Despite His Downfall, Cassidy Stays Upbeat

From the window in his second-story office, Pete Cassidy can see some of the Cal State Northridge world he has inhabited for more than three decades.

Below, just outside the walls of the sparkling new kinesiology building, athletic fields stretch long and wide. Several hundred yards away, partially blocked from Cassidy’s view by a tree, sits the baseball diamond.

The view is not picturesque, but it’s a view nonetheless.

“You know, I’ve never had an office by myself before,” Cassidy said. “I always shared space with other coaches.”

There undoubtedly are many other things Cassidy never had before, but the one constant in his life had been basketball, Northridge men’s basketball.

Not anymore. Not this season and most likely never again.

For the first time in a quarter-century, Cassidy is an outsider looking in, an interested bystander watching from a distance the program he painstakingly helped build, shape, nurture.

For the first time in all of those years, Cassidy and Northridge basketball are not linked like some people believed, maybe even hoped, they would be for yet a while longer.

That notion disappeared last March when Cassidy was fired, when he was unceremoniously dumped like some bum who didn’t deserve a more dignified departure from his life’s work.

But even though the wounds might still be raw and probably will never heal, Cassidy refuses to let them paralyze him. He won’t allow himself to drown in self-pity because no good Irishman worth his Guinness does that, and Cassidy is a good Irishman.

That’s why his desk drawer houses a paper pad with Irish proverbs on every page, to help him maintain perspective.

“I choose to try to make those around me happy and I choose to be happy,” Cassidy said, quoting from his own philosophy. “Whatever bitterness I harbor should not eat at me and definitely should not affect the people I work with or my family and my friends.

“My responsibility to myself and to those around me is too great, the way I see things. We have a responsibility to each other to make our lives good. I prefer to be that way rather than being miserable.”

Cassidy would have been much happier, of course, were he still coaching the Matadors. He desperately wanted to return this season to usher Northridge into the Big Sky Conference after so many years in vastly inferior leagues. Some at the school had different ideas.

During a meeting with Paul Bubb, the athletic director, and Ron Kopita, vice president of student affairs, Cassidy was told his fate.

“I wanted a contract extension through this [season],” Cassidy said. “I really wanted to be in the Big Sky. . . . I paid my dues, I felt, in bringing [the program] this far and this long. I thought I had earned the right to have that year.

“In my opinion, it was a poor decision.”

That is was.

Whether the game had passed him by, as critics contended, or whether the Matadors required a younger and perhaps more energetic leader, Cassidy deserved better and was owed much more. If not because of what the man meant to Northridge sports, then out of simple decency.

It would have been easy to do it the right way.

They could have given Cassidy the extension he wanted. They could have let him go out in style. They could have let him say his goodbyes.

Instead, they chose to imprint their shoe marks on his rear end, hiding behind lame excuses that the program needed fresh blood now that it finally was able to recruit out-of-state players, now that it had a full complement of scholarships and was headed for a legitimate conference.

Go figure that. Cassidy won 334 games on shoestring budgets that prevented him from recruiting top prospects from California or anywhere else and he was widely respected for his basketball knowledge, but he supposedly wasn’t the pilot to fly Northridge to the Big Sky.

The rationale still escapes Cassidy but he tries not to dwell on it. He concentrates instead on teaching kinesiology courses, playing golf occasionally and, yes, staying interested in Northridge basketball.

Cassidy believes the Matadors, now under Bobby Braswell, will do well this season and he plans to watch them play. But not being on the court has been tough for him.

“It’s so different. Even when you go to sleep at night, you always have basketball in your mind. Now it’s not there,” said Cassidy, who will retire from Northridge when the school year ends but hasn’t discarded the possibility of coaching again. “There’s a void and an emptiness there. . . . I miss the teaching, the relationship with the players, the game preparation.

“One door has been closed to me but I feel other doors might be opened. . . . Basketball will always be a part of my life. How much in the future, we’ll have to wait and see.”