Mount St. Mary’s Man for All Seasons

Jim Phelan, Mr. Bow Tie, is driving his Cadillac along the Old Emmitsburg Road. The land is snow-covered and divided by white fences. Sunk deep in his tilted-back seat, he has the wheel and all that he ever wanted of the world at his fingertips.

He’s just finished lunch at one of those roadside inns with wood floors and piping hot soup. Everyone knows him; the waiters call him “Coach.”

Now he’s pointing against the car window toward his sprawling red-brick and white-wood house. It has eight bedrooms and three kitchens, and two individual apartments, one occupied by his 85-year-old mother. His five children grew up there. He calls it “a monstrous white elephant.”

It’s nine-tenths of a mile from the main entrance to Mount St. Mary’s College, “right on the glide path of graduates, players and friends. In fact, anybody looking for the school accidentally finds me.”

It could almost be said he is the school. As much as any basketball coach can be identified with a college, as John Wooden was to UCLA or Dean Smith is to North Carolina, Jim Phelan and the Mount are practically synonymous.

In 35 years, the bushy-browed Phelan, who also is athletic director, became a king of the hardwoods in Division II. His 659 victories put him second to Winston-Salem State’s Clarence “Bighouse” Gaines (790) among active college coaches, just ahead of Dean Smith (657). He’s won almost 70 percent of his games, taking the Mount to the NCAA Division II tournament 14 times, to its final four five times (most recently in 1985) and to a national title once. At 59, his hair wispy in front, he deserves to loosen his bow tie.

Instead, he has this whole new challenge. The school has presented him with a gem of a 3,500-seat arena, with big windows on a central corridor aligned with a main campus building and its cupola, and a mountain in the background. The Knott athletic complex replaced Memorial Gymnasium, known as “The Hangar” -- a World War II hangar shipped in pieces from the West Coast and reassembled in 1950. The floor actually caved in twice.

The first time, Phelan had been sitting in his office in the building. “I heard this huge noise. It sounded like thunder. I said, ‘What the hell was that?’ ” He hurried around the corner and, to his amazement, “the whole gymnasium floor had sunk 18 inches.”

Along with the new building, Phelan has a mandate to win -- in Division I. Partly because several traditional rivals have moved from II to I, said Phelan, the Mount (enrollment, 1,400) followed. But this is one of Phelan’s most inexperienced teams; the record is 8-14.

He hasn’t been through anything like this since going 6-17 in 1971-72. That season, he didn’t wear bow ties because his children were embarrassed by them. The next season, he began wearing them again and, of course, won. But the answer to winning in Division I won’t be found at his country haberdashery.

Yet Phelan has always found a way. When Robert J. Wickenheiser became the school’s president in 1977 and the team was coming off a rare losing season, Phelan recalled him asking, “What do you need to win?” For most coaches, it would have been a loaded question.

“I said, ‘I think I need an assistant coach.’ ” All those years, he never had an assistant!

“I said I needed a full-time assistant, primarily on the road, recruiting. Sure enough, the last 10 years have been the greatest 10 years I’ve ever had.”

A man of few requests, and demands only of himself, Phelan is known for working persistently to elevate his players’ talent (although he can’t make them taller). His teams usually feature perimeter shooters, cutters and screeners and scrappers on defense. Once in a while, he strikes gold.

In his Philadelphia hometown, Phelan discovered Fred Carter, who went on to play in the NBA from 1969 through 1977 and is now assistant coach of the Philadelphia 76ers. Carter was the Walt Frazier, the Magic Johnson of Emmitsburg. “I thought they would never stop yelling,” said Phelan. And that was when Carter was introduced before his first game.

It was the early ‘60s. A friend in Philadelphia called Phelan. ‘Come up to this all-star game and see this prospect, John Baum.’ After the game, Phelan approached Baum, who told him he had signed the day before with Temple. Phelan, with his friend, walked disconsolately from the arena. “Hey, you’ve come a long way,” said the other man. “Let’s go back.”

Carter had been the best player in the game, but he had dropped out of high school and more or less disappeared. Coaches were overlooking him. On a hunch, the two men hurriedly returned the one block, and found Carter walking out of the locker room.

“He had a cigarette in his hand,” recalled Phelan.

Phelan’s friend said to Carter, “Fred, come over here, I want you to meet a friend of mine.”

Phelan settled back from his soup. To think, if only he could find another Fred Carter. ...

