SUITED TO COACH : John Chaney Has Taken Temple to the Top

On game days, John Chaney likes to stop off at the nearest mall and shop.

“Got to see what the rich folks are up to,” he says.

Some days he just browses, buys a card or two to send to a friend. He likes to look at clothes. Sometimes, he doesn’t buy a thing. “Sometimes, I buy everything,” he says.

As a youngster in Philadelphia, Chaney, coach of a Temple University basketball team that is 18-1 and ranked No. 1 by the Associated Press, didn’t have a lot of nice things. When he was named the most valuable player of the Philadelphia high schools’ Public League in 1951, he didn’t have a suit to wear to the awards dinner at the Warwick, one of Philadelphia’s best hotels. So he borrowed a suit that belonged to his stepfather--Pop, as Chaney called Sylvester Chaney. The suit was too big for John, and, what was worse, it was a zoot suit, years out of style. Chaney still remembers the big shoulders, the wide lapels, the big old flapjack tie.

Now, of course, he can buy about whatever he wants. He has fine clothes, nice shoes--wonderful things, really. But in them, once a game begins, Chaney--his collar open, the knot of his tie hanging down around the second button--ends up looking like a working man who has stopped off at a Philly schoolyard at the end of the day.

“He’ll have these beautiful shoes on, these nice suits,” says C. Vivian Stringer, the coach of the top-ranked Iowa women’s team. She and Chaney became close friends when she was the women’s coach and he the men’s at Cheyney State, a predominately black school just outside Philadelphia. “And he’ll be very uncomfortable with it. He’s saying, ‘I understand how to dress, but I want you to know how I feel comfortable. Look at me now.’ He probably doesn’t feel right with everything in place.”

The loosened tie and disheveled appearance have become his trademarks, along with his weary rasp of a voice and a string of four seasons of 25 or more victories. Chaney says the tie is a superstitious thing. He slips the knot just before the game begins, as unfailingly as he wears his lucky undershirt--the one, thin with wear, that he has put on every game day for years and that his wife, Jeanne, has tried to slip out with the garbage for just as long.

It may be superstition, but it is not based on nothing. Chaney, who was born into the public housing projects of Jacksonville, Fla., but moved to Philadelphia, is proud, he says, of his background and determined not to forget the times when he wanted for both money and opportunity.

“You must never divorce yourself from the common ground,” he says. “If I ever found I was divorced from the common ground . . . “

He shakes his head and laughs at the thought.

The thing about Chaney, almost anyone will tell you, is his sameness. Peter Liacouras, the Temple University president who hired Chaney in 1982, making him Temple’s first black coach, says the folks at the Italian grocery on 10th Street still remember Chaney from when he was a boy, when the Chaneys lived at 17th and Ellsworth.

“He’s the same,” Liacouras says. “When I met him, he was so exactly the way he is now--animated, didn’t try to politic with you.”

Liacouras hired Chaney away from Cheyney State. In 10 years at the school, Chaney’s teams were 225-59, and won the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. Division II championship in 1978.

Chaney says he was “extremely happy” at Cheyney State and that he would not have left to take the Temple job had Cheyney State come through with the tenured teaching position he sought.

The school did finally offer a position on the day he was supposed to sign with Temple, Chaney said, but in his anger, “the little boy in me,” went anyway. “I said, ‘Give me the pen.’ ”

Liacouras, who was president-elect at the time of Chaney’s hiring, says he made the move in part “to shake up” things at the school, which had been losing enrollment.

“There was great controversy at the time,” Liacouras says. “People may not remember it, but I do.”

Liacouras, in the eyes of some, fired Don Casey (now a Clippers’ assistant) who is white and had six straight winning seasons, in order to hire Chaney, a black man unproven in Division I.

“He was appointed with great controversy, but his tenure here has not been controversial,” Liacouras says.

In Chaney’s first season at Temple, the Owls went 14-15, giving Chaney the only losing season of his college coaching career. In the next four seasons, Temple went 25-6, 26-5, 25-6 and 32-4, advancing to the second round of the NCAA tournament each time. Chaney’s career winning percentage of .785 ranked him third among active Division I coaches before this season, behind Jerry Tarkanian of Nevada Las Vegas and Ralph Underhill of Wright State, and just ahead of Dean Smith of North Carolina.

Chaney’s associates, to a person, insist success hasn’t changed him.

“It’s not like he’s one person today and another tomorrow,” Stringer says. “In all the years I’ve known Coach Chaney I’ve never guessed him wrong. In every phase of his life, he is always the same.”

As evidence of how far Cheyney State was from the big-time, when Chaney and Stringer were both at Cheyney State, they often held portions of their practices together. Once, when one of Stringer’s children was in the hospital, Chaney ran the women’s practices as well as his own.

When school was out of session, Chaney and Stringer used to bring hot plates to practice in order to fix great batches of eggs and bacon for the players before practice.

“He has a way of just being himself, down to earth,” Stringer says. “He undresses people so to speak, won’t let people come on with airs. . . . He doesn’t threaten people with his presence or his accomplishments.”

As Chaney puts it: “I don’t get to the lofty places.”

Chaney did not follow an easy route to Temple, where he began his first Division I coaching job at age 50.

