Some things never change... CCC edition

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Interesting CCC references... finishing first, players coach, out of bounds plays, and a dog!

The ballad of Larry Brown, Pop and the Kansas staff that changed basketball

In his five years in Lawrence, Brown fostered a coaching tree that included Gregg Popovich, John Calipari and Bill Self.

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The ballad of Larry Brown, Pop and the Kansas staff that changed basketball
By Rustin Dodd, CJ Moore, and Alex Schiffer
Jul 10, 2020

When Larry Brown arrived at Kansas in 1983, the blue blood program was coming off a pair of losing seasons and Allen Fieldhouse, the old college hoops cathedral, had empty seats. Within five years, the Jayhawks appeared in two Final Fours, claimed a national title in 1988 and returned to prominence. Yet it wasn’t just the Kansas program that changed; it was the course of basketball history.

In five years, Brown fostered a coaching tree that featured the future architects of an NBA dynasty (Gregg Popovich and R.C. Buford), two future Hall of Fame college coaches (John Calipari and Bill Self), two future NBA general managers (Kevin Pritchard and Milt Newton) and two other future NBA head coaches (Alvin Gentry and Bob Hill).

Add to them the players and staffers who became Division I head coaches: Mark Turgeon, Danny Manning, Tad Boyle, Bill Bayno and John Robic, and the student manager who became an NBA front office member.

It was just five years. The ripples are still being felt. The stories are even better.

It all starts with Larry Brown.

Milt Newton, player: It all stems from one guy. That tree starts from one root.

Jeff Gueldner, player: It sounds weird, but as a player, (I felt) he was a very “God-like” figure.

Bill Bayno, graduate assistant: Mythical.

Scooter Barry, player: All of his coaches were like little disciples. They would all get together and go for a run at lunch. And they would all adapt and adjust to wanting to be like Larry.

Bill Pope, student manager: He was in great shape, and all the guys — that was the deal. You wanted to run with Coach through campus and down Mass Street.

Mark Freidinger, assistant: We would run at noon.

Larry Brown: We didn’t go for a jog, we went for a run. Jogging is when you’re just jogging along. We ran seven-minute miles. We might run five miles or six.

Freidinger: He would get mad if someone would take off and run ahead. He always wanted us to run together. I had to learn how to become a runner.

Pope: It wasn’t really a race, but Coach would always finish first. (Calipari) was the one guy who always wanted to make it a point that he was going to finish first. That’s kind of how he’s always been.

Brown: When you’re running in a pair of shorts and everybody is sweating and working hard, they’ll tell you things that they might not tell you when you’re just sitting there in an office with a bunch of guys. They would share a lot of things that I thought were really important. I loved that.

Gregg Popovich, volunteer assistant: He’s the ultimate teacher. It’s in his blood.

Bayno: He was an encyclopedia of basketball.

Freidinger: He’s one of the greatest teachers of basketball of all time.

Bill Self, graduate assistant: He shares everything.

Popovich: If you can’t learn from him, you probably can’t learn from anybody.

Mark Turgeon, player and graduate assistant: Coach Brown made us feel like we were going to be successful no matter what.

“Larry’s Shadow:” The year Gregg Popovich showed up in Lawrence
Brown: Coach Smith used to invite me to Chapel Hill before the season to talk basketball. I remember going to Chapel Hill (in the fall of 1986) and Pop was there.

Freidinger: He was doing a sabbatical. (Popovich was then the head coach at Division III Pomona-Pitzer.)

Popovich: I didn’t really know him ahead of time. He knew my coach, Hank Egan, who was the head coach at the Air Force Academy, and they would exchange ideas and things, and I would listen to both of them.

Freidinger: Pop had spent two weeks with Coach Smith at North Carolina.

Brown: He didn’t have the kind of access that I thought I could give him. My relationship with Pop was such that I said, “Come with me. Sit on the bench. Be involved. Be like a coach.”

Popovich: When I went to Kansas, I knew immediately he was the exact opposite of Coach Smith. Coach Smith was sports coats and ties, and Coach Brown was the opposite. I think I came in in a tie, and he said, “Take it off and I don’t want to see it again.”

