Hardly inspiring, but coach has winning history

THIS was a lifetime ago, at the Paradise Valley Golf Course in Fayetteville, Ark. I was sitting in a golf cart with Nolan Richardson, and he was in a chatty mood. This was when Richardson was in his “40 minutes of hell” prime at Arkansas.

“You see that man?” Richardson asked, and he nodded at a man spraying iron shots all over t he driving range. “Let me tell you who he reminds me of. He reminds me of Coach Haskins.”

In Nolan Richardson’s personal code, there was no higher compliment. Don Haskins had been his coach at Texas Western. Richardson graduated the year before the “Glory Road” Miners would win the most important college basketball game ever played, their all-black team beating Adolph Rupp’s all-white Kentucky team for the 1966 NCAA Tournament.

But Haskins had been the f irst white man who had ever treated

Richardson as an equal, and then as an adopted son. Everything Richardson had accomplished as a coach he credited to Haskins. He puffed on a long cigar and pointed at the hacking golfer again.

“When that man gets his chance,” Richardson said, “he’s going to have the same impact on this game as Coach Haskins did.”

He was pointing at Mike Anderson, who had helped Richardson win an NIT title at Tulsa as a player and had been with him ever since as an assistant coach and a surrogate son. It was Anderson who, in Richardson’s first, awful year at Arkansas, had driven Nolan’s beloved daughter, Yvonne, back and forth to Tulsa for treatments for the leukemia that ultimately killed her.

It i s Anderson who St. John’s turns to now to rescue the school from a b umbling, a mateurish coaching search. It may not be the most inspiring hire, and it is anything but a slam-dunk hire.

But Anderson comes with pedigree, and he comes with a résumé. He had an inconsistent run these past eight years at Arkansas, where he was the latest man unable to match the 28-season run of Eddie Sutton and Richardson from 1974-2002. But before that he’d built Missouri into a power on his own, winning 31 games in 2009 and finishing one win shy of the Final Four. He won big at UAB before that. He has won big. Can he win here? The better question, of course, is this: Can anyone win here? The Johnnies have won only in spasms in the 27 years since Lou Carnesecca retired in 1992. They exposed themselves as a dysfunctional basketball mess of the highest order these past few weeks, too many people with opinions and not enough leadership entrusted to the man who should have run this operation solo, AD Mike Cragg.

Anderson has no direct local ties, but he can survive that. He can hire well. And he has spent the entirety of his career recruiting the very best players in the country. That guarantees nothing of course It was a consensus belief that Anderson and Arkansas would be a perfect marriage, and it ended up with Anderson getting fired there last month.

At his introductory press conference in Fayetteville, Anderson was the favorite son returning to the throne and the whole time he was serenaded by the local hymn: “Woooooo! Pig! Sooie!”

Here, if anyone says anything likely to be: “Who? Phooey!”hooey!” “People underestimate him,” Richardson said that stifling summer day in 1992. “But that’s OK. You underestimate good people at your own risk.”

Twenty-seven years later, there will be no shortage of underestimation shrouding this hire, as much because of the men doing the hiring as the man they hired. Mike Anderson ought to feel right at home with that.