Legend: Chaney, 89, left his mark from Chesco to Philly and beyond

As he does every morning, the first thing Darrin Pearsall did Friday was check his phone. As the one-time Chester star and former Temple player went through his messages, a photo of Pearsall, John Chaney, Mike Vreeswyk and Tim Perry popped up from Chaney’s induction into the Big 5 Hall of Fame.

Pearsall immediately posted the photo to a group chat with many former Temple players.

“I just felt like I needed to post it,” Pearsall said.

One of the first things former Penn Wood great LaMont Ferrell did when he got up Friday was put on a Temple hoodie.

“I probably have like a hundred hoodies,” Ferrell said from his home in Conyers, Ga. “I just went through them and thought, ‘Today just feels like a Temple day.’”

Little did they know how fitting those gestures were. A few hours later, Pearsall and Ferrell learned that Chaney, their coach and mentor, had passed away that morning. He was 89.

“He meant the world to me,” said Ferrell, who was just hired to teach screenwriting at the University of Southern California. “John Chaney was like a father figure, not just to me, but to all the guys. I got recruited by Temple in high school, but went to Mount St. Mary’s and then transferred back. At that time, Coach had never had a transfer student on scholarship and people were telling me not to transfer to Temple. But I’ll never forget the day I went to Temple, enrolled and went to his office. I told him, ‘Coach, I would love to play for you’ and he said, ‘I would love to have you.’ He put me on scholarship and the rest is history.

“He was a guy who truly cared about you as a person more than basketball. As successful he was on the court he was more successful off the court teaching us the game of life … Those lessons I carry with me to this day.”

Chaney died after a brief illness, according to Temple. He won 741 games in his career, 516 in 24 seasons at Temple and 225 in 10 years at Cheyney University. He guided Cheyney to the NCAA Division II title in 1978 and led the Owls to the NCAA tournament 17 times including five trips to the Elite Eight. He was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2001 and also is enshrined in the Big 5 and Philadelphia Sports Halls of Fame.

Chaney’s teams were known for their discipline. His teams practiced at 5 a.m., rarely turned the ball over and employed a rugged matchup zone defense that gave opponents fits. He could be an imposing figure on the sideline, yelling at his players and staring down officials.

Chaney was a fiery competitive, and that sometimes got him in trouble. In 1984, he got into a scuffle with George Washington coach Gerry Gimelstob. Ten years later Chaney threatened to kill Massachusetts coach John Calipari during a post-game news conference. The two nearly came to blows. In 2005, in a physical game against Saint Joseph’s, Chaney sent Nehemiah Ingram into the game with instructions to foul. Hawks forward John Bryant left the game with a broken arm and missed the rest of the season.

Yet there was a softer side to the rough exterior. Chaney loved to tell stories and had a tale for seemingly every situation. The stories, though, were not always well received at first.

“When you are a teenager/young adult and somebody is stern and strict and is putting down their foot and says, ‘Here’s the rules,’ no teenager wants to hear that,” Pearsall said. “But it’s something you grow to learn and get used to obviously as a team we grew to understand that because of our success we all learned to cope and deal and work together. That’s what he was about, teaching us how to work together.”

Chaney remained that way up to the end. Pearsall set up a Zoom call with Chaney and several members from the 1987-88 team on Tuesday night. That group was ranked No. 1 and was the first in program history to reach the Elite Eight. The teammates have remained close ever since. The call lasted about 30 minutes, and it is one Pearsall and Ferrell cherish because Chaney was still teaching them more than three decades after their careers were over.

“He was upbeat,” Pearsall said. “He was spirited. He was all laughs and joking. He had stories. He reminisced about the different guys that were on the line. It was odd, though, and now that I think about it, he was saying his goodbyes because he said, ‘Fellas, I need all of you to take care of one another.’ He said it over and over again. We ended every practice with a ‘team together’ chant and we cherish that. He was telling us that we had to stick together.”