Although he was one of Philadelphia’s best high school players in his senior year at Ben Franklin High, he was not offered a scholarship to any of Philadelphia’s Big Five--LaSalle, Penn, St. Joseph’s, Temple and Villanova.

“At that time, there were just not many blacks attending those schools,” Chaney says.

Instead, he went South, to Bethune-Cookman, a predominantly black college in Daytona Beach, Fla., where he gained fame for his dazzling ballhandling. He was chosen in the National Basketball Assn. draft, Chaney says, but nothing came of it.

Instead, Chaney had a seven-month stint at something that seems odd to imagine a major-college coach doing: He played for the Harlem Globetrotters.

It is not a time he remembers fondly, and he says he “didn’t know” when he signed a contract that the team was just a show-act.

“I just wanted to play basketball, and it wasn’t serious basketball,” Chaney says, seemingly still miffed. “I could do the dipsy-doo when someone said to, but I was serious. When I shot the ball, it was for real. I was very unhappy.”

Afterward, he spent 10 years playing in the Eastern League, a semi-professional league.

His coaching career, too, began rungs lower than those of most Division I coaches. He got his start as a teacher and coach at Philadelphia’s Sayre Junior High. Later, he coached in Philadelphia high schools before his 10 years at Cheyney State.

He remains, by his own admission, a man who believes in simple things, although he is by no means a simple man.

“I’m A-B-C, 1-2-3,” Chaney says. “I don’t often make it to Z.”

Some of Chaney’s basketball methods border on the quirky. For one, there are the pre-dawn practices, not as a first-day gimmick but all through the preseason and occasionally during the season. The Temple team will show up at McGonigle Hall for a 5:30 a.m. practice, after which the players are given doughnuts and juice and sent on their way.

The morning practices are held in part, Chaney says, to allow the players the normal time to be students. In part, it is an exercise in discipline and the order of things.

“Mom and Pop used to get up early,” Chaney says. “They showed me what they could do.”

Discipline and order, in Chaney’s eyes, have virtue of their own.

“Life has a definite order in everything around us,” he says. “In plant life, and animal life, there’s an order. You can’t see that and not be able to take the hint to apply it to your own life.”

In his efforts to get to the essentials of things, Chaney has boiled basketball down to one supreme statistic--turnovers. Other coaches stress defense, the fast break. Chaney puts his stock in a statistic that is often an afterthought for them.

“I want to know how many times I had the ball, and how many times I lost it without shooting,” Chaney says.

During practices, a manager keeps track of turnovers. After games, word has it, players ask first how many turnovers they had, then how many points.

This shows on the court. Temple players take care of the basketball as if it were the only one in existence. Some of the passes between guards Howard Evans and Mark Macon may look more like handoffs to the fullback, but it works.

Last season, Temple averaged only 9.4 turnovers a game, and committed 131 fewer than its opponents. Even in the loss to Nevada Las Vegas last month that spoiled Temple’s undefeated record, the Owls turned the ball over only eight times--this against one of the renowned pressing defenses in the country.

That Jim Maloney, Chaney’s head assistant, subscribes to this theory fully is testament in part to the Owls’ success but also to Chaney’s remarkable persuasiveness. Maloney, who was an assistant under Lefty Driesell at Maryland for four years and was at Temple for nine years under Casey, before Chaney came on, swears by the turnover theory. In his own words, “I believe it in my soul.”

That theory is central to the Temple style of play, which is anchored by a disciplined half-court offense. Such crowd-pleasing acts as alley-oops and driving dunks are not favored by Temple teams. “We’d rather take the 15-foot jumper,” Maloney says. “Less spectacular, but also less risky.”

Neither will you see Temple players engaging in rowdy high-fives. “We don’t play from emotion, or we try our darndest not to,” Chaney says.

Chaney’s amiability sometimes belies his toughness, but anyone who has played a game of one-on-one against him says you are apt to catch an elbow, and you had better watch the rules.

Competition apparently brings back the instincts of his youth, when, for lack of an opponent, he would challenge three to five younger boys to take him on together in a playground game for a soda. The rules, back then, sometimes changed to suit Chaney.

“We’d play I make it, I take it, and you make it, I take it,” he says.

Even today, he is not one to let a point go easily. At tennis, his friends say, balls near the line are called out, more often than not.

As a coach on the court, he has been known to stick an intimidating finger in the face of an opposing coach, and to say things about officials that later have become a subject for discussion between himself and the Atlantic 10 Conference.

If an official makes a call that offends him, Chaney has been known to follow the official with a chilling stare for the better part of a timeout before turning to join his huddle, which has gone on without him.

The feistiness didn’t come from nowhere.

“That has to come from being poor, and wanting to go further,” Jay Norman, a former Temple star who is a part-time assistant and Chaney’s friend, told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “If you don’t fight for a piece of the earth, no one’s going to give it to you.”

One of Chaney’s most impassioned subjects, because he believes it denies opportunity, is the NCAA’s Proposition 48. Chaney’s stance is that it punishes students from poor educational backgrounds, and that it can discourage schools from offering scholarships to such players.

“I don’t see it,” he says. “I just can’t digest that, I can’t.”

To Chaney, it seems another obstacle for those seeking to follow a difficult path. He figures everyone needs all the help they can get.

“I’ve come to know,” Chaney says, “that the door of success is but a narrow door.”