John Chaney will be defined by days like this. He already has. Three times Chaney has coached Temple within one game of the Final Four and three times he has lost. The fourth opportunity comes Sunday against Duke, the best team on campus, the best team in most foreign countries and a not unnoticeable portion of the NBA.
Of course this would happen to Chaney. He’s not going to get a break. He depends on not getting a break. He is never going to get to play Cinderella and he’ll never be Cinderella. Chaney has what is known as buzzard’s luck. Can’t kill anything, can’t find anything dead.
Take that Elite Eight loss to North Carolina in ’91. Dumb, cruel luck, nothing more, nothing less.
“I’m beaten by a guy who couldn’t make a basket if you set him in the basket and dropped his rump through the basket,” Chaney said, as if it had happened just yesterday. “King Rice was his name. He hadn’t made a shot all year. He kicked one off the backboard, off the top of the backboard. It was a terrible shot. He was a terrible guard. But they called him King.”
Temple lost to Michigan in ’93, to Duke in ’88. If Chaney got any closer to the Final Four, he could sell souvenirs. This is the 15th time in the last 16 years Temple has been in the NCAA tournament.
“Everyone loves to get to the top of the hill,” Chaney, now 67 years old, said. “If I never get there, I’ll know I had some smidgen of success.”
Smidgen, pigeon. Chaney is, in the cruel consideration of these things, a failure, a look he wears without effort, his eyes the envy of any pallbearer, his voice perpetually weary. Had Chaney been to the Final Four even once, this is not likely to have changed, for he seems to take to grief like hair spray to an evangelist.
“When Duke replaces one of their starters,” Chaney said, “they are replacing apples with apples. When I go to my bench, I am replacing apples with lemons.”
This is said with the apples within earshot. Some of the lemons too. Chaney is from the “my way or the highway” school of coaching, not a school so much as a foundry.
“The greatest challenge to coaching,” Chaney said, “is getting players to listen. They all think they know more than you. They flex their muscles but they don’t lift up their arms and smell what’s underneath.”
When Chaney was a high school player in Philadelphia, he was the best player in the city, though there were those who have picked Tom Gola. In fact, LaSalle did pick Gola, who went on to become an All-American. Chaney, who wanted to play for Temple, went to obscure, all-black Bethune-Cookman in Daytona Beach, Fla. Outside looking in again.
“In my era,” Chaney said, “blacks were not encouraged to go to college. You graduated from high school, you got a job. Nine to five. I had a guidance counselor who told me I shouldn’t go to college. He put me in wood shop. I made cookie cutters and wooden stools and I never got the legs right. I kept cutting them off until I had a table top.”
Chaney played lesser pro ball for 11 years in the Eastern League, was twice MVP of the league and a seven-time all-star.
“I was the `Moon Man,’ ” Chaney said. “Here comes the `Moon Man,’ the headlines would say. `Moon Man’ mauls city. Oh, I could play. I was a pretty good player. I could handle the ball and I could score. I was selfish. If I played for me, I would have driven myself crazy.”
But Chaney never made the NBA, never got one of the real top jobs when he became a coach, and after he made Temple into one of the good, consistent programs in America, never tried to leverage his success into anything more. He says he’ll stay at Temple until he dies.
“Or until they stop listening to me,” Chaney said. “My mother told me old people don’t die until other people stop listening. Maybe they don’t listen to me now. Nah, if they didn’t listen, I’d kill ’em. Look over at me on the bench sometime when they don’t do what I say. You see me with two Tylenol and a baseball bat.”
A simple job, coaching, Chaney says. Build some character, win some games. Share a laugh, share a tear. And every once in a while get the chance to take the last step to certification as one of the great coaches in college basketball.
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After winning 607 games over 27 years of coaching, what would it mean to Chaney if Temple were to beat Duke and he would finally get to the Final Four?
“All the peanut butter I can eat for the rest of my life and the bicycle I never had,” Chaney said.
Modest dreams, it seems to me. I hope he gets them.