The Son Also Rises : After a Shaky Start, Joey Meyer Found Success at DePaul--but His Father Still Worries About Him

The father worries about the son. He always has. He worries about the dark circles under his boy’s eyes. Worries about the sleeping pills. The lost weight. The Di-Gel lunches. The 15-hour days. The silence.

He worries because he knows.

Forty years ago at Chicago Stadium, Ray Meyer was the DePaul coach. His son, Joey, was 2. That night, Meyer’s Blue Demons were seconds away from upsetting the legendary Adolph Rupp and his nationally ranked Kentucky Wildcats, a team that had won the NCAA championship a season earlier.

As his wife, Marge, watched nervously from the stands, Meyer shouted instructions to his team. Only a few moments remained. The score was tied. DePaul had the ball. A basket would win it for the Blue Demons.

Then it happened. A DePaul player, perhaps flustered by the pressure, saw the ball stripped from his hands by a Kentucky defender. In the time it took for Meyer’s face to contort in disbelief, Kentucky converted the steal into a winning basket. The buzzer sounded. It was over.

A stunned Meyer shook hands with Rupp. Then, into the locker room he went, only to find one of his players sitting by himself, a towel draped over his head in shame. It was the player who had lost the ball.

“You have won many games for DePaul,” Meyer told the young man. “You have nothing to be ashamed about.”

Meyer spoke briefly with reporters, returned to the locker room and stayed there until the hurt subsided. Then he drove home.

At midnight, the ringing of the phone echoed through his house. Meyer picked up the receiver.

“Hello?” he said.

It was Marge. He had left her at the Stadium.

Meyer learned. As the years swept by, he quit treating each loss as a private Dunkirk. He learned to smile when victorious, wince when defeated and then go on. No longer did he walk the Chicago streets after a loss, not wanting to go home, not wanting to be consoled.

And he never, ever forgot Marge again.

The father coached 42 years. The son has coachedeight. The father won 724 games.The son has won 158. That’s 50 years of Meyers pacing and squirming on the DePaul sideline. That’s 882 victories . . . and counting.

But Ray Meyer worries about the son. The Blue Demons, expected to finish in the top 20 and win the newly formed Great Midwest Conference, have struggled this season. Which means Joey Meyer has struggled with them.

“Right now, he’s kind of getting desperate,” Ray Meyer said.

A recent winning streak has helped. DePaul, clinging to a 6-5 record days ago, has won its last four games. But that doesn’t mean Joey has slept any easier. Or eaten any better. Or fretted any less.

Another loss or two and the young Meyer could be a mess again. That’s how seriously he takes this stuff.

Not long ago, Ray stayed up with Joey until 3 a.m., doing what he could to persuade his son that basketball was only a game, nothing more. Joey thanked him, walked him to the door and then, still unable to accept the results of a loss, hurried to his VCR and watched tapes of his team.

“He’s got to understand there’s more to life than basketball and tapes,” Ray Meyer said. “But Joey keeps everything within himself.”

Earlier this month, when lightly regarded University of San Francisco beat the Blue Demons by 15 points, Joey Meyer was distraught. Afterward, he sat with his head in his hands, wondering what he , not his players, had done wrong this time.

“When I saw Joey after that game, I thought he probably should have quit,” Ray said. “Joey blames himself for everything. It’s amazing.”

Actually, the son’s biggest mistake was sticking around to witness the worst basketball a DePaul team had played in years, if not decades. Ray, who now works as the radio color commentator for the Blue Demons, called the performance “a new low. If we had tried to play worse, it would have been hard to.”

What had once been a promising season lurched unexpectedly off track. That immediately caused Joey Meyer, the professional agonizer, to elevate his own game, so to speak. He watched more tapes. He changed his lineup . . . seven times. He blamed himself for the tiniest errors. A kid missed a breakaway dunk? Joey’s fault. A late charter bus? Joey’s fault. The worse it got, the more Joey criticized himself.

“This year when things go wrong, even after eight years of coaching, you doubt yourself,” Joey Meyer said. “You start thinking, ‘Maybe I should have done it this way.’ I think I self-analyze things too much. I take it much too seriously. I know it, but I can’t help it. This is the way I am as a coach.”

It isn’t much better during a winning streak. For instance, did you see him as the Blue Demons won their third consecutive game last Wednesday evening against Cincinnati, one of the best teams in the conference? Never has it looked as if a coach enjoyed a victory less.

And ask him about the school’s “Spot the Coach” promotion, the one where if you see Joey on the “L” train, get his autograph and return it to the DePaul ticket office, you receive two free basketball tickets. The Joey Meyer response: “Right now, there aren’t too many people who want (an autograph). If I ride it, I’m going down with security guards so somebody doesn’t whack me.”