Freidinger: He was going to spend just a couple weeks … but then Larry gave him a pair of shoes and 20 pairs of shirts and pants.

Chris Piper, player: Hell, he ended up staying with us the whole year.

Popovich: I wasn’t planning on it, but that’s what happened.

Bob Davis, radio broadcaster: He was Larry’s shadow that year.

Popovich: It was exactly what I thought it would be in the sense of basketball, like it would be basketball all the way teaching. He threw me on the court the first day and asked me about press offense. I about had a heart attack. I didn’t know any of the players. I don’t know any of the assistants. I just basically met him sorta, and he turned and said, “What do you do for your press offense?” And I just stared at him. He said, “Get out here, show us.” I went through it on the court. So I knew right away it was going to be all basketball and I was going to learn something every day.

Pope: He was staying with a friend in Kansas City, and he drove this old Lincoln Continental, big four-door. (When Popovich was told that Pope had mentioned the old Lincoln, he said, “Billy, what an ass hole.”)

Popovich: It had one of those retractable roofs. I can remember being in the car with Larry and it was wintertime, and it retracted, and all of a sudden all the snow fell in on him. He just looked like, “Geez, you’re a hick from the boondocks somewhere. What’s the deal?”

Pope: He was driving back and forth to Kansas City in the car that he had borrowed. Just him hanging out with our team.

Bayno: We won an intramural championship together. He actually played on our intramural team and we beat the football team by about 30 in the finals.

Popovich: We kicked ass.

Bayno: Pop was good, man. He was older then, so he said, “Young fella, I’m going to get you the ball.” But he was a winner. He passed. He screened. He cut. He was smart. He was in his late 30s, but he was still in great shape.

Popovich: We still talk about it — he and I and Robes. We were really proud of it.

Bayno: We were all young. I was 23. There were beautiful girls on campus … So we would all go out and party, and we would talk about marriage, and I remember Pop giving me this long lecture on marriage. He said, “Bayno, I’m going to give you some advice. Before you get married, I don’t care how much in love you are with the girl, you’ve got to interview five married couples. Interview a newlywed couple. Interview a couple that’s been married for two to three years; for seven to 10 years; for 15 or 20 years and for 25 or more years.” And it just made a ton of sense to me — because people rush into things — to get the perspective of all the different phases of the relationship and the marriage and what it entails, and to this day, it’s probably why I’m single.

Barry: I remember having good talks with Pop and wanting to know his history. He had a scar where his eyelash was missing. I wanted to know the real story. Was it in the game? Was it this big thing? He had a bunch of different stories for it.

Alvin Gentry, assistant: The guy had a degree in Russian studies, so that in itself makes him a really unique guy. I think he was training to be a CIA agent or on that route.

Barry: And then at the end, he told us all: In the graduation ceremony, when they all threw their hats up, somebody’s hat came down and cut him.

R.C. Buford, assistant: It didn’t take you long once you got to know Pop, both as a person and a coach, to recognize how special he was.

Danny Manning, player: He seemed to be very observant.

Brown: He was an unbelievable human being. The more time I spent with him, the more comfortable I became.

Bayno: Coach was so impressed with him, he wouldn’t let him leave. So there were no more trips. Popovich stayed there and lived there, and that was Coach Brown. He saw something special in Pop, and said, “I don’t want you to leave. Stay. Be a part of the staff.” So he stayed. And we all benefited from that too.

“A place called the Wheel:” Guest bartending and staff meetings over drinks
Pope: (Coach Brown) didn’t know his own address for a long time. He lived in a cul-de-sac in Alvamar (Country Club), where at that time there were only three houses. You got to the end, took a right to his house.

Bayno: He was the king in Lawrence.

Brown: I loved Lawrence.

Bayno: When he showed up, the whole town wanted to be there.

Pope: He would do guest bartending at the bars that Doug (Compton) owned, and it’d always be a big draw.

Bayno: It was mobs.

Freidinger: It was like 10-cent beer nights. Coach would be at one end of the bar.

