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FINALLY, THE SPOTLIGHT: Fans
around the country are learning what Montgomery’s
fellow coaches always knew: he’s one of
the best.
Art Streiber |
It was the kind of game
that gives basketball coaches of a certain psychological
bent the willies. Arriving at Maples Pavilion barely
a week after Stanford’s upset win over No. 1 Kansas
and right before a matchup with 13th-ranked Gonzaga,
Florida International presented the kind of foe that
could bring out the worst in a team. So what if the
Golden Panthers were rated 310th in the nation and your
team was ninth? They were five guys just like you who
wanted to win, Mike Montgomery would tell his players.
Don’t look past them.
Any pregame dyspepsia Montgomery might have had on
December 15 was justified, it turned out. Let everyone
else admire Stanford’s winning margin of 27 points—Monty
saw the real story: 12 turnovers and a rebound margin
of two. Two! His eyes skipped right over Rob Little’s
team-high 17 points to the junior center’s rebound
total. Two! “Maybe they didn’t feel threatened
and as a result weren’t willing to put in the
work,” Montgomery said of his players afterward.
“Rebounding-wise, I thought we were poor; our
reaction to the ball was poor. So it’s back to
work.”
Some might call Montgomery a pessimist—bring
up the 24 games his undermanned team won last season
and he’ll bring up the eight they almost lost—but
he is, in fact, a realist. To maintain a presence in
the top 20, his collection of overachievers and the
occasional All-American must have unwavering mental
focus. They have to play together; they have to be consistent.
They have to be as fundamentally sound and as detail-oriented
as their coaches, who have heated debates about, for
example, how to teach post-to-post screens.
That’s why it sometimes seems Montgomery is watching
a different game than everyone else. The same moment
fans are cheering a Rob Little dunk, he is exploding
out of his seat, yelling at sophomore guard Jason Haas
to get back on defense. “If you win by 27, but
you give up five layups in the last two minutes, that’s
really going to piss him off,” says Little. “Offensively,
he looks to get people off rhythm. He doesn’t
necessarily want to just pound it in your face. He wants
to catch you on the backscreen, he wants to catch you
looking one way when the ball is turned the other way.
He wants to outsmart you.”
Few in the business are better at doing so. “We
have a great coaching staff [in the athletics department],
and some people would say it’s the best in the
country, but I think most of the coaches on our staff
would say that Mike Montgomery is the best actual coach
we have,” says athletic director Ted Leland, PhD
’83. “In the old coaching parlance, he can
take his five guys and beat your five guys and then
take your five guys and beat his five guys.”
It sounds simple, but beating any five guys
has historically been a challenge for the Cardinal.
Before Montgomery arrived unheralded from Montana in
1986, Stanford basketball was a model of mediocrity,
and few people imagined it could ever be anything more.
Was there a better validation of the alleged incompatibility
of elite-level basketball and high admissions standards
than the previous four decades of Stanford hoops?
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LOW-PROFILE: Montgomery, studying
game film in his office, enjoys a quiet life despite
his success.
Art Streiber |
Since the banner year of 1942, when Stanford won its
only NCAA championship, the Cardinal had stacked up
26 losing seasons against 15 winning ones (the 1982-83
season ended at 14-14). In that span it had not won
a single conference title outright and had not been
invited to either the NCAA tournament or its poorer
cousin, the NIT. Television exposure was nil and fan
interest was slight, especially among students, who
might leave the library for games if Stanford was down
by 10 or less at halftime. Maples was a gloomy concrete
box that, aside from its unnervingly bouncy floor, offered
little in the way of home-court advantage. Tom Davis,
the school’s experiment with a big-name coach,
could stand only so much of the indifference. After
four years (and a 58-59 record) he fled the Farm in
1986, proclaiming that no one could win with such an
intractable admissions office.