“He showed me the best hand action I’d seen,” said Phelan. “He had the cigarette jammed in his palm and had put it into his pocket, just like that. I mean, lightning quick. He said, ‘Yeah, very happy to meet you.’ ”

Happily, it turned out that Carter had his high-school diploma. After his father died, Carter had dropped out. But he had later returned to school, attending both day and night, earnest in his effort to graduate. He also held a job as he attended school. The persistent effort made an impression in the Mount’s admissions office when Carter presented himself. Shortly, he was admitted. That August, Phelan picked up his 20-year-old freshman at the train station in Baltimore and the two headed west for school.

“The farther into the country we got, he said, ‘This is pretty far out.’

“I said, ‘Nah, it’s not far.’ ”

They drove some more.

“I said, ‘Fred, there’s not too many black kids in school.’

“He said, ‘How many?’

“I said, ‘You.’ ”

The best thing they did was not turn back.

“I said, ‘You don’t have to worry about being a crusader or a pioneer.’ I said, ‘Your biggest problem will be being lionized. You’ll be a hero.’ ”

Carter was, and took it in stride. He stayed four years and graduated. After his NBA playing career, he coached women’s basketball here before he went into pro coaching. He often comes back to visit.

Phelan came out of La Salle in 1951 -- his coach, Ken Loeffler, wore bow ties. He played for the Marines, briefly for the NBA’s 1953-54 Philadelphia Warriors and the Pottstown Packers of the Eastern League. Competitor that he is, he still believes he’d have had a little longer NBA career (“I wouldn’t have made a lasting impression”) had he not been cut for a player who would play for a few hundred dollars less.

One game when he was with Philadelphia, an injured teammate was unable to shoot his foul shots. The opposing coach, Clair Bee of the Baltimore Bullets, walked in front of the Philadelphia bench, looking for an unlikely fellow he could pick to shoot. “I was the only guy he didn’t recognize,” said Phelan. He made the two -- it turned out to be a highlight of his pro career.

In 1954, Tom Gola led La Salle to the NCAA title, with Phelan serving as an assistant to Loeffler. After the season, Loeffler said to him, “A little school in Emmitsburg, Md., needs a coach.”

Phelan and his wife, Dottie, also from South Philadelphia, drove into town, sized up the cows and wondered if this was for them. That was almost 1,000 games ago.

In his very first home game, the young Phelan caught the spirit of the crowd. After a year or so, his wife was settled in. He never meant to stay this long, it’s just that one season led to another ... and another.

And almost every one was filled with excitement. His record is packed with close victories. In 1962, the Mount won the NCAA Division II title game by a point in overtime, after winning triple- and quadruple-overtime games earlier in the season. In a fairly typical finish to a Phelan game, the Mount advanced in the 1985 NCAA tournament on a running 30-footer in the last seconds.

While many of the victories haven’t come easily, he’s endured partly because he can relax, as he would say, “drop my pack.” The Charles Town races are his “avocation”; one feature of the area that he said has helped keep him on the mountain is “year-round racing.”

He hustles up the steps and into the new building for an afternoon practice. “John Wooden,” he said, “was 53 when he won his first championship. I’m still in my 50s -- barely.”

A few nights later, he was back on the team bus, heading to Baltimore and the first Beltway Classic. He has a way to go to make an impression in Division I. More than anything, he needs a big rebounder. Next season, the Mount will join the Northeast Conference, the old ECAC Metro. For now, he was trying to get past the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. A few minutes before game time at Loyola College, he followed his routine. He put on a brown bow tie to match his camel’s-hair blazer and brown slacks.

Phelan watched the game on the edge of his chair. Occasionally, he’d bolt to the edge of the floor and cry out in anguish at an official or one of his players. But he’s not as prone to explosive outbursts as he was when he was younger. One story has it that during a halftime many years ago, he kicked a trash can, then hopped around in agony as his players tried to keep from laughing.

With 35 seconds to play and trailing UMBC by three, Phelan called time. He set up a play for any one of four outside shooters. With 12 seconds left, the only senior on the squad, Mike Tate, hit for three. Unfortunately for Phelan, UMBC dominated the overtime.

“That’s the story of our season,” he said, drinking from a can of soda outside the basement locker room. “We don’t play badly -- just bad enough to lose.

“What the heck,” he added, and forced a laugh.

Over the years, he’d often done what seemed the impossible, and he wasn’t finished yet.