Dye Still Working Miracles

The trek from Fantasyland to Tree City, U.S.A.--by way of The Real World and Bakersfield--has left Bobby Dye remarkably intact.

You remember Bobby. Basketball coach. Nice guy. Parts his teeth in the middle. Well, he’s hanging out in Idaho these days. Idaho, land of potatoes and . . . potatoes.

Oh, it was just a joke. Idaho is a great place. Great people, great outdoors. Bobby will tell you. He’ll tell you Idaho is a great place over and over.

“This is a great place. I really love it here. It’s a great place.”

See.

Bobby coaches basketball at Boise State.

Boise is known for being the City of Trees and for the Boise State football team, a perennial Division II power.

Basketball?

“I think the people of Boise are hungry to support a basketball team,” said Gene Bleymaier, director of athletics. “I think once we establish a winning program, they’ll come out.”

And so here is Bobby Dye.

He has turned around basketball programs at St. John Bosco High School and Santa Monica City College, and performed outright miracles at Cal State Fullerton and Cal State Bakersfield.

Things have started to tilt that way at Boise State.

The Broncos started competing in Division I basketball in 1970, yet have had only four winning seasons. Two have come in Dye’s first three seasons.

This season, the Broncos are 4-1 and play UC Irvine tonight at 6:30 in the Boise State Pavilion.

As it stands now, Dye’s program poses no threat to the football team or the acts that share the 12,000-seat Pavilion.

“David Lee Roth, Jimmy Swaggart, they fill that place,” said Max Cobert, sports information director. “The basketball team gets about 3,000 to 4,000.”

Which doesn’t worry Dye--there are priorities in this world--and anyways, all Bobby Dye really cares about is coaching basketball.

That’s what Bobby was meant to do. He discovered that when he tried to leave it.

Remember that? That came soon after the miracle season at Cal State Fullerton that was supposed to assure Bobby a spot in hardwood heaven.

Of course, things didn’t work out that way. You remember the scenario. Read like a bad opera.

There was the miracle in the 1978 NCAA Western Regional playoffs, in which Fullerton came within three points of advancing to the Final Four.

Then the fall from grace when (gasp) Bobby Dye actually considered other--and better--jobs.

Then came the resignation from Fullerton, the repudiation of coaching, the rebirth in Bakersfield and now Boise.

After all that, what remains is pretty much the same coach who started out at St. John Bosco in the ‘60s.

Bobby Dye still preaches defense, still gets close to his players and still has a problem keeping his voice in working order from one game day to another.

No, the past hasn’t so much changed Bobby Dye as taught him the finer points of survival.

That there are fine but critical differences between loyalty and sensibility, dedication and sensibility, goals and sensibility.

There’s an old story about a vaudevillian who grew tired of listening to the jeers and the boos every night, and so one evening showed up on stage with what he billed as the act of a lifetime.

He asked for dimmed lights, then drank healthy portions of gasoline, kerosene and nitroglycerin. Then he lit a match, swallowed it and exploded.

The crowd went crazy. The stage manager called out, “That’s terrific! Best act I’ve ever seen. Do you hear that crowd? They want more!”

The vaudevillian, now a spirit rising through the mezzanine, turned and said: “Yeah, but that’s the thing. I can only do it once.”

Vaudevillian thy name is Bobby Dye.

He was hired to coach at Fullerton in 1973. At the time, Fullerton was a Division II basketball program with nine straight losing seasons.

By 1976 the Titans--the Division I Titans--had won the Pacific Coast Athletic Assn. title.

That was nice, but then came 1978.

You know the story. The slow start, the fast finish. Unbelievable victories over New Mexico and San Francisco in the Western Regionals. A heartbreaking three-point loss to Arkansas in the region’s final.

Dye, who was hailed as the Wizard of Nutwood, called 1978 “Fantasyland Revisited.”

Dye was contacted by Auburn, Cal, Purdue and Wichita State. There were rumors about coaching USC.

Dye decided to stay after all. Yet some Fullerton supporters were nonetheless angry that Dye was even considering other jobs.

“I had people tell me that the thought of Fullerton playing a game without me on the floor absolutely infuriated them,” Dye said.

It got so bad that Dye felt compelled to state, “I’m not a Benedict Arnold, I just have to look at what is around.”

Looking back on his decision to stay, Dye thinks he may have gotten caught up in the moment.

“Everything happened so fast,” he said. “I didn’t have a clear idea what I was doing. Looking back, I think I made a mistake by not taking one of the jobs. I think I took loyalty a little bit too far. But those were very extraordinary times. People expected so much.”

Said Jerry Pimm, Santa Barbara coach and a close friend: “It was unfair of anyone to expect more from Bob Dye after that season. That was a once-in-a-lifetime deal.”

The 1979 season began quick, 15-2, but the Titans soon self-destructed, victims of slumps, injuries and dissension. Dye had to leave one game in San Jose with high blood pressure.

“Bob would get so involved in coaching that he would neglect himself and his health,” Pimm said. “That’s dangerous. I told him to go fishing, go hunting, play tennis. There has to be an outlet for the pressure.”

Dye work outs out every day now, and he plays tennis regularly.

By 1980 everything had come undone. Dye was trying to get the head coaching job at San Diego State, but at the last moment was turned away.

He resigned with four games left in 1980, effective at the end of the season, and tried to make a go of it away from coaching.

But, as Dye said after accepting the Bakersfield job in 1981, “spending time at home is vastly overrated.”

Bakersfield had been 6-20 the season before his arrival.

Dye compiled a 50-11 record in two seasons.

Then came the offer from Boise State, and Dye moved.

Would he move again? Maybe. But the job would have to be very good.

“I’ll listen. Experience has taught me to listen,” he said. “Of course, that doesn’t mean I’d ever go anywhere. And nobody is offering anyway. And anyway, I like my life here, this is a great place.”