that stick, that sticks with me.

So you talked about, you know, the things that stuck with you and the, the, the impact that they had.

So when I was being recruited, one of the places that I went to visit was an NAI school in Atlanta, Oglethorpe University.

And when I was at Oglethorpe on my visit, I remember I was sitting in the coach's office and it was an assistant coach.

And I honestly, I don't remember his name, but I still can picture it.

I can still picture sitting in the office when he told me this and he said, you know, because I told him, I'm still, I'm still waiting on Kent.

They're still in on me.

I think I, I think I may, you know, I think I may end up getting an offer.

And I remember he looked at me and he said, mike, he goes, you don't want to go to Kent.

He goes, there's no way you're ever going to make it there.

They're going to bring you in this year as the seventh guy in a seven player class.

They're going to recruit over you the next year.

He's like, if you came here to Oglethorpe, you come here and you could score a thousand points.

And so at Kent, I ended up with a thousand six points.

So my very last game as a senior was in the Mac tournament.

And obviously at that time I didn't know whether it was our last game, but our team obviously didn't have the kind of year that we would have liked to had.

So there was a decent chance that was going to be our last game.

So I went into the game, I got to think, I got to think about this and do the math.

So I went into that game with 991 points.

And so I needed nine points to get myself to, you know, I needed nine points to get myself to know I needed a lesser.

I need 11.

So I had 989.

I need 11 to get to, to get to a thousand.

I ended up getting 17 in that game and finished with 1,006.

And so when I think about, you know, not very many individual things necessarily mean a lot to me, but the fact that I can always look at that list and see that I scored a thousand points.

That coach at Oglethorpe, I'm sure, has no recollection of ever saying that to me, but that, that drove me, at least from an individual standpoint, to try to prove that guy wrong.

And I'm sure he could care less at this point.

Yeah, that's right.

Well, Mike, we combined for 10, 13 points because I had my 13.

There you go.

You and me.

You and me.

I like it.

Yeah.

I do think there is something about you I am not.

I do think there's something about the stick to itiveness.

It's helped me as a writer quite a bit.

Is it?

Yeah.

You know, as a writer, one rejection after another, you know, rejection Rejection, rejection.

This editor and that publisher.

You know, if there's anything that would prepare you for writing life, it's getting cut from the team in high school, getting cut from the team in college, you know, losing, you know, that kind of, that kind of thing.

It can, it can really, it can really prepare you for, you know, if it doesn't beat you down, you know, And I was just, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

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Tell me about the transition to writing.

How do you gut decide that?

Hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna get out of the coaching profession.

I want to get into writing.

Had you always been writing while you were coaching?

Are you a guy who likes to journal?

Just what's the background that kind of leads you in that direction?

Or was it just the fact that you had an interesting story to tell?

I, I, I, I, I, I go back to that year as a security guard When I read 50 books, and I was, I was, you know, one at UTEP and at New Mexico State, we would fly Southwest Airlines, and I would always deliberately be the last one on the plane.

If you've ever flown Southwest, you know, there's no reserve seats, so I'd see everybody.

Sorry, I got to sit in this middle seat here, guys.

I'll see.

And I could read my book that way.

And for, I think, like, a lot of, A lot of coaches are guys who love to play and couldn't imagine living without it.

They kind of spill over from players into coaches.

And I think for me, I spilled over.

I like books, and I was interested in books.

I didn't know this at the time, Mike, but looking back, you know that I was always more interested in the stories.

Like, I was reading sports books as a kid.

I was very, very, you know, very enamored with these kinds of stories.

You're not old enough to remember Dan Gable, but he was the Olympic wrestler that was from Iowa.

Yeah, sorry, he's from Iowa, right?

Yes, that's it.

And became the coach, I think maybe at Iowa State, and I don't know anything about wrestling, but I remember watching the Olympics that he was on and hearing the story of his crazed practices, and he would practice in pushups all the time and this and that.

I just thought.

And that really hit home with me.

And, you know, sports books, you start thinking, if you read enough sports books, well, I can do what Michael Jordan did or whatever.

Of course you can't.

But.

But.

But I'd read a lot of sports books as a kid, and I was just a reader that spilled over.

And I think I was always more interested in the stories.

Like, I couldn't.

Lou Hanson was an X and O genius.

He was maybe the greatest X and O coach who ever lived.

He would rather draw plays on a napkin than do anything.

If I said.

If you said, lou, there's a bunch of gold here on the ground.

Look.

He'd rather be, you know, drawing plays on a napkin than pick up the goal.

But I don't remember any of those plays.

I couldn't drop.

I don't think I could drop any of Lou's plays.

But I got a lot of good Lou Henson stories, and I think I was always more interested in the stories.

I got very enamored, you know, because of the black culture thing.

I was enamored with playground basketball and reading about New York playground basketball and that kind of thing.

I read Foul, the Connie Hawkins story.

