Missouri’s Soap Opera : This Showing Has the Potential for a Long Run

If it’s true, as Oklahoma State Coach Leonard Hamilton says, that adversity often brings teams together, then look for the Missouri Tigers to go a long, long way in this year’s NCAA tournament.

What other team has had to deal with the loss of its head coach to illness and the top assistant to school and NCAA investigations? What team, already fighting a battle with the world at large before the coaches’ departures, was forced to confront rumors of dissension within the team afterward, all the while trying to maintain its position in the nation’s top 10?

Having been through enough ups and down to make even the most fervent soap-opera fan skeptical, the team now moves on to the Midwest regional, perhaps the toughest road to the Final Four. Should they make the trip to Seattle, the Tigers likely would have to beat Louisville, Syracuse and Illinois.

Missouri might be better than all three; certainly none of those teams can match the Tigers’ depth. Ask Oklahoma, a 12-point loser to the Tigers in the Big Eight title game Sunday.

And none of the Tigers’ potential foes has a coach like Rich Daly. Forced to take over the reins when crusty Norm Stewart was hospitalized at midseason with colon cancer and Bob Sundvold was suspended, Daly is a refreshing alternative to the ultra-serious sorts roaming the sidelines for most top-20 teams.

After Missouri had beaten Oklahoma, he was asked if he felt any pressure in coaching a talented team that had nevertheless lost in the opening round of the NCAAs the past three seasons.

“No I don’t feel any pressure,” he replied. “I’ve never had any problems coaching in the tournament.”

As the Tigers’ main recruiter, he brought most of the current talent to the Missouri campus, but the 47 year old hadn’t actually coached a team in six years. Even then, it was at the junior-college level.

He still carries on like an assistant today. When he gets excited, which is often, he rises up off the bench just like John Thompson, but the words that come out are hardly strategic pearls. He often tells his players to look the ball into their hands or move their feet on defense.

“I think it’ll be tough for him to go back (to being an assistant),” said center Gary Leonard. “Now he’s been jumping up and running up and down the bench; you can’t do that when you’re an assistant. Unless he plans on staying, I hope he doesn’t get too used to it.”

That doesn’t seem to be the case. While the spotlight of the Big Eight tournament and the upcoming NCAAs has provided a sizable stage, Daly says he can’t wait to go back into the shadows.

“I love the job I had,” he said. “I’ve had chances to be a head coach before, but I’m at home. I just want to get Coach Stewart well.”

Stewart, who has won 420 games the last 21 years at Missouri, collapsed on a team flight in February the day before a game against Oklahoma. Days later he had surgery to remove his gallbladder and part of his colon. Doctors discovered seven bleeding ulcers as well as cancer inside the colon’s right wall.

After the surgery, doctors said Stewart had a 90% chance of recovering but forbade him from coaching the rest of the season. When the Tigers beat Nebraska, Kansas State and the Sooners for the Big Eight title last weekend, he was in Houston, undergoing treatment at a hospital that specializes in working with cancer patients.

There’s no telling where Sundvold was. Before Stewart took ill, his first assistant had been suspended, in part for providing plane fare to a former player, the proof provided by the player’s mother in a tape recording delivered to the NCAA. That left Daly, almost literally, by his lonesome.

“I was driving down the road one day, and I’m watching the traffic and all of a sudden I go ‘What the heck am I doing (coaching)?’ ”

“The way it all happened was so sad, it was so much so quick--Bang! Bang! Bang!,” he recalled. “Coach Stewart and Coach Sundvold, we golf together, we vacation together. They’re my two best friends and all of a sudden they’re gone. All I could do was stop to try and pick up the pieces.”

Daly isn’t exactly the picture of health himself, often wearing a corset during games to protect a back injury. “That’s all we’d need,” said Tigers’ sports-information director Bob Brendel. “If his back goes out, I’d probably end up coaching the team.”

Before the conference tournament there were reports that such an idea wouldn’t have met with too much disapproval from the players. Missouri was just 4-4 during Daly’s initial eight games and some of the Tigers were apparently grousing about some of his bench moves and player rotation.

When the Tigers hit Kansas City last weekend, they couldn’t pick up a newspaper or look at a sportscast without finding some reference to their “problems,” which included players boldly making faces at Daly in huddles, then disregarding his instructions when they returned to the floor.

Things got so bad that after Missouri’s win over Nebraska in the tournament’s opening round, point guard Lee Coward refused to attend the postgame news conference, eventually being persuaded to go by Leonard.

“Just talk but don’t say anything,” the senior told his teammate. “It’ll be just like the Iran-Contra hearings.”

“I think the biggest problem I’ve had recently is registering for spring classes,” Leonard said later. “Before the tournament everyone wanted to know about our lack of confidence--we all thought we were having a pretty successful season. Then everyone started saying that we lacked leadership; well big deal, even if you had never seen us play you probably could say that after we lost our coaches. We just had a couple of bad games, which could have happened even if Coach Stewart had been there.”

But even amid the euphoria of winning the conference tournament and taking a solid third seed into this week’s regionals, Daly admitted that he’s still trying to figure out the ground rules for his new position.

“You know, I’ve had a very good relationship with these kids. I was the one they came to see when they got the measles or were mad at something,” he said. “Now I’m the boss. I’ve been put in that position so I have to do it but really I’m just taking it day by day.”