A small wooden plaque rested against a wall in Bill Foster’s office at Northwestern. It read: “Good things cometh to him who waiteth if he worketh like heck while he waiteth.”
Foster did not live in gothic times, but he uttered it so often while coaching at Duke in the 1970s, it was made into a plaque.
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His words still resonate. Patrick Baldwin, who played for Foster at Northwestern and is now a Wildcats assistant for Chris Collins, used that quote Thursday morning in a text conversation with a player seeking more minutes. And then Thursday night, Baldwin learned that Foster had died in Chicago at 85.
“He was one of the greatest human beings I’ve been around,” Baldwin said Friday.
Indeed, friends will remember Foster not so much for guiding Duke to the 1978 NCAA championship game, for winning 20 games with four schools (Rutgers, Utah, Duke and South Carolina) or for enduring a rough seven-year stretch at Northwestern.
He will be remembered for his kindness.
As CBS/ESPN analyst and Duke alum Jay Bilas tweeted: “A great coach, a great basketball man. A wonderful person.”
Big Ten Network lead studio host Dave Revsine, who covered Foster for Northwestern’s campus station, put it like this: “He was a kind man who treated us with incredible respect.”
I had the good fortunate of covering his 1992-93 team for The Daily Northwestern. It started 0-9 in Big Ten play, but Foster routinely handled the adversity with sarcasm, rather than lashing out.
Asked what he could do to cut down on his team’s turnovers, he responded: “A lot of those mistakes you see on the floor, like when a player kicks the ball, we don’t teach them that.”
He had every right to be frosty to a cynical teenage sports reporter who came up with a lead like: “Attention struggling Big Ten players! Need to break out of a slump? Need to pad your statistics? Come to Evanston — and the Wildcats will take care of the rest.”
But he wasn’t. After tough losses, he would get behind the wheel of his Oldsmobile, pop in a motivational audiotape and drive, sometimes reaching as far as Milwaukee.
“I just try to come up with a reason (for the losing),” he said in February 1993. “Why and how can we change our situation and how can we get the guys ready to play hard again?”
That Wildcats team won three Big Ten games, with Foster joking after one: “This is fun. I don’t know how to act.”
Said Baldwin, then the team’s starting point guard: “His humor loosens us up.”
The current Northwestern team is 13-3 with back-to-back home losses to Maryland and Ohio State.
When patience is needed, Baldwin keeps in mind the motto of his former coach.
“This is the influence he had on me,” Baldwin said.