On the last night of last January, in the din of U.S. Cellular Arena during one of the more jubilant games in the history of University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee basketball, a fan held up a sign: Bruce, take us to the Promised Land.
It spoke on one level to the metamorphosis of the UWM program – that such a demand could be levied without derision or delusion. It spoke equally to the new challenge of the program – that such an encouraging demand would even be made after all of the crusty admonitions from past years of letdown.
The year before, head coach Bruce Pearl had guided the Panthers to their first ever Division I NCAA tournament, which found them within a last-second lay-up of upsetting Notre Dame in the opening round. Having wobbled at the start of the 2003-’04 campaign, they caught stride and looked primed once again for the postseason. The 11-point victory against UW-Green Bay on that January night was UWM’s ninth in a row and would ultimately beget a regular-season title. It was, as coaches like to say, “a statement win,” commanding the rest of the Horizon League kingpins to stand back and watch.
Maximizing the euphoria, Pearl grabbed the announcer’s microphone after the buzzer and begged the crowd for continued support. He knew that all good things have provisions in this land, that such a robust crowd had not always supported the Panthers. He knew as well that UWM still straggled.
Even its facilities paled in comparison to other Division I facilities in the state and to others in its conference. Pearl, in fact, was kept far from their sight until after he was hired. Not until then did he get the opportunity to peek at his office, housed at the time in a 20-year-old temporary tin building. Nor had he been allowed a glimpse of the old locker rooms, which he later referred to as “probably the worst in the country.” Even the Klotsche Center, UWM’s ramshackle gymnasium, was sensibly kept off the tour.
“Bud Haidet did a great job recruiting me,” Pearl would later say of UWM’s athletic director. But the truth was, limited resources did not dispirit the coach. He was used to it by then.
Pearl’s ability to drum up all aspects of a program, court to cash box, is what attracted UWM to him in the first place, Haidet’s enticement at the time having focused on the head coaching job’s ample breadth and responsibility. “I have to have somebody who can go out and market the team,” says -Haidet. “Shake hands, raise money. You have to be more than a coach.…”
Three years after Pearl’s arrival, the athletics department’s annual revenue had swelled by almost a million dollars. -Basketball donations had tripled. As a more convivial public figure than his -predecessor, Pearl mobilized fan support, a fact borne out at that UW-Green Bay game with its 8,703 fans, the second-largest home crowd in UWM history. That the Panthers were playing at the arena Downtown was due in no small part to his lobbying efforts.
The fan’s sign might have begged for more, but many on that January night surely agreed that Bruce Pearl had already done it – he had carried the program from ruin to the world of major college basketball.
Hot Commodity
But Promised Land? Even in victory, there were no promises. Nor would there be, not for the season, which concluded two months later with a second-round loss to Boise State in the National Invitation Tournament. Not now, at the start of Pearl’s fourth go-around, with high expectations and a dearth left by the departure of last season’s best player, Dylan Page. Not ever. For Pearl, nothing is guaranteed. Achievement itself brings only -larger looming doubts.
The predicament of success for the mid-major college basketball coach is of a dual nature. For years, Pearl contentedly walked along an involuntary path that had taken him to places he would never have -imagined. Then came the job offer from Milwaukee. Having found success and stability at his previous post at the University of Southern Indiana, this would be the toughest decision of his life. And though much success has been had in Milwaukee, it will be progressively more difficult to stay here.
“This is a very dangerous level to be at in coaching,” Pearl says, “because it’s -really hard to do it and hard to maintain it. So a lot of people come here as a way to move on, or come to this level and fail and move out.”
A trace of stoicism hangs in the air of every blossoming athletics program, the concession that with each good season comes the heightened chance that some bigger program with deeper coffers and a grander stage will swoop in and filch the coach. Fresh is the memory of the carriages from Madison arriving, so unpredictably, and leaving with Bo Ryan. It was nothing so much as a somber reminder of the program’s mid–major status and its susceptibility to foreign incursion.
“From a fan’s standpoint, it’s tough,” says Jon Marc Hall, athletic director at Southern Indiana, a small Division II school. “From an administrative standpoint, you realize that’s how it is.… It is tough knowing you have a hot commodity. But I know here at Southern Indiana, which is probably similar to UW-Milwaukee, I would much rather have someone on the rise who I might lose than someone on their way down or who is struggling to maintain a successful program. That was easily our take on it. I would -rather have Bruce Pearl, even if it puts [me] on pins and needles every spring.”
Oh, how the needles reared their points two Aprils ago, when Pearl’s name appeared on the radar just before the annual -waggle dances during Final Four weekend. To protect itself from unwanted advances toward its coach, UWM did for Pearl what it will do every year hereafter: renegotiate a five-year contract extension and cross its fingers.
Two weeks after UWM’s program reached its most glorious point, it braced itself, along with the rest of the college basketball world, waiting to see if the domino effect from the University of North Carolina’s hiring of former Kansas coach Roy Williams would reach its shores. The grapevine had Marquette University