Bayno: Those were the most fun nights of my life. He and Doug Compton were good friends and Doug owned a couple bars. Especially on Thursday nights in the offseason. He would tend bar and we’d all show up and drink free and just have an absolute blast. It was honestly, by far, the most fun I ever had in any season. He’d make shots and make us do shots.

Popovich: When you’re with Larry, there’s often outings.

Bayno: He would call staff meetings in August and we would go down to the (Jet Lag), which was a dive bar, and we’d get down there and we’d just drink and talk basketball, and next thing you know the place is packed because the word would get out. Next thing you know it was the most fun you had.

Barry: We had a place called the Wheel, which was a burger joint. And “Doc Woo,” who owned it, was good friends with Larry. They would golf together and they were tight. We would go there all the time and have burgers.

 

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Freidinger: Coach Brown used to play Gin Rummy over there in that corner table.

Bayno: We would go out and have staff meetings and eat and drink, and he’d just grab napkins and salt shakers.

Popovich: He always wants to draw O’s and X’s. He’ll wear you out.

Buford: Every meal, every moment there was an opportunity to learn.

Popovich: He enjoys camaraderie and going to lunch and going to dinner and laughing and enjoying life. It was just an experience.

“Could life be any sweeter?” Bill Self, R.C. Buford, a party house and growing up
Self: I lived at Alvamar with R.C. — on the No. 1 tee box on the private side and the No. 9 green. We had the sweetest hookup in town, and I’m 22 years old and I’m living with R.C., thinking that I’m a rock star making $4,000 a year.

Pope: He was just chilling, man. He didn’t do nothing. He was living at R.C.’s, going out, hanging out on the weekends. (Alvin and I) lived across the fairway together, so we spent a lot of time together.

Calvin Thompson, player: The things I remember about Coach Self, I can’t tell you. Because they can’t be printed.

Pope: I never got the sense that Bill was going to be a great coach. I knew he loved the game. I think he spent a lot of time learning from Coach.

Self: I remember I got a check for $400 a month for 10 months. That’s what I was getting paid, and that was it, and thinking, “Could life be any sweeter than it is right now?”

Pope: R.C.’s house was this big area and he had all these accouterments there — like it was hanging out at the country club, and it was nice and just two single guys. Bill stayed downstairs and had a great run of the house, and R.C. was upstairs and had a run of the house.

Gueldner: R.C. had some family money.

Pope: He was the most giving dude. You’d never know he was from wealth. He was always looking out for other people and very humble.

Popovich: He was a single guy, and he had a really nice place to live and he was very kind in sharing it.

Bayno: It was the first time I had ever seen the flat plexiglass burners where they weren’t raised and iron. I think they had just come out. I was like, “What is that?” (He said) “That’s my stove.” And he turned it on and the circles would turn red, and I was like, “Wow.”

Barry: We used to tease R.C. because R.C. bought the round glasses that Larry wore.

Freidinger: He was really like a gopher. He would go get the laundry and the donuts and things.

Piper: R.C. got the brunt of it from us. One time we were watching film in Coach’s office, and Coach called up R.C. and told him to go feed his dogs. We all started laughing. Coach kind of looked at us like: “What?”

Freidinger: At that time, he was kind of struggling. I think he wanted to be in basketball, but he didn’t know how to go about it.

Brown: R.C. was still trying to figure out what he wanted to do in life.

Freidinger: My second year there (in 1986-87), Larry let him coach the JV team. I really think that opportunity gave him the confidence to get started. He was responsible for the team. He had to put in the offense and defense. I think it kickstarted his career.

Pope: After he got past the stage where he was partying a lot and got serious about things, he was unbelievable in terms of his quest for knowledge.

Turgeon: R.C. was really business-driven.

