The Commercial Appeal

Tang has Kansas St. feeling sweet again

- Dave Skretta

MANHATTAN, Kan. – Jerome Tang was tearing around his property on an unseasonab­ly warm spring day not long ago, just before Kansas State headed down Interstate 70 for the Big 12 Tournament, when he noticed his fourwheele­r was running out of fuel.

So, the Wildcats’ coach did what anyone would do in a small town: He steered that bad boy onto the road, convenient­ly forgetting that it wasn’t exactly street legal, and headed off for the service station.

“So I’m zooming down and the college kids are outside. They’re hollering at you, happy to see you. I mean, how great is that?” Tang recalled. “My wife was upset. She’s like, ‘You’re going to get arrested. It’s going to be on the news!’”

Tang glances around furtively, his ever-present smile growing just a bit wider.

“I can’t, like, get in trouble for something that already happened, right?”

Not these days. Not in Manhattan, Kansas.

One year after taking over a downtrodde­n program coming off three straight losing seasons, Tang and his upstart Wildcats are preparing to play Michigan State in the Sweet 16 on Thursday night.

They’ve already taken down mighty Kentucky and its roster of NBA prospects, and now they will face Tom Izzo and the Spartans – a program synonymous with NCAA Tournament success – under the bright lights of Madison Square Garden.

The fan apathy that reached a nadir last spring?

Forgotten after eight straight sellouts to end the regular season. Chants of “Eff K-U” during home games, the epitome of a long-standing inferiorit­y complex toward their bitter rival, replaced by pride-filled shouts of “K-S-U,” much to the relief of a coach who demands 10 pushups every time his players swear.

This is a coach who can be found posted up on a purple sofa delivered to random spots around campus, from dining halls to the engineerin­g building, so that he can chat with students going about their everyday lives.

“I mean, I’m just happy to see Coach Tang and our team having so much success,”

says Markquis Nowell, their Allamerica­n guard. “He’s the reason we play with so much love and joy. And you know, we still have a lot to prove.”

Tang kept using the term “elevate” when he was hired to replace Bruce Weber a year ago. But not even the longtime Baylor assistant could imagine how quickly, and how high, he would have the Wildcats soaring.

“We surpassed the epectation­s I had,” Tang said in a wide-ranging interview with The Associated Press. “But like, you don’t enjoy this, you shouldn’t be doing it, right? Our guys, our young people, our community deserves to have someone that really appreciate­s them and desires to be around them. They deserve this.”

The first thing to understand about Tang’s winding road to the heartland of America is fortunate to be here. Not here, as in Kansas State. Here, as in alive.

Born in San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago, Tang moved to St. Croix with his mother and three siblings while his father chased work in the oil industry. He was about 5 years old and playing marbles beneath a car in his aunt’s driveway when his cousin, not knowing he was there, got behind the wheel and drove away.

“Drove right over him,” remembers Tang’s older sister, Kim. “He’s lucky. He was in the hospital for weeks.”

Perhaps that brush with death somehow infused in Tang his profoundly deep faith – “I believe my gift is ministry,” he explains, “and my passion just happens to be basketball.” Or perhaps it somehow led to a preternatu­rally optimistic outlook on life, which has served him well as he tries to resurrect Kansas State’s basketball program.

“He treats people the right way,” says Baylor coach Scott Drew, his longtime friend. “He just always sees the good in people.”

Tang grew up playing cricket and soccer, and when his family moved to the Houston area, it became baseball and football – this was Texas, after all. But in 1979, while watching Magic Johnson and Michigan State beat Larry Bird and Indiana State in the title game that truly gave birth to March Madness, Tang fell in love with basketball.

Except, well, he wasn’t very good. It was a bible scholarshi­p that got him to North Central College. He later attended junior college before dropping out, partly because of money, partly due to immaturity. (He would earn his degree from Charter Oak State College years later.)

Tang returned to Texas, intent on becoming a youth pastor. But when the founder of Heritage Christian Academy, Dr. Jennifer Cooper, was searching for a basketball coach, she turned to Mike Allard, Tang’s own youth pastor at Green’s Bayou Assembly of God.

He recommende­d this energetic kid with a devout faith in both Jesus and basketball.

“We drove around in, like, a Cheechand-chong van to get places,” Tang says. “It was the best place in the world.”

Tang soon built the small school into a national power, pumping out prospects such as Von Wafer, who played at Florida State and in the NBA. And he was still there in 2002 when Drew was hired to clean up an inconceiva­ble mess at Baylor.

Drew needed someone with an unflinchin­gly positive attitude who could recruit in Texas, and over dinner one night, Tang won him over, earning a job that Drew had very nearly given to someone else.

 ?? JOHN BAZEMORE/AP ?? Kansas State coach Jerome Tang celebrates with members of the pep band after Kansas State defeated Kentucky.
JOHN BAZEMORE/AP Kansas State coach Jerome Tang celebrates with members of the pep band after Kansas State defeated Kentucky.

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United States