Landmarks are, after all, portable. They moved London Bridge to Arizona, didn’t they? The Berlin Wall was sold by the shard. Mike Ditka is in New Orleans.
So, DePaul will get on without Ray Meyer, like a bird without a song, like a noose without a neck.
Ray Meyer will be missed only as long as it takes to get an NCAA bid.
Sentiment is to college athletics what cellulite is to a supermodel.
It took Meyer only 55 years to get fed up with DePaul, a place that he authenticated, a place that authenticated him, so his leaving certainly was not an impulse.
But enough is not only enough, it is time.
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This is best all around, for the Coach (Meyer was Da Coach long before Ditka), for the school, for the future, for everyone who doesn’t care about loyalty or devotion or the journey together.
That is the how of big-time college athletics, and DePaul has not been in the big time for some time.
Whether it could get back there with one Meyer or with several, that choice made Ray Meyer’s choice, and now it will have to do it with none.
Ray Meyer himself could not have lasted as a head coach of one school for 42 years. He would not have been allowed those long, losing gaps between the good times, the long years between George Mikan and Mark Aguirre.
Meyer was DePaul basketball. He was there before Alumni Hall, itself an outdated antique. He had no full-time assistant until he hired his own son as one.
He had to supplement his income with basketball camps and as a summer coach for a decade of a team that toured with the Harlem Globetrotters.
And yet it was all easier then, before the big shoe money and the TV intrusions and the over-decibeled world that is now college basketball.
That is what Joey Meyer had to manage. And while he was not indulged as was his father, it is his father who is responsible for that. For it was Ray Meyer who gave DePaul ambition. It was Ray Meyer who set the bar. It was Joey who could not raise it.
Joey got a fair shot, did a fair job and it was only the cruel timing at the end that should be disputed. That may be as simple as it is for the Coach. Joey deserved a better end. Ray deserved a better explanation.
How could Meyer stay, or why would DePaul want him to, after his son was dismissed? An old man’s heart can be broken more than once. DePaul broke it the first time, the second is self-inflicted.
Even at 83, a man does not leave the place that was his life without some small torment, leave it with conspicuous bitterness, leave a note of disapproval for others to read.
That is what Ray Meyer is doing, a sadder finish than he could have imagined when he signed that first one-year contract back in 1942, convinced that if things did not work out, he always could go back to his alma mater, Notre Dame, as an assistant coach.
His is a gesture without real teeth, and DePaul will survive this tiny bit of scorn from its most famous figure.
It already has put the Meyers behind it. What fundraising value Ray Meyer has may be missed, but not for long and not if life after the Meyers goes as imagined.
Ray Meyer was beyond help to DePaul as a recruiter, and recruiting is everything in college basketball. Any recruit coming in now was not yet born at the point of Meyer’s greatest success, the Final Four team of 1979.
Recruits are not interested in old men with old stories, and neither, apparently, is DePaul. History is something you have tutors for.
And all Ray Meyer ever gave to DePaul was his best, and his children, of course.