Pope: He was the JV head coach and we were playing Garden City. We played the JuCo teams before games, so we would try to schedule teams with good players and it would count as an unofficial visit. We were recruiting Keith Smart. Keith was really good and we really wanted him, but R.C. really wanted to win the game. And one referee for every JV game was Tommie Smith. He played at KU. With Tommie, we got good homecourt calls, and Keith Smart had three fouls in the first half, and I can remember vividly — Coach coming in the locker room at halftime, and he’s like, “R.C., what the blank are you doing? We’re trying to sign this guy and you’ve got him fouled out.” And R.C. said, “Hey, I’m just trying to win the game.” And Coach is like, “This is not going on your permanent record — R.C. it’s not going on your resume.”

Brown: I just watched R.C. grow. But if you would have asked all those guys during the time he was at KU, if he would be in the position he’s in now, they would probably laugh.

‘Mad scientist’: Four-hour practices, foot stomps and basketball genius
Pope: He was the king of practice. Assistants didn’t say a whole lot.

Barry: The one thing that every player will remember is his foot stomp. You could hear him stomp his foot in a crowded Allen Fieldhouse.

Gueldner: You might practice for three or four hours with a lot of scrimmaging, but no running.

Brown: I’ll ask the guys: What do you remember most about your experiences at Allen Fieldhouse? And a lot of the guys told me: The old (Longines) clock. They say: ‘Coach, there was a clock up on one side, and we started practice at 3, and when it got to 5 p.m., we were halfway through.’

Manning: I don’t know how many times we heard him say, “OK, one more time. OK, one more time. OK, one more time.” It’s just like, “Wow, how many one more times we gonna have, Coach?”

Self: I remember one time, we’re in practice and he is just going nuts on our guys. Going nuts. And they can’t do anything right, and after an hour, he throws them out of practice and said, “We’re going to come back later.” I go in the coaches’ locker room and it’s just me and him, and I said, “Coach, are you OK? I didn’t think they were doing that bad.” He said, “Bill, they weren’t. They were doing fine, but I’ve gotta go see this kid play. If I don’t leave now, I’m going to be late.”

Newton: The thing that was amazing about him is he would let practice go, and he would stop to make a correction and then he would call other players out on the mistakes that they made 15 minutes ago. And he would say, “Hey Milt, 10 minutes ago, defensively you made a play and you should have done this.”


Brown with Danny Manning during the NCAA Tournament. (Getty)
Popovich: He would stop practice and say, “So and so, you needed to go backdoor over there and so and so, you passed it, you stood, you needed to cut, you needed to do this. You didn’t block out. On offense, you didn’t do this.” He’ll talk to three or four players real quickly and he’ll start it up again. And we’d all just kind of stare at each other, like, “How did he know what all those guys did?” That’s what you did at practice. You were mostly just amazed of his command of everything that was going on.

Barry: He was like a video camera.

Self: He would talk about a side out-of-bounds play that the Pistons ran against him when he was coaching the New Jersey Nets in 1982.

Barry: He had a gazillion plays in his head that he could draw from.

John Calipari, assistant: We’re at Colorado, and we’re getting killed. We get back in the game and we’re down (in the final seconds) … He comes over and he runs this out-of-bounds play. And I will never run something that we haven’t run in practice. He puts this out, runs this loop on Danny (Manning). “This guy is stepping back, that guy is coming back, and we’re throwing it to him and you shoot the ball.” And son of a gun, if it didn’t … boom, boom, boom, bang, and the kid makes it. And we win. We win the game. I go: Where in the world did you get that? He said, “Well, I was in Denver in 1976 … “

Piper: One day we were running through our offense with no defense out there. We’d run the play, and he’d stop and say, “You’re not in the right spot. Get in the right spot.” Then I’d move, and he’d stop again. We did it like three times. “Pipe, get in the right spot!” I’m like, I’m in the right spot. It was up by the left elbow. He comes up and takes me and physically moves me one foot. And I’m like, OK. Then we run the play, and the play runs to perfection. Literally 12 inches made the timing and spacing correct.

 

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Buford: Somebody said to me about him, “Coach Brown thinks that there’s a wino on the street corner with the perfect out-of-bounds play.” So he’ll listen to anybody trying to learn himself.

