”I want my youngsters to see Chicago; there are a lot of things they can see that are educational in themselves,” Larry Finch says. ”By the same token, I want people to see my youngsters. I`m very proud of them.”
The Memphis State basketball program, which Larry Finch heads, had very little to be proud of back in September of 1986. That was when he was named to succeed the disgraced and deposed Dana Kirk, and when all he surveyed was pockmarked by scandal and tarred with disgrace.
Some of its players shaved points. That was the first charge whispered against the school, and one of the few that would ultimately prove unfounded. But that rumor opened a box, Pandora`s Box as it turned out, and in its wake came an NCAA investigation of the program and a grand jury inquiry into Kirk`s finances. The first ended in a year`s probation for Memphis State, the second ended in a four-month prison term for its former coach, and together they created that problem all universities dread. They created an image problem.
”Clean things up and stay competitive” is what the administration told Finch when he was hired.
”When I got the job,” he now recalls, ”I was told they were not so concerned with wins and losses, but more with getting the image back in tack. To be honest, I know what I was told and I think we`ve done a good job getting our image in order. But I also knew if I didn`t win games, I wouldn`t have a job. I knew I had to soothe both wounds.”
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Larry Finch, Memphis and Memphis State are as inextricably linked as the Meyers, Chicago and De Paul University. He grew up in a section of that city called Orange Mound and was one of a basketball-playing group called the
”Select Street Kids.” Melrose High, a 10-minute drive from the university, was his next stop, and after earning All-America honors there, he signed up at the university itself and became a Tiger.
Through his three varsity seasons, he averaged more than 22 points for them, and in his senior year was their captain and helped lead them to the 1973 NCAA title game against UCLA. They would lose it, lose on a night when the Bruins` Bill Walton hit 21 of his 22 field-goal attempts, but Finch was still an All-America and on his way to being the first pick of the old American Basketball Association`s Memphis Pros.
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His career with them would last but a year, and when they picked up and moved to Baltimore, he decided to stay home and took a job teaching and coaching at a local junior high. Next came a year doing the same in high school, and then, in 1977, he received a call from Gene Bartow. Bartow had coached Finch at Memphis and was about to move to Alabama-Birmingham, and he offered his old player an assistant`s job with the words: ”We`re going to start this new program.”
”I was the first person he hired, and it was an honor that my old coach thought that much of me,” remembers Finch. ”It also gave me the experience to see a program grow from the ground up, and you can`t put a value on that. We had no uniforms, no nickname, no players, no place to practice. I learned everything.”
By 1979, when his alma mater was looking for a new coach, some thought he had learned enough to get that job, but it instead went to Kirk. He, in turn, soon contacted Finch and asked him to return home as an assistant. Yet Finch hesitated, for a reason that gives a measure of this man. He would be replacing, he knew, his old high school coach, and so he refused to accept the job until he got his old coach`s blessing.
Finch was there, then, as the scandals bubbled toward the surface; and after Kirk was fired, he prepared himself and his family to move on as well. School administrators, awash in the vortex of those scandals, groped along while searching for a successor, and when they finally got around to offering the position to Finch, they asked him to take it on an interim basis. ”I didn`t think,” he would say two years later, ”that they wanted me to have the job.”
”I wasn`t apprehensive about my ability to handle it,” he says now.
”But I didn`t want it on an interim basis. That would be a Catch-22 situation. I could do a good job for a year, and still not hold onto it. Plus, I`d grown close to the youngsters I would be working with, so I hoped to be afforded the opportunity (on a full-time basis).”
Finally, on Sept. 25, 1986, he was, and weeks later he was on the cover of Memphis magazine`s November issue. ”Can This Man Save Memphis State Basketball?” asked the headline that accompanied his picture.
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Loyalty, which he possesses in abundance, is one reason Larry Finch took on that task, and that too is the reason he now says little of his predecessor or the headlines he created. ”To be honest, some problems had to be addressed,” he says at one point.
”The only thing that hurt me,” he adds, ”is that we were singled out. It wasn`t just a Memphis State problem, it was a universal problem. Don`t get me wrong. Some people were getting it done. But most everyone had the same types of problems we had.”
”I changed our recruiting tactics,” he finally admits later in the conversation, ”to getting more career-oriented youngsters. They`re probably not as talented as some we`ve had in the past. But I love `em.”
The main problem he inherited-an abysmally low graduation rate-demanded that Finch change his school`s recruiting tactics, and so here he set out in search of athletes who also were truly students. In Monticello, Ind., he found current junior guard John McLaughlin. He posted a 4.0 (out of 4) grade-point average his freshmen year and is still in the high 3s.
But it was in his old hometown that Finch mostly mined, mined kids whose histories were well known to him. Sophomore forward Tim Duncan: Finch went to high school with his dad. And senior guard Cheyenne Gibson: Finch attended church with his folks.
But the biggest jewel he plucked from his city was junior guard Elliott Perry, now an All-America candidate, then a prep All-America being wooed by
(among others) Kentucky and North Carolina. Finch had watched him since he was a mere sprite, and when he signed on at Memphis State, says his coach,
”He helped bring respect back to the program.”
The school itself also helped do that by expanding its academic services to all its athletes. So those Tigers Finch brings to The Horizon for this weekend`s Old Style Classic are not only ranked, but untainted as well.
”Despite all the negative publicity,” he says, ”I still saw a positive situation because the school became more committed to helping the youngsters get their degrees. Now there`s no room for a kid to say he wasn`t put in class. There`s no way for that to happen. The only way for that to happen is if the kid wants it to happen.”
But isn`t it sad, he is then asked, that it took a scandal to make this happen?
”It`s like that in life,” says Larry Finch, who has succeeded not only as a coach, but in life as well. ”We`ve all been to places where there`s a flashing light when you really need a stop sign, but they don`t put in that sign until something happens.
”I`m extremely proud now of the success we`ve had. People pat me on the back. I say I can`t take the credit. It begins with the youngsters. This proves if they want to get it done, they will.”