Taken together, the achievements of the basketball
program since Montgomery replaced Davis seem a fever
dream. Stanford has had a winning record in 16 of the
last 17 seasons, and a slew of crowd-pleasing highlights:
that first victory at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion in
1990, 25 years after the building opened; nine straight
NCAA tournament bids; a Final Four appearance (1998);
a preseason No. 1 ranking and the cover of Sports
Illustrated (1998-99); three straight Pac-10 titles
(’99, ’00, ’01); and perhaps the ultimate
compliment—Arizona fans rushing the court in Tucson
after the perennially powerful Wildcats defeated Stanford
in 2000. Nowadays, Maples sells out consistently and
tent cities occasionally spring up outside the arena
as students vie for one of the toughest tickets in the
Bay Area. Once described as “dark” and “echoing,”
Stanford’s home court is now considered “intimate”
and “raucous”—a credible snake pit
for opposing teams.
The agent of this revolution hardly cuts a radical
figure. Now in his 18th year at Stanford and 26th as
a head coach, the 56-year-old Montgomery is graying
at the temples, and he still lives his life to some
extent as if he were what he once assumed he’d
grow up to be, a high school P.E. teacher. His style
of dress, if you want to call it that, is subdued preppy.
He goes to work at 8, leaves at 5. He reads a lot—Ludlum
and Michener and Clive Cussler and whatever escapist
novels catch his fancy—golfs a little and spends
as much time as possible with his wife, Sarah, and their
kids, 20-year-old John, now a sophomore guard at Loyola
Marymount, and 18-year-old Anne, a freshman on USC’s
volleyball team. He doesn’t bother his assistants
at home much, and they return the favor. He goes to
bed at a reasonable hour, declining to stay up all night
watching videotape. He has an open-door policy in the
office, except when he closes the door to take an occasional
pre-practice nap, stretching out on the floor sans pillow.
None of which is to suggest he isn’t driven to
win. “If you’ve ever played golf or racquetball
against Mike, you feel like technically you shouldn’t
lose to him, but you do a lot of times because of his
competitive nature,” says his good friend and
former Montana assistant, Utah State coach Stew Morrill.
“I think you see that in coaching as well.”
Montgomery says he enjoys wins for about two hours while
he endures losses like a 48-hour flu. Even so, as college
basketball coaches go, he is a relatively untortured
soul.
You wonder, in fact, if he will ever get the hang of
being in the big time. Forget the utter lack of scandal
attached to his program. He hasn’t written a “My
Ten Keys to Success” book, doesn’t host
a Mike Montgomery-brand basketball camp or TV show,
doesn’t have a famous mentor, doesn’t wear
an iconic sweater. The guy doesn’t even have an
agent, for Pete’s sake. He pooh-poohs most coaching
awards and milestones (although he allows that a recent
honor, the prestigious John R. Wooden “Legends
of Coaching” Award, is “probably the best
thing I’ve ever won”). “Mike has always
thought it’s about the program, about the kids,”
says Blaine Taylor, a former assistant who is now the
head coach at Old Dominion. “Some programs, you
see the poster and there’s the coach standing
on top of the Empire State building. Mike doesn’t
think that that’s the way it is.”
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GAME FACES: Montgomery’s
former players praise his teaching and motivational
ability.
gonzalesphoto.com |
Montgomery’s teams are usually a reflection of
him: straightforward, humble, hardworking, disciplined,
consistent and unflashy. Their specialties—setting
screens, making that extra pass, playing stingy defense—don’t
often make ESPN’s highlight shows, and neither
does he. After his team lost in the first weekend of
the NCAAs a few years ago, ESPN asked Montgomery to
stay on the East Coast to be an analyst for the rest
of the tournament. He declined, telling Leland, “Why
would I want to do that when I could be home with my
family?”
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gonzalesphoto.com |
It was TV’s loss. Besides having a great basketball
mind, Montgomery has a needle-sharp wit that he occasionally
unveils in public, frequently turns on himself and sometimes
employs as his primary form of communication. Some who
have worked with him say his wisecracks are the clearest
signs of his approval and/or affection. Says Morrill,
“I used to tell people, if he doesn’t give
you a bad time, you should worry; if he gives you a
bad time, that means he likes you.”
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gonzalesphoto.com |
Montgomery may strike some as an old-school guy, but
his reputation as straitlaced and uptight isn’t
right either, says former assistant Doug Oliver, now
the coach at Idaho State. “Mike’s very easygoing
and a lot of fun to hang out with. I’ve driven
down the highway singing Bob Dylan songs with him, and
he knows all the words to some of those songs. He thinks
he can sing but he can’t. He’s just a normal
guy.”