Pope: We’d walk through a play that Oklahoma runs for Mookie Blaylock, and he’d be like, Hey, I like that. We’re going to run that tonight and we’re going to call it Oklahoma. The next game we have a walk-through and we do Iowa State, so we’re in Ames and we’re calling “Iowa State” and running their plays.

Tad Boyle, player: “We’re in a timeout and Coach said, “We’re running 3-play,” and Ron Kellogg raised his hand. You don’t see players raise their hands in huddles. And he said, “Coach, is that last week’s 3-play or this week’s 3-play?” It was kind of comical. Even Coach Brown laughed.

Bayno: He really was like a mad scientist.

The disciples: Alvin Gentry’s energy, Mark Turgeon’s destiny and John Calipari’s dog
Pope: Alvin is the center of every room when he comes in. He’s just so different with his energy.

Davis: We were on a commercial flight, and Alvin was talking to a flight attendant, and he’s kind of being charming. He sits down, and I look at him, and he goes, “I’m a procurer of talent — and I often times recruit basketball players.”

Newton: We were in Ames about to play Iowa State, and we decided that we were going to grab one of the coaches and tie them up with trainer’s tape. We went down a list. We can’t do Coach Brown because he’s Coach Brown. We couldn’t do Coach (Ed) Manning because he would beat the crap out of all of us. He wasn’t to be messed with. We couldn’t do R.C. We used to talk about R.C., as his family’s wealthy, and we decided to give him a pass based on that. Well, we said, “What about Alvin?”

Turgeon: People kind of gravitated to his personality.

Newton: We had him come to one of the player’s rooms, and the entire team was in there. He comes in the room and we start wailing on him. Not trying to hurt him but just wailing on this guy. We took most of his clothes off and wrapped him up in trainer’s tape, put him in the elevator and pressed lobby. We did that out of endearment.

Pope: He has ability to — I don’t want to say BS — he has an ability to relate to anyone and make them feel comfortable.

Manning: Alvin always brought smiles to our faces.

Barry: Alvin was the pro-Larry coach. “C’mon, guys, just do what he’s saying.” Calipari was the sarcastic, get to be friends with the players coach. He was the double agent. He’s got a big personality. He had nicknames for everyone.

Thompson: He was the jokester. He was the youngest of the crew.

Pope: He was annoying. He annoyed everyone. He didn’t make a lot of friends with the players necessarily. He would do room checks with his little dog, and his dog was met with derision, we’ll put it that way. It was some little white something.

Tad Boyle, player: I think there’s a select few that are born to coach. Larry Brown is one of them. Mark Turgeon is one of them.

Barry: Turg was destined to be a coach.

Freidinger: Coach Turgeon is the closest I’ve seen to Coach Brown on the practice court.

“Don’t beg:” Bowling, designer ties and the superstitions of Larry Brown

Turgeon: He was very superstitious.

Barry: Oh my god! Every superstition that you could think of.

Freidinger: My first game we played Tennessee-Martin, and I got my haircut that day. And after that game, Coach said, “Don’t ever do that again.”

Brown: I never got a haircut the day of a game, because Coach McGuire told me you shouldn’t do that.

Turgeon: If the ball was on the rim, you couldn’t talk to the ball. He wouldn’t like it if you talked to the ball.

Bayno: He’d turn around and go, “Don’t beg!”

Brown: John Calipari was from Pittsburgh, and I remember we went to play Ohio State, and that was the closest he was going to get to Pittsburgh, so he bought a new suit. I remember we lost, and I told Cal, “You’re never wearing that suit again.”

Freidinger: When I first got there, he gave me about 10 Polo ties that I’m sure he had worn coaching in the pros and he’d lost games with them. He wouldn’t wear them again.

Barry: If we lost, then he would get rid of his jacket, and (Mark Turgeon) would always volunteer to take it off his hands. That was one of the benefits of being a smaller player.

Newton: We used to laugh at Mark. He had a closet full of Larry’s ties. Every time things went bad, he went to get rid of one of those designer ties.

Brown: I loved clothes. If you weren’t going to wear something, and somebody that you cared about had the same size …

Bayno: Robic and Pope benefitted from that. They were getting $1,000 suits at the end of every season.