You know, he was wound up in the NBA after being shunned for getting caught in a gambling scandal.

And just reading books like that really affected me, and I just became very interested in the stories behind it.

And I think, you know, I tell my.

I told my students for years at New Mexico State, where I became a writing professor, is that we're made of stories.

You know, if I ask you, Mike, tell me about yourself, Mike, you don't say, well, I'm type A, blood type.

I'm 6 foot 3, you know, but, you know, I'm 86% water.

You know, we.

You have to tell you.

We want to tell your story.

You know, my grandfather came over from.

Your grandfather came over from Germany or how.

You know, whatever it is, I think we're wired for stories, and we're wired.

And I think that's one of the big attractions of sports is that every game is a story.

You know, like, what's going to happen now?

Oh, there's these twists and turns.

Just like a good novel.

A good.

A great game can have the twists and turns like a novel.

And, you know, Nearly all the books you read that are sport related.

It's either about a game, like, you know, when Muhammad Ali fought in the Thrill in Manila or whatever, or the Rumble in the Jungle.

It's either about a single game or a season or a career.

And they all make.

They all make for stories.

And so I got very interested in the story side of things.

And when I came to New Mexico State, my first day on campus, a guy came up to me and said, are you the new basketball coach?

It happened to be.

My picture wasn't in the paper very much, but it was that day.

And his name was Robert Boswell and he was a well known novelist and short story writer.

And we struck up a friendship.

And so I started.

I would go over to his house after the games and he would want to talk about the game.

Like Point Nevada's center was really.

And I would want to talk about books.

And so he was giving me books and I would sort of fill him in on basketball.

We would always wrestle for the control of the conversation.

But I started sitting in on his classes and I realized, you know, I started thinking about what had happened to me.

I was in division one at age 23, you know, working for Don Haskins at all.

I was on a fast track very quickly.

You know, I think I.

Maybe I mentioned before we got on the air, or maybe I've already, so forgive me if I sounds like I'm bragging, but I was in seven, eight NCAA tournaments by the time I was 31 years old in Division 1.

It was all happening too fast and not, you know, as a writer, I've been able to sort of think about, you know, all of my books are about sort of the intersection of sports, basketball particularly, and culture and the way, you know, basketball can often be.

You know, I don't think.

I'm not so sure that sports builds character, but I think it reveals character.

You know, I think you learn a lot about what, you know, what LeBron is really like or what Steph Curry is really like from watching these guys play.

And so, and I, you know, when I was looking at these older coaches, Lou Henson was really the only older coach I ever met who was happy.

He was the only one.

Everybody else was bitter and I got screwed.

Don Haskins, not so much.

He was natural.

He was naturally, you know, in a bad mood.

I just thought there were a lot of unhappy coaches out there.

And I thought this, if I remember.

And I went in and asked the athletic director, when Lou Henson retires, can I get this job?

And he says, well, I can guarantee you'd get an interview.

Well, I started thinking, and I thought at the time, I thought, I'll go back to school and I'll get my master's and then I'll be a Division 3 coach.

Because that was, to me, there's a real beauty when Ohio Wesleyan plays Wooster or when Cedarville plays, you know, plays Wilmington or whatever.

I think there's a real purity to.

In a way that there is still in women's sports.

I think that we've lost in college basketball.

And so I wanted.

I thought, I'll get a master's degree and then I'll, you know, and then I'll become a small college coach.

But I had a chance to go to Ireland, and so then everything got screwed up.

And that became my first book is.

It's a memoir about coaching my team in Ireland.

It's called Patty on the Hardwood.

I coached my team in Ireland into last place while I was trying to learn the Irish fiddle.

And so most of the book is about.

There's.

I don't want to spoil it for your listeners.

It does cover two seasons, but it's mostly about the first season.

I think the, you know, the losing seasons are.

They say that history is written by the winners, Mike, but literature is written by the loser.

And I think that, you know, the losing season is much.

Everybody wins well, and it's exciting and you hug and you cut down the nets.

But I think in that losing season, I learned so much about myself and trying to learn the Irish tradition of fiddling.

While I was teaching the American tradition of the basketball, I'd learned from Don Haskins and Lou Henson.

That's sort of the interplay.

And so I just got interested in the stories.

And then one day I do a basketball camp in El Paso called Basketball in the Barrio.

I've been doing it for as long as you've been doing your camps, 33 years.

And one day, Nolan Richardson walked in.

He had just been fired.

And I started doing a little research on it.

And everyone said, well, Nolan deserved to get fired.

He deserved to get fired.

And I thought, there's gotta be more to this story.

And so pretty soon I was off and running.

And we know it.

We know in basketball, Mike, that just because you're a good player doesn't mean you're going to be a good coach.

But in academia, they haven't figured that out yet.

In academia, in Ohio State or any of these schools, if you have a book, you're somebody.

