REASON TO SMILE : Virginia’s Holland Adds Humor, Smarts to a Winning Career

Some things about Terry Holland are obvious, to use one of his favorite words. He is a good basketball coach. You don’t put together a record of 362-173 in 18 years without being good, especially when the last 13 are in the Atlantic Coast Conference. He has a temper that’s hard to miss when watching a Virginia game, especially since he’s a gangly 6-foot-7.

But people miss a lot when they look at Holland. It’s easy to do, largely because he is not very forthcoming in public. One of the reasons he uses the word “obviously” so often is that he generally says only that which is obvious.

Terry Holland is very smart and very funny. He is an inveterate practical joker with a sense of humor so sly it often goes right past people.

Several weeks ago, Holland sat with a group before a game discussing Virginia sports promotions director Todd Turner, a good friend. Someone jokingly asked exactly what Turner did with all his time.

“I’ll be damned if I know,” Holland said. “Personally, I think he sits in his office all day updating his resume’.”

Shortly after that, Holland left the group. A few minutes later, Turner came racing over. “Okay, who’s the wise guy here who says I spend all my time updating my resume’?” he demanded.

The wise guy already had left.

That sense of humor, combined with an ability to look at life and his profession without taking either one, or himself, very seriously, have kept Holland in a business that seems hardly ideal for someone like him.

“I first got into coaching thinking I would do it for one year,” he said recently. “Every year I say I’ll keep doing it for as long as it’s still fun. Every once in a while Ann (his wife) will look at me and say, ‘So, you still having fun?’ Sometimes I’m not sure how to answer.

“I always tell myself that if it’s not fun, there’s no sense doing it. I’m not in it for the prestige or the ego or the money or the classic reasons. I am, but I don’t want to admit it. I think I would lose my sanity if I did. As long as I can rationalize it that way and still have fun, or at least think I’m having fun, I can keep doing it.”

Holland has had fun this season. His team comes into Friday’s ACC tournament opener against Georgia Tech with a 20-8 record and an NCAA tournament bid locked up, Virginia’s sixth bid in seven seasons and, perhaps more significantly, its third in the four seasons since Ralph Sampson graduated. This was a team picked to do big things before Olden Polynice left school after a shoplifting incident. It is a team that has done superbly without him.

For that, Holland deserves credit. For that, some people say, “typical Terry.”

That’s part of the image: “He’s a great coach when he doesn’t have great talent.” It has been said of him often and it’s a label that won’t go away because of what happened during Sampson’s four seasons at Virginia. Virginia won lots of games, but never THE games. Sampson never reached the level people expected of a player with his gifts, a trend that has continued in the NBA. Maybe the fault lay more with the player than the coach. But the coach never will say that.

Holland is intensely loyal to Sampson. When Sampson left without any of the championships that had been predicted, people questioned Holland. Publicly, he never seemed to mind. Privately, friends say and he now admits, he burned. “Of course it hurt,” he said. “How could it not hurt?”

One season after Sampson left, with a one-time walk-on starting in his place, Virginia reached the Final Four after barely getting into the tournament. In fact, it came within one superb defensive play by Akeem Olajuwon of beating Houston and going on to play Georgetown for the national championship. Suddenly, Holland was vindicated. Did he need vindication?

“Well, if there was any doubt before, that took care of it,” he said. “There was a lot of luck involved, but that’s part of the game. ... Suddenly, we looked up and said, ‘Hey, we’re in the Final Four.’ If I had questioned myself before then, I didn’t afterwards. I know I’m a good coach.”

Holland’s trip to a career in coaching was an unusual one. He grew up in Clinton, N.C., a town of 7,000. His father ran a small restaurant, his mother was a teacher. He was an excellent student and a good basketball player in high school. Basketball was always just a sport to him, not an obsession or a ticket anywhere. He could have gone to college on an academic scholarship if he never had picked up a basketball.

