bearister said:
Your comment about players arriving at college lacking the fundamentals was touched on by Brad Duggan in his blunt, 2 x 4 on the head style in this 20 year old article:
"The game itself hasn't changed," he said, "but the quality of coaching and playing has gone way down. There are too many guys coaching who aren't capable of teaching a first-grader how to open a carton of chocolate milk."
WHERE ARE THEY NOW / Ex-coach still drives in high gear
https://www.sfgate.com/sports/article/WHERE-ARE-THEY-NOW-Ex-coach-still-drives-in-2865463.php
*Come on, SFCB, I'm counting on you to have some Brad Duggan stories.
A long time ago, back when Cal was playing boring basketball and losing at it, I got tired of going to Cal games and I stayed home. Looking for some action, I heard that Brad Duggan had a really good team over at CCSF, so I wandered over to catch a game. His best player was a little guard, Dean "the Dream" Maye. The team didn't have a lot of athletic players, and not much speed, so their game was in the halfcourt, and they played deliberately. They were so good that they took apart teams like surgeons, probing weaknesses, and then exploiting them. I went to every game that season, and the next and the next. One year, Duggan had this very athletic team, a fast break team that could throw down 110 points on you without breaking a sweat. They ran like deer and jumped to the rafters. I don't remember seeing a loss in those years. Here was a coach that could coach very different styles of play, who would pick an offense that highlighted the abilities of his players.
Duggan played his college ball at SF State. He was a wide but undersized post man in his day. As a coach, Duggan was loud, demonstrative, and in total control. The players respected him no end, and really enjoyed themselves. He was pretty rough around the edges, a sort of hippie who used a lot of colorful language, and used to hold court with friends, fans, and reporters at a bar down on Mission street, where he liked to drink beer and talk sports. He was very good friends with Bobby Knight, which means he was likely a friend of Pete Newell as well. Like both of those coaches, he loved his players, most of whom were black kids from the City, many from the living projects, from Hunter's point, Balboa High, the Fillmore, the Bayview, and Ingleside. Even in those days, too many black male children were raised by working single moms, and grew up with little discipline. He was hard on them but loved them, and he had lifelong relationships with many of his players. He worked hard to find universities and colleges for them to go after CCSF, and found jobs for many as well. Probably the best player he ever turned out was Dean Garrett, a fine center, who he sent to Bobby Knight at Indiana, and Knight won an NCAA title with him.
If you wanted to know what Brad Duggan was like, you needed to arrive at a CCSF game about an hour early, because that was when the players would be dressing for the game, and the gym would start filling up with all the parents, relatives, and friends of the players, past and present players. It was like a favorite neighborhood meeting place, where families came to meet, and in this case to meet Coach Duggan. He would then appear and make the rounds with each group, greeting everyone who came honor him in a way, for helping their sons get a real break and get their start in life. This was all before the games started, and Duggan made sure he had talked with everyone who had come to the gym, and learned from them how their son or sons were doing.
When Duggan retired, I think, he took a job as the color guy on Cal TV or radio broadcasts. He was great but never got totally comfortable with it. Then some Cal fans proposed his name for the Cal head coach job. The rumors started that maybe Cal would be willing to take a look at him. I don't thing anything ever came of it, and I'm sure, with his persona, he would have not been a good fit for the elitist (compared to him) UC Berkeley. Dinner with big donors, with the Haases, or the Chancellor, or any professors and the like might not have been his cup of tea. Hanging out at LaVal's, drinking beer with Joe Kapp and Ned Averbuck would have been more his style. Duggan as a coach would have been the Cal Administration's worse nightmare, I'm afraid.
The coach Brad Duggan was an enigma, one of his kind in everything he did. You couldn't put him in one bag, called "authoritarian", though modernists would try and fail, because they always leave out the intense love a coach like Duggan had for his players. During games, he only spent about 60% of his time on the bench with his players. He would often sit 10 or 15 rows above them, or wander down to the either end and watch the game from there, all the time stopping to bark some instructions at his players. The was one moment that typified his coaching style for the player with a hard head. This player, often a starter or even the star, makes a crucial mistake. Duggan jumps up and calls time out. he start yelling at the the player, "You stupid SOB! (or something similar). What in hell do you think you were doing? How many times have we gone over this in practice? You never, ever, foul a guy in the backcourt ( or some other offense). As Duggan finishes his tirade, and looks around to talk with the rest of the players, the kid who he had scolded slinks down to the far end of the bench, sitting alone to lick his wounds. Duggan starts to draw up a play, and then looks around to the kid sitting alone on the end of the bench, and yells at him, "What do you think you are doing, sitting way down at the end of the bench? Get the hell back over hear and pay attention to this play." And of course the play Duggan draws up will likely set this kid up to take an easy wide open shot. This play illustrates how to get a player's attention, get him to forget his mistake, and restore his confidence in himself by being rewarded with an easy two points. As Duggan himself said, "I have so many more ways to make a 17 year old kid crazy, than he has to make me crazy."
SFCityBear
