Colorado Coach Rides Wave to Inevitable Unemployment
This isn’t quite as goofy as the Bo Schembechler Fires Bill Frieder, Hires Steve Fisher, Wins National Championship, Is Forced to Keep Steve Fisher college basketball headline story of 1989--but it’s getting there, it’s getting there.
Tom Miller is the coach at the University of Colorado--temporarily. His team will play here today. If it wins, it will qualify--with 17 defeats--for the NCAA tournament’s 64-school field. As long as Colorado keeps playing, Miller keeps coaching.
Except, he’s already been canned. Miller’s team struggled through the regular season with a record of 10-17. It finished eighth in the Big Eight. The university president concurred with the director of athletics that Miller must go. They tried to withhold the news, but a TV station got hold of the story, so they had to give Miller his notice and go public. They did so a few days after he returned from his father’s funeral.
Unlike Schembechler, Colorado did not decide to bring in a temporary. Leaving wasn’t the coach’s idea, as it was last season with Frieder taking a job with Arizona State while he was still employed by Michigan. Leaving was strictly the administration’s idea.
As Miller himself said: “I came to Colorado knowing that in big-time basketball, you either win or move on.”
Well, the plot thickens. After Saturday’s 82-72 upset of Oklahoma State, coupled with Friday’s 92-88 mega-upset of Missouri, the coach is suddenly Mr. Popularity. Suddenly, nobody from Boulder is eager to see him go. Suddenly, everybody wants this former West Point cadet to stick around, to start what he finished.
These people include the Big Eight’s leading scorer and rebounder, 6-foot-10 junior center Shaun Vandiver, who is threatening to leave Colorado now that the coach has been dismissed. And the talkative Vandiver is still talking. After he lit up Oklahoma State for 26 points and 16 rebounds Saturday, Vandiver, unlike many intimidated schoolboy athletes, did not mince words.
“If we win this tournament and make the NCAAs,” Vandiver said, “the president and athletic director (at Colorado) are going to have their (tails) between their legs.”
Tom Miller, 41, is trying to enjoy all of this, but it’s not easy. He’s a tight-lipped guy by nature, a guy who tends to be leery of the media, a guy who played for Bob Knight at Army and coached under Knight at Indiana, a guy who was warned by Athletic Director Bill Marolt in 1988 that he would be fired if he kept grabbing or manhandling players at practice.
On the other hand, much like Knight, Miller is a big believer in discipline, is dogged in his determination to make his players attend class and is concerned about the priorities of scholastic basketball, saying: “If you look at the college game, there are some strange things happening. You don’t need to be a Rhodes scholar to figure it out. Is it a win-at-all-costs mentality, or what?”
The coach got at least a partial answer after Colorado’s victory over Missouri, when the university president, Gordon Gee, issued a written statement in Boulder congratulating Miller on his splendid achievement. One day, the guy’s fired. Next day, he gets told what a good job he’s doing.
Miller, also like his mentor Knight, has a few eccentricities, superstitions, such as wearing the same lucky clothes. Knight is known for his crimson V-neck sweater. Miller wore the same faded pink shirt and droopy red necktie during both the Missouri and Oklahoma State games and is expected to have it on for today’s championship game.
“If I can’t find a dry-cleaner open, I’ll have to hand-wash it myself in the sink,” Miller said.
He can be a character, a charmer, when he wants to be. When one of his forwards, Rodell (House) Guest, a notoriously bad shooter of free throws, came through with two in the clutch Saturday, Miller said: “I think he’s on a tear. But don’t get any ideas about shooting the ball after this, Rodell.”
Same as you-know-who, Miller trades friendly barbs with his players at news conferences, dares them to one-up him, re-directs questions to them, as when someone asked how Colorado’s strength was holding up, having to play three difficult games in less than 72 hours.
“How about it, you guys? You gonna have the strength to show up tomorrow?” Miller asked his players.
“Si, senor,” replied team joker Reggie Morton, a senior guard who can’t speak Spanish except to order from a menu.
Or when forward Brent Vaughan (from Bloomington, Ind., incidentally) spoke of what a pleasure it was to play before 17,000 cheering fans after averaging about 3,000 for home games at Colorado, Miller piped up and said: “What Brent doesn’t understand was that those people who were cheering for us were OU-KU fans.”
Oklahoma and Kansas, he meant self-deprecatingly, were rooting for a chance to play Colorado. They thought they could beat Colorado. Everybody in the Big Eight thought they could beat Colorado. Tom Miller’s Colorado. Or at least what used to be Tom Miller’s Colorado.
“The coach is like a diamond in a rough mine,” said Vandiver, who has his own way of putting things. “The guys who let him go, I guess they went with their own best thoughts.”
He wonders what they might be thinking next--or where their heads might be when they’re thinking it. “I still don’t know if this is a fairy tale or a nightmare,” Vandiver said. Neither does his coach.