Montgomery is, as he likes to remind people, just a
physical education major from Long Beach State. When
he was growing up in Southern California, coaches populated
his world and P.E. was the highlight of his day. His
late father, Jack, who became the first athletic director
at Long Beach State, was also a football coach at UCLA.
There, Jack hung out with track coach Ducky Drake and
basketball coach John Wooden, on whose lap baby Mike
once sat at an athletic department picnic—or so
Wooden likes to tell people.
“I thought I’d be a coach or a P.E. teacher
because I didn’t know what anyone else did for
a living,” says Montgomery. Neither, apparently,
did his brothers. Dick is a former women’s volleyball
coach at San Jose State and Don was head golf coach
at Cabrillo College until he recently retired and moved
to Hawaii. Mike, the youngest and smallest (he topped
out at 6 feet), played all kinds of sports with his
brothers in their backyard, but he was smitten with
basketball. Between seasons at Millikan High, he spent
summer evenings playing three-on-three in gyms all over
Long Beach. “Not being very physically gifted,
I had to figure out how things worked in order to survive,”
he says. “I think that’s why a lot of guys
who are like me are successful coaches as opposed to
the great athletes, who never had to figure it out.
They could just do it.”
Montgomery figured it out well enough to start at guard
as a senior at Long Beach State. That year he experienced
a fleeting moment in the spotlight: after scoring 17
points and displaying deft ballhandling against Fresno
State’s press in a rare televised game, Montgomery
was named college division conference player of the
week the same week UCLA’s Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
(then known as Lew Alcindor) was honored for the university
division. Characteristically, Montgomery explains away
the award as a “kind of a lack-of-anybody-else
type thing.” (Nevertheless, the 35-year-old plaque
is displayed prominently in his office.)
Facing the draft after graduating from Long Beach in
1968, Montgomery joined the Coast Guard, “in retrospect,
the best thing that could have happened to me,”
he says. After a two-year training stint, he landed
a gig coaching the freshman team at the Coast Guard
Academy. From there he bounced from one assistant’s
job to the next, at Colorado State, The Citadel, Florida,
Boise State and finally at Montana. After two years
as a Grizzlies assistant, he became head coach in 1978,
at the age of 31. Four winning seasons later, Montgomery
heard Stanford was looking for a replacement for coach
Dick DiBiaso and called then athletic director Andy
Geiger. “Geiger was very nice and polite and said
he had somebody else in mind,” recalls Montgomery.
When that person, Davis, blew out of town four years
later, Geiger remembered Montgomery and eventually offered
him the job.
Unknown though he was, Montgomery made an imprint his
first year. With a group of good players that Davis
had left him, including Todd Lichti, ’89, and
Howard Wright, ’90, he fashioned a winning season
and a competitive 9-9 Pac-10 record. “That was
a huge deal to everyone here because we hadn’t
done that in many, many years,” says Montgomery.
“I had most everybody back the next year so it
created some excitement, and we just built on that.”
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‘In the old coaching
parlance, he can take his five guys and beat your
five guys and then take your five guys and beat
his five guys.’
|
There is, of course, much more to the story: the transformation
of the Maples environment with a coat of paint. The
development of the rabid Sixth Man Club student section.
All the great assistants Montgomery has hired. (Ten
have gone on to Division I head coaching jobs.) The
profile-lifting recruits, like Adam Keefe, ’92,
and Brevin Knight, ’97, and the incredible luck
of landing twin towers Jason and Jarron Collins, both
’01, after UCLA screwed up their recruitment.
Through it all, Montgomery has been faced with the
same admissions challenges that brought his predecessor
to his knees. Instead of railing against a system he
couldn’t change, Montgomery embraced the school’s
mission so tightly that Leland says his relationship
with the admissions office is the best of all his coaches.
But the pool of players who are both excellent students
and elite basketball players remains small. Montgomery
has two student interns who do little but call schools
to get the transcripts of top high school players so
his staff can determine whether to even bother pursuing
a kid. Then they have to get test scores, and unlike
every school save for a few Ivies, Stanford must have
a completed application, with essays, before it will
offer admission.