Meyer has never known anything but DePaul. His father had been the coach at the university for seven years when he was born. High school years were spent at DePaul Academy, college at DePaul, where he eventually became the team captain as a senior. His first job was as an assistant on his father’s staff. Thirteen seasons later, he earned his first head coaching job--at DePaul. He lives three blocks from the urban campus.

And that’s where he has been ever since. One time, shortly before Oklahoma hired Billy Tubbs in 1980, the Sooners contacted him about the vacant position. Meyer interviewed for the job, but before a decision could be made, DePaul officials quickly promised him that whenever his father retired, Joey would be named the successor.

That whenever came in 1984. So did the constant second-guessing. The boos. The hurt.

In his rookie season, DePaul finished 19-10, the first time in eight years that the Blue Demons hadn’t won 20 or more games. DePaul was invited to the NCAA tournament and lost to Syracuse in the first round.

The second season was worse. The Blue Demons won only 16. The local columnists wondered if perhaps, at 36, Meyer wasn’t too young for the job. Or maybe he had benefited too much from his last name. Or maybe, well, he stunk as a coach.

Meyer never forgot those moments. He never forgot that feeling of desperation and loneliness as he stood on the court at game’s beginning, heard his name announced over the public address system and then heard the boos rain down on him. He was young. He was new. He had ideals. Now this ?

Making it worse was the considerable shadow of his father. Ray Meyer was beloved in the city. Coach Ray. He wrote a newspaper column. He had his own television show. He was the radio color analyst. Worse yet, he sat only 10 feet from the DePaul bench during the games.

So Joey Meyer did what came naturally. “You start feeling sorry for yourself,” he said.

But then, as it had happened three decades earlier for his father, the improbable took place. Considered nothing more than a courtesy pick for the NCAA tournament that year, the Blue Demons won their first game. And their second. And almost their third before Duke beat them in a Sweet 16 game.

Joey Meyer was saved.

“All of the sudden I wasn’t as dumb,” he said. “I was a genius then.”

Since then, he hasn’t coached a DePaul team that has won fewer than 20 games. Better yet, the Blue Demons have been to the tournament four out of the last five years.

“This year, I’m back to being a dummy,” he said. “It’s a yearly thing.”

DePaul isn’t quite the program it used to be. Meyer still gets his share of the area’s best high school stars, but he loses his share, too. Freshman forward Tom Kleinschmidt, considered the city’s second-best player, stayed home. Meyer also signed highly touted guard Howard Nathan from Peoria.

But forward Juwan Howard, considered the top player in Chicago and one of the best in the country, went to Michigan.

The list of Chicago exports continues: Eric Anderson went to Indiana, Jamie Brandon to Louisiana State and Aminu Timbrerlake to Kentucky.

It isn’t necessarily Meyer’s fault. No recruiter gets everyone--unless you’re Steve Fisher at Michigan. After all, DePaul can offer only so much. Or as Ray Meyer said: “We’ve got the cake, but we don’t have the frosting on the cake.”

So Joey Meyer makes do. In this case, he has four starters back from a 20-9 team, but a DePaul team for the ages, this isn’t. Senior forward David Booth leads the team in scoring with an average of 19.7 points, but at 190 pounds he also leads the team in getting pushed around. Senior center Stephen Howard, with 16.5 points and 9.1 rebounds, is also worth watching. After that . . . well, it depends what night you catch the Blue Demons on WGN-TV.

What really has caused Meyer to toss and turn at night has more to do with communication than points. Joey Meyer has the answer: It’s his fault.

“I’m struggling just as bad as I did in my second year,” he said. “It’s the nature of the beast.”

Meyer is too hard on himself. It is a character trait, and a dangerous one at that.

Instead, he should listen to Ray Meyer. Listen to those 42 years of experience. Listen hard, because father knows best. He always has.

To his son, he says to enjoy life. Hug your wife, Barbara. Cherish your son, Brian. Quit thinking the world revolves around DePaul basketball. Ten years from now, who will care? Do this, says the father to the son, and all will be OK. Do this and sleep will come easier. The craving for antacid tablets will lessen.

And if he resists?

Ray Meyer shakes his head. He is worrying again.

“I don’t know,” he said.

He does know this much: The son will never coach as long as the father. The circumstances are different, the pressures more intense, the game forever changed. A nervous breakdown would come to Joey before he reached the halfway point.

“Either that,” said the father, “or he’ll be dead.”