He landed at Davidson, playing for one Charles G. Driesell, after a number of twists. Davidson basketball was almost non-existent in 1959 when Holland was a high school senior. Holland was thinking about going to Wake Forest or perhaps Duke. His first choice probably would have been North Carolina State if he had been recruited there because he grew up a State fan.

“I was a candidate for an academic scholarship at Carolina and, being a State fan, I really didn’t want to go there,” he remembered. “ ... During one of the interviews, I was asked about Davidson offering me a basketball scholarship. The guy wanted to know which I would take. I said, ‘Well, probably the basketball scholarship to Davidson.’ That took care of Carolina. Needless to say, I didn’t get their scholarship.”

It came down then to Davidson or Wake Forest. Davidson had just hired a new coach. Even then, at age 28, Driesell knew how to recruit. “He came to the house with this wild song and dance,” Holland said, smiling broadly at the memory. “He said I could have academics and good basketball. Davidson was horrible in basketball. I wasn’t sure. But my mom was sure. She loved Lefty. Finally, one day she just said, ‘That’s it, I’m mailing this acceptance to Davidson.’ ”

So the truth comes out: Lefty Driesell’s first recruit was Terry Holland’s mother.

He was a solid player at Davidson, leading the country in field goal percentage (63.1) as a senior. But Holland knew he had no future as a pro. He received a letter inviting him to a Baltimore Bullets tryout camp, but that was about it. He decided to enroll at North Carolina’s accounting school, intending to become a CPA. That summer he worked a camp with Driesell and, as the two were driving home, Driesell suddenly had an idea. Holland, who does a near-perfect Driesell imitation, slips easily into Leftyese telling the story:

“He just turned to me and said, ‘You know Terra, aah been thinkin’. Aah got about $4,000 extra for next year and aah can use an assistant. You bein’ a Davidson guy, maybe aah can get you a couple thousand more. You could do it for a year. It’d be fun.’ ”

Holland, who had been surprised at how much he was already starting to miss basketball, decided to try coaching “for a year.” That was 23 years ago.

He worked under Driesell at Davidson until Driesell took the Maryland job in 1969. When Davidson gave Larry Brown the job, Holland, a bit miffed, went to Maryland with Driesell. But Brown lasted three months at Davidson, got into a fight with the athletic director, and left. Davidson asked Holland to come back. Holland said his first thought was “stick it, why didn’t you hire me in the first place?” His second, calmer as always, was “okay.”

He was 92-43 there in five years when Virginia called him. “What I remember about that is that two things were really affecting our recruiting at Davidson,” Holland said. “It was a combination, actually. They had eliminated student air fares and the gas crunch was on. We were recruiting a lot of Catholic school kids out of New York. They were that rare combination of kids who could play who were good enough academically to come to Davidson. But it got harder for them to fly because of the fares and with the gas situation, they couldn’t drive either.

“I really liked Davidson, obviously. In the end, though, Virginia was a bigger Davidson.”

Virginia was 4-8 in the ACC that first season, including a stunning upset of North Carolina. A year later, the Cavaliers again were 4-8. The week before the ACC tournament, Holland publicly picked his team to win the tournament. “If the team playing the best basketball is going to win,” he said, “then there is no doubt that it will be us.”

Amazingly, he was right. Suddenly, at the age of 33, people were calling him one of the bright young minds in the game. “I got a little bit cocky after that,” Holland said.

“But it never really got out of hand because things happened to remind me I wasn’t as big a deal as I might have thought.

He had talked for more than two hours, telling funny stories, remembering events with remarkable precision. Now, he was looking ahead.

“I’ve enjoyed this team quite a bit,” he said. “They have really done a good job and worked very hard. I think I’m still as competitive as I’ve ever been, but I don’t feel driven to win a national championship. I want to win, I always want to win, but there’s no obsession. I think understanding that has made me better at what I do.

“To tell the truth, I just like to coach.”

Obviously.