“It’s tough getting kids to do the application,
but the really motivated ones who know they want this
level of school of course will do it, and that’s
great,” says Montgomery. “When we find a
kid who wants this level, we are generally in great
shape. It’s just finding more than one. Once we
get a group of players, this is the best job in the
country, because the kids are just terrific to work
with.”
Montgomery is a great evaluator of talent; moreover,
he is a superb salesman of his coaching philosophy.
“He can watch an athlete and see precisely what
he can do well and what his limitations are and how
he can fit into the mosaic of a team and help a team
win,” says Leland. “Mike gets an athlete
to buy into that and to actually try to do that. And
that’s a difficult sell job.”
Putting together a team and watching the players learn
to execute “is where the fun is, even more so
than the games,” says Montgomery. “I really
enjoy watching the whole thing come together as a team
or as a program, where they like each other, their highs
and lows, that whole thing.”
Chemistry is critical to Stanford’s game and
not something Montgomery can really control. Weirdly,
his tendency to see the glass as half empty sometimes
helps. “Even if you had a great game personally,
he wants to know how that relates back to the team,”
says Little. “How does that relate back to everyone
doing well? In what he calls his equal-opportunity offense,
everybody needs to be a threat, otherwise you are a
detriment to the team.”
Somehow, in this team-first environment, virtually
every individual improves. “People get so much
better under Coach Montgomery,” says former player
Mark Madsen, ’00, now with the NBA’s Minnesota
Timberwolves. “Would I be in the NBA if I hadn’t
gone to Stanford? I don’t know. Some guys are
good enough to make the NBA from wherever they are.
I don’t think I’m in that category. I’m
grateful that Montgomery really pushed all of us to
achieve our potential.”
Despite the greatly increased profile of his program,
Montgomery still flies mostly under the radar, even
locally. (Note that it has taken this magazine 18 years
to get around to profiling him.) Part of that is calculated.
One of the reasons Montgomery has stayed at Stanford
instead of pursuing higher-paying, higher-profile jobs
elsewhere is that Stanford has allowed him relative
anonymity. He can go out for a beer and pizza in Palo
Alto and not be approached or even recognized.
Of course, he has mixed feelings about that. On one
hand, he wishes college basketball fans here were more
passionate, involved enough to call into a talk radio
show now and then and rant, “Why didn’t
that sonuvabitch call timeout!?” On the other
hand, he’d hate living under a spotlight. “The
perspective here can drive you nuts but it’s also
very healthy in terms of what I prefer,” says
Montgomery. “It seems like fans here don’t
care how we do, but they do care. It’s just not
the only thing. It’s a trade-off. Okay, I’m
not a big deal, nobody lives or dies by what we do,
but the benefit of that is a peaceful sort of existence.
I wouldn’t want everybody to want to talk to me
all the time. I want to go on the driving range and
drive golf balls without that.”
If there has been one criticism of Montgomery’s
program of late, it is that his teams seem to peak early.
In the last five years, the Cardinal has had big wins
against highly ranked teams in December. But only once
during that time has Stanford advanced beyond the second
round of the NCAAs. Montgomery could point out that
with the exception of the loss to a subpar North Carolina
team in 2000, those second-round losses came against
good teams. But he doesn’t bite. He simply says
he doesn’t pay much attention to the naysayers.
“They are going to criticize whatever you don’t
do short of a national championship.”
Naturally, he’d like to win an NCAA title. “Logically,
realistically, should we be able to win one here?”
he asks. “Probably not. Can we? Obviously, yes,
based on the fact that we got close to it. Does it consume
me? Not at all.”
Winning the Big One would propel Montgomery into a
different stratosphere in terms of national recognition,
and it might even increase his visibility around Palo
Alto. But not winning it should not diminish a coaching
legacy that Madsen unabashedly calls “the greatest
success story in Division I basketball.” Montgomery
will be the first to tell you that winning an NCAA title
would not suddenly make him the world’s best coach.
“I think it was [former North Carolina coach]
Dean Smith who said after a big win, ‘You know,
I’m no better coach than I was two hours ago,’
” he says. Fortunately for the Cardinal, Montgomery
is as good as it gets right now.
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