A Basket Case : Alford’s Obsession for Basketball Leads to His Success as Coach at Southwest Missouri State

He learned to count when he was 3 by watching the scoreboard numbers flip while his daddy coached the high school varsity.

Later, at New Castle’s Chrysler High, the boy grew up to become Indiana’s “Mr. Basketball,” honing his feathery shot by tossing Ping-Pong balls into Pringles potato chip canisters.

He denied himself ice cream for missing practice shots on his driveway court, punished himself with fingertip push-ups for messing up his boot-camp basketball regimen.

He earned a national title, an Olympic gold medal and a Purple Heart under Coach Robert Montgomery Knight at Indiana, and even involved his romance with Dr. Naismith’s peach basket, making his high school sweetheart climb a ladder to fetch the engagement ring he’d placed in a box on the back of the rim.

He was a peculiar son.

“Oh yeah, the neighbors all thought there was something wrong with that boy,” his father remembers. “He’d be out there at midnight, be out there in ice and snow, shooting with galoshes on. He was absolutely obsessed with basketball.”

The boy never played kick the can.

A perfect day to him was putting a new net on the rim.

He charted every practice shot he took--reporting at the end of one summer that he had taken 25,200.

On vacation stopovers, the family’s younger son, Sean, would make blind leaps into motel swimming pools.

Not Steve Alford.

“Steve would walk out there on the diving board and look, and look, and look, and feel the water, then jump in,” his dad says.

What Steve needed was a scouting report on the pool.

Naturally, when his star-spangled playing days ended, Alford having stretched every ounce of ordinary talent into a four-year NBA career, logic dictated he pass “Go” and proceed directly to the bench.

“I was doing scouting reports when I was a sophomore in high school,” Alford says.

The shock isn’t that he has succeeded--”failure” was never a word he fancied much--as much as it has been how fast he has ascended.

In his second season as coach at Southwest Missouri State, Alford, 32, has made over a program that had gone stale after Charlie Spoonhour left, establishing himself as the nation’s brightest young coaching prospect.

Alford’s Bears are 22-7 this season, 12-6 in the Missouri Valley Conference, and still in the hunt for an NCAA berth.

Some coaches toil years before getting a chance to run a program.

Alford toiled for a month.

When the Sacramento Kings released him in 1992, Alford returned home to Indiana to help coach his father’s powerhouse Chrysler team.

Days later, the phone rang.

Manchester College, a Division III school in Manchester, Ind., wanted the home-state hero to rescue a floundering 0-8 team in midseason.

Alford asked his dad about it.

“I said, ‘I guess you have a choice of working for them for money or helping me for free,’ ” Sam Alford remembers. “Not a big choice in my opinion.”

Sam gave Steve two going-away gifts: John Wooden’s seminal basketball work, “The Pyramid of Success,” and a whistle.

“I’d never blown a whistle until I got to my first practice,” he remembers.

Alford was 27.

Manchester was drawing 200 fans a game and had not had a winning season since 1976.

After tug-boating that 0-8 team to a 4-24 finish, Alford strung together seasons of 20-8, 23-4 and 31-1. His last, 1994-95, Manchester advanced to the Division III title game before losing.

The first time a Manchester kid called Alford “Coach,” he winced.

“That was the oddest thing, starting out,” he says. “Coach to me had always meant Dad or Coach Knight.”

Alford had spunk, though.

Once, a Manchester player made 23 consecutive free throws in practice and dared Alford to match it. Maybe the kid didn’t know Alford had shot 89.8% from the line in college, fifth best in NCAA history.

Alford stepped up and sank 218 shots as players watched, mouths agape. Probably none of them had shot Ping-Pong balls into Pringles canisters.

Two things were clear: Things at Manchester were going to change, and Steve Alford was not long for the place.

When Southwest Missouri called in 1995, Alford had barely heard of Springfield, Mo., let alone set foot in it.

When an official offer was tendered Alford, as usual, tiptoed to the edge of the diving board.

Sam says, “He used to aggravate his mom and I because he couldn’t make a decision; he wanted to hear the full story.”

Steve made the decision at 1:30 a.m. in a Burger King parking lot after he had hashed over the details with his parents, Sam and Sharan, and wife Tanya.

Alford accepted the position on one condition, that his father join him on the bench as an assistant.

Sam Alford had spent 20 years at Chrysler High, coaching prep powers before packed houses. He had turned down college offers so he could coach sons Steve and Sean through high school. Sam was only 52, but had found himself waiting at the mailbox for his quarterly 401K reports.

“I needed a change,” he says.

So, Sam and Sharan packed up and moved to Springfield, lured by opportunity and the chance to grow older with their son and two grandchildren.

Steve didn’t need a resume to know how much his dad cared.

“I think that’s the problem with a lot of the players,” Steve says. “They never really fall in love with it. This business is too hard to have a passion for if you don’t.”

Sam Alford handles recruiting, concentrating on Indiana.

And Steve still calls his No. 1 assistant “Dad.”

“He was my dad long before he was my coach,” Steve says.

But although basketball issues are discussed in open forums, there is no doubt who is in charge.

“If we’re not doing our job, or screwing up or something, he’ll tell us,” Sam says of Steve. “He won’t beat around the bush.”

The son has come a long way since “Steve, clean up your room.”

The toughest part for Sam has been the games.

“The worst place I feel it is with the referees,” Sam says. “As an assistant coach, you get no respect. . . . The biggest thing is not being able to say anything, just having to sit there.”