Freidinger: One day he was bored in the office on game day. He said, “What can we do?” Someone said, “Coach, let’s go bowling.” Ed Manning’s hands and thumbs were so big, he could barely get them into the ball. But we started bowling, and we beat the managers and the GAs, and they popped off. They wanted to play for dinner that night. Larry would always take us to a place called Vaccaro’s after the game and pay for the chips and margaritas. So we played for that. We beat them again. That night, Larry went to the owner and told him, “Make the bill a little higher.”

Thompson: After that, we all had to go out and get bowling shoes and bowling balls and go bowling before games.

Newton: When we were making our run to the Final Four and championship game, we were playing the Midwest regionals in Detroit and we called him “Jimmy the bus driver.” He was the bus driver that drove us for the entire Midwest region. And we came out of the Midwest region to get to the Final Four, and Jimmy became part of the family. We had to have Jimmy as our bus driver in Kansas City, and Coach was like, “We have to have Jimmy.” So we had Jimmy the bus driver in Kansas City as well. Normally, you find someone new to get you around, but we had such success in Detroit that we had Jimmy as well in Kansas City. He made that happen.

Brown: Jimmy Dunlap … But the story on that was that there was a young kid named Ryan Gray; he had an inoperable brain tumor and had become part of the team. I lived on the same street as the Gray family, and the guys loved having him around. I saw the way Jimmy treated Ryan. So I wanted him to be at the Final Four.

Pope: He drove by Ryan Gray’s house every day, because they lived right on the way to his place, and he befriended him, and Ryan became special to the whole program. To me, especially. That told you about Coach’s caring and how he looked out for a young kid and gave him the ride of his life.

“We’re a family:” The end in Lawrence, and the start in San Antonio
Pope: My senior year, after we won the championship, we thought we were going to UCLA. The year before, Coach talked about going to the Knicks, but UCLA was a dream job and he felt like he had unaccomplished stuff there, so that’s as far as my mind ever got. We were all going. Alvin and I were going to live together.

Brown: R.C. was supposed to go with me to meet with UCLA and he got in a car accident. So he didn’t get on the plane with me, and I was kind of there by myself. If R.C. would have been there, I might have accepted the job.

Pope: There was never a thought from any of the guys that the NBA is something we can all do, but Coach preached loyalty and he was loyal to all the people that were loyal to him.

Popovich: That’s like a topic that will always bring guilt for Alvin, R.C. and I. He brought the three of us airheads with him to San Antonio, and what the hell did we know about the NBA, right? A hell of a move on his part to have the three of us come with him along with Ed Manning. He’s big on relationships.

Brown: My whole life, I’ve been taught that you hire family. Because you can teach family all the basketball you know, but you can’t teach them to love you.

Turgeon: We’re a family. We still are.

Buford: Every day was a learning day. Throughout this time we’ve been working from home, I’ve gone back through some boxes and all the notes we kept as a coaching staff.

Pope: We used to have all these old notecards in the office that we printed up. I found it at my parent’s house the other day. It’s just a Jayhawk and it said, “Good ones do for themselves; great ones do for others.” That was kind of like Coach’s deal.

Gentry: I think Larry Brown is definitely the biggest influence in my whole coaching career.

Self: Coach probably influenced me as much as anybody in seeing the good of somebody carrying out an assignment that had absolutely nothing to do with the play. I remember him crediting — so much — a big guy that runs the floor hard, which forces the defense to collapse and then you can have a quick ball reversal. Something that simple.

Newton: To me, he’s the greatest to ever coach the game.

Brown: When you see their success, that’s the greatest compliment. People always say to me: You don’t have a tree, you have a forest. And that’s the greatest compliment anyone can give to you. They helped me in so many ways I can’t explain.

(Photo illustration: Wes McCabe. Photos: Bill Self (Stephen Dunn / Getty Images); Alvin Gentry (Rich Clarkson / Getty Images); Larry Brown and Greg Popovich (Rocky Widner / Getty Images); John Calipari (Mitchell Layton / Getty Images).