If you've Written a book, you're somebody.

And if you've written no book, you're nobody.

And so I immediately things started happening quickly for me, promotion wise.

I got promoted and raises and became a full professor.

Although I was a phys ed major at north park with a 2.3 average grade point average, I was getting promoted by, you know, through these publications and by publishing, by publishing books.

So.

And I have a new book that comes out in a week or so.

It's about, it's a satire about the over emphasis of sports on our campus, on the big school campuses.

It's called big time and it happens at a school that I made up called Coors State University.

The beer company came in and bought out the school and all the money goes to football and basketball.

But they started having campus protests and it's a satire.

But I think there's, I do think that, you know, through books, you know, through stories and books were able to see the world and change the world.

I don't think it's any coincidence.

It's two of the greatest coaches, Phil Jackson and Steve Kerr and Popovich I guess does as well at the pro level.

These guys are giving the players books to read.

And I do think there's a certain power to books and I hope that we don't get too far away from that with YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and all the stuff you young guys do.

Well, yeah, I do a little bit of that, but man, there's nothing better than books.

All right, I got a book to ask you about and then I want to talk to you about your writing process.

So have you seen or have you read.

This is a book that goes back a long time and when you started talking about again the interaction of basketball and culture.

Have you seen read the in your face basketball book?

That was a huge.

That was it.

Was it Alex Wolf's book?

Alex Wolf?

Yes, absolutely.

And that was a huge influence on me.

It was, it almost looked like it was self published.

It was sort of a.

But it, but it was, you know, it had all the slang and all the, you know, playgrounds.

But what my writing career, one of the.

He was a big influence on my writing career.

I read his, I read that book, but I read the one called Big game Small world where he goes around the world.

Each chapter is a different country, but.

One of the chapters, I've read that.

One of the chapters was Don Haskins in El Paso and I got mentioned in that book, not by name, but I, you know, I'd lost My job at utep.

It's a long and sad story, but I wrote.

When I was trying to write the Irish basketball book, Patty on the hardwood, I wrote to Alex Wolf and he was so nice to me.

I didn't realize at the time, like, he's a real icon in basketball writers.

It'd be like, you know, writing to Bob Knight and Bob Knight calling you and you know.

And so Alex got very involved in the early part of my career and was very encouraging to me because I think he saw the.

In.

In fact, he had me apply for the Vermont Frost heaves job at the.

The old ABA when he took over that team.

I didn't get the job, but I was flattered that he asked me to apply.

But yeah, that.

That book had.

Alex Wolf had a huge influence on me.

And I still say that Big game Small world is one of the great basketball books ever written and still do.

My shoelaces, based on the in your face basketball book.

They had different ways you can lace up your shoes.

Well, just.

Just don't do the one I remember they had.

They had.

They had like sort of do's and don'ts.

Like don't go to the.

Don't go to the playground with these black socks.

Yeah, exactly.

That kind of thing.

Yeah, he's a wonderful person.

He has, he has the.

He has the.

The Obama basketball book called the Audacity of hoop.

But I think he's a really.

Not only is he a brilliant person, he's a really nice and decent.

Yeah, I think you learn a lot about people by, you know, he never talked down to me.

He's a much better writer than I'll ever be.

And he's never done anything but encourage me.

In fact, he interviewed me before the.

The hoops IQ site that just came out a few days ago.

So.

Yeah, I'm a big.

I'm a big Alexander Wolf fan.

It's funny, I don't have that book anymore.

I loaned it out, the one you mentioned, the in your face basketball book.

But, but, you know, I think, you know, keep.

And I would say this to your listeners too, especially the young ones, is you don't have to play in the NBA or be a famous coach to be involved in the game.

You know, there, there's.

There's a lot of ways to stay involved in the game and not like tomorrow night I'll do the television for the New Mexico State home game.

The color analyst, meaning.

I don't say that much.

I just say, boy, he should point.

But.

But there's ways to stay involved in the game.

And you don't have to be Michael Jordan or Steve Kerr to, you know, just to stay involved in the game.

That's true.

You can write or you can have a silly podcast like this.

Right.

There's lots of different ways you'll be an agent or a trainer or, you know, or, you know, there's a lot of different ways.

Even scorekeeper or that.

There's a lot of ways to be around the game.

And for me, I could not envision.

I.

I don't know if you were the same way, Mike.

I could not envision a regular job.

I thought with coaching basketball as a way to stay.

It was never felt like a job to me.

I never once thought, oh, this crap again.

It was.

Now there's a lot of hours and it was exhausting.

But I never want it.

Never once felt like work to me.

Yeah, I mean, basketball, anything that I've ever done with the game, I always say that one.

It's.

It's what so much of, you know, you mentioned earlier just how many people that you know through the game.

And I would say that when I look at what the game of basketball has given me in my life, there's no possible way I could ever repay the game for what it's given me.

And.