UrsaMajor said:
SFCityBear said:
UCBerkGrad said:
Gkhoury2325 said:
Mussleman is not a good fit at Cal. Good coach for sure. He was cursing on TV. I don't find it offensive, but others might. Especially here in the Bay Area where being people may in tune with sensitivity.
No one ****ing cares if a coach swears
Except the Cal Administration. It could be the reason Brad Duggan was not offered the job. Cal coaches, from Nibs Price to the present day were squeaky clean, or the swearing was covered up and not made public (Newell), except for Lou C., and they allowed that to go public, so they could fire him for that and other reasons. There is no way Cal would hire a Bobby Knight, for example, in spite of all the recommendations Pete Newell might have given. How Campanelli slipped through the door a landed the job, we don't know, but I'm one who was glad he coached Cal and put some spark back into the program. Unfortunately, the spark became a fire that had to be put out.
Does that explain why no one ever hired Duggan as a D-1 coach? Not sure how coaching long time at a JC necessarily translates to D-1.
You are right, and I should have said that swearing might be "one of the reasons" Brad Duggan was not offered the Cal job, and your reason might be another. A unique character like Brad Duggan would likely never be offered nor hired by a school with the prestige that Cal has as a university.
First, that prestige would eliminate any JC coach from getting a serious look from Cal. We look down on JC. I have friends, fellow Cal Alums, who have taken graduate classes at SF State, and they look at SF State University as "a school for the masses." SF City College is a cut below SF State. City College is for the kids who manage to graduate high school, and they admit anyone who does. They are the bottom level of colleges, JC. Fortunately, Cal does accept transfers from City College as students, but they do not brag about it. Cal wants to be and maybe is the Stanford or Harvard of public universities, and that makes Cal elitist.
Cal probably would not take a basketball coach from City College, no matter what his record was or how good a coach he was, any more than they would hire a professor from City College. Perhaps I am wrong. Do you know of JC professors or instructors who have been hired by Cal?
City College does an amazing job, if students are willing to work. I have a high school classmate who was a QB of our football team, a C student at best, who liked to party. He went to City College. Several years later I ran into him on the Cal campus, wearing glasses and carrying a big briefcase. He told me he was studying for a phD in Electrical Engineering at Cal. Later he went to John Hopkins to get another phD and now is a professor at UCLA teaching molecular biology.
I was a good student, but my weakest subject was foreign language. I studied Latin, French, Spanish, German, got B's, and never learned any of them. Someone dared me to study Chinese. I went to City College at night. There I had the best teacher I ever had for any subject. She could run rings around any professor or instructor I had at Cal, and I had world famous physicists, chemists and engineers at Cal. I now speak, and read Chinese, all because of that one CCSF instructor.
I did not know Duggan personally, but I watched him coach and perform in public many times, and I have friends who know him. His purpose in life seemed to be to take kids from the ghetto, the hood, the inner city, some or many of whom might otherwise end up turning the wrong way in life, and coming to a bad end, taking those kids and getting close to them and their families, gaining their respect while respecting them, and making men out of those same kids, men who can live good productive lives on the right side of the law. CCSF was the perferct place for Duggan to ply his wares. He used basketball to attract those kids, to teach them life values, and he stayed with them and mentored them for years afterward. To see a gym full of grateful parents from the inner city pay their respects to the coach for helping their son before and after games must have warmed Duggan's heart, as it did mine. I don't think Duggan would have been happy at Cal. I don't think he wanted the job, and probably would not have accepted, had it been offered.
For Cal, it wouldn't look good to have a coach like Duggan. His attire was more Telegraph Avenue than Cal faculty. If he ever swore during a game, that would be the end, and Duggan was not beyond doing that. And then there was the Irish bar down in the Mission where Duggan used to hang out and unwind.
Cal would have been a bad fit for Duggan. At Cal he would be getting better students to coach, kids who were not likely inner city kids with one or no parents around, kids who already had exposure to after school basketball programs, many paid for by their parents. Kids with advantages, in other words. They would all be faced with the problems of maturing, but at Cal those kids are starting from a different point than the kids at CCSF. Duggan swore when he had to, to make a point. That was not tolerated at Cal and Lou Campanelli was fired for it. Take swearing away from Duggan, and that takes away one of his tactics to make a kid learn something. But the biggest thing you'd take away would be his kids. He thrived on those inner city kids, and on making them into adults. He turned out some great players, including Dean Garrett, who was the star of Indiana's NCAA 1987 Championship team. But Duggan drilled it into his players's heads that only a tiny percentage of players make the NBA, so they needed more to prepare for a life working at something, and not playing basketball for a living. Many years ago, when Robert Gordon Sproul was running the University, Cal and Duggan might have been more on the same page, as Sproul said, "At California we want students playing at athletics, not athletes playing at being students." That is not what Cal wants or has today,