For the Alfords, basketball is the circle of life. Kory, Steve’s 4-year-old boy, is learning to read off the scoreboard.

Kory ran into the locker room before the Drake game this year and read out loud--”Get on the floor”--the words his dad had written on the chalkboard to his players.

Alford watches Kory and Bryce, his 2-year-old, and sees himself.

*

Practice in the Hammons Student Center is crisp, fast and organized.

The state may be Missouri, but the system is Indiana’s--motion offense and man-to-man defense.

Alford is still skilled enough to drill a 20-footer to make his point, or body up to a defender. He scored 2,438 points at Indiana, none on dunks.

Sam Alford stays in silent backdrop as his son commands the court.

Comparisons between Steve Alford and a young Bob Knight are inevitable. Knight was 24 when he was named head coach at Army.

Like Knight, Alford makes his players keep daily notebooks. Alford still has the one he kept for four years in Bloomington.

Like Knight, Alford can break down opponents’ films in an hour.

“He got some from me because he was a coach’s son,” Sam says. “But the majority of his knowledge of the game came from Coach Knight.”

Alford is his own man, but the cloak of Indiana is always draped over his shoulders.

“I saw how many times we’d won over teams that had more talent, just because we were better prepared,” he says, remembering specifically Indiana’s 1984 East Regional semifinal upset of Michael Jordan and North Carolina.

This season, Alford’s Bears turned a similar trick on Fresno State, beating Jerry Tarkanian’s talent-superior team by 15 points in late December.

Alford wondered if he would inherit Knight’s demons, the on-court tirades and cussfests.

“You’re always interested to see what’s going to irritate you, what’s going to be your boiling point,” Alford says.

No Indiana player suffered Knight’s wrath more than Alford, an Indiana storybook legend.

Alford was a star when he arrived in Bloomington, a prep pretty boy who’d averaged 37.7 points his senior year of high school.

“My last few years at New Castle, we were playing in front of 10,000 every night,” Steve says. “One game . . . we had press tables that went the entire length of the floor. Eighty-four feet of nothing but press tables.”

Knight took care of Alford’s ego, driving him relentlessly.

Alford was as stubborn as his coach, though, determined not to crack.

He had prepared for Knight since grammar school.

“He knew he was going to get his rear end worked off,” Sam says of Steve. “But that’s what he wanted.”

What did not kill Alford at Indiana made him stronger.

Before the 1986-87 season, the season Indiana beat Syracuse for the national title, Knight took Alford aside, according to John Feinstein’s book, “A Season on the Brink.”

“I just want you to know how much I appreciate you,” Alford says Knight told him. “You stand for everything this program is about. I don’t think I could care about you more than I do if you were my own son.”

Alford has never figured Knight out.

“It’s still an odd relationship,” he says.

During a mid-January visit, Alford said he and Knight had not spoken this season.

“He’s extremely busy and I understand that,” Alford says. “It’s just good to hear from his assistants, because I know that’s an extension of what he is.”

Knight did not respond to an interview request.

Alford, it turns out, did not inherit his mentor’s darker side.

He is not a young version of Knight.

“I can’t be,” Alford says. “It’s not my personality. It doesn’t make him right or wrong. I would love, down the road, to say I’m a coach who can get the most out of somebody, because that’s what they say about Coach Knight.”

Alford disdains profanity and has yet to heave a chair across a court.

After his Bears had lost two consecutive games this season, Alford went easy on them in practice.

“It doesn’t do any good to rip into them,” he says. “There has to be a lighter side.”

Alford has three players from Indiana in his starting lineup.

Two say they chose Southwest Missouri because they saw Alford as the anti-Knight.

“He doesn’t go in cussing players, like Bob Knight,” said sophomore center Danny Moore, from Shelbyville, Ind. “He’s easy to communicate with. You can talk to him. I don’t think you can talk to Bobby Knight.”

Freshman guard Kevin Ault was Indiana’s “Mr. Basketball” last season, averaging 30.1 points for Warsaw High.

Ault said he was petrified meeting Knight during a recruiting visit and didn’t think he could play for the Indiana coach.

“I’m a shy person, myself,” Ault said. “I didn’t know if I could handle the personal lashings.”

But it took a lot for Ault to leave Indiana.

“I wouldn’t come out of state to play for anybody.”

He did for Alford.

*

Knight is going to retire someday.

His logical successor is Steve Alford.

Forget the knock that Alford is too young.

“A lot of coaches who are 50, they have a lot of experience, but few have had as much basketball experience as I’ve had,” Alford says.

The Indiana subject is a touchy one, though. Alford maintains he was happy at Manchester and is happy in Springfield.

“I never predict what’s going to happen a year from now, or four years from now, or six years from now,” he says. “I concentrate on the now.”

But no one really expects Alford to stay at SW Missouri.

Sam Alford is biased, naturally, but he knows coaching, and he says of his son, “His potential is unlimited.”

In the natural order, Alford would return to Bloomington, one Indiana legend replacing another.

“When you talk about dream jobs, following Coach Knight, I don’t know if you’d consider that a dream job,” Alford says. “What can you do that he hasn’t already done?”

Yet, the thought creeps into his mind.

“You know, it is my alma mater,” Alford says. “That is my home state and everything else. I think you have to weigh everything.

“It’s just a matter of timing, of getting the right shot at the right time at the right place. Right now, my timing and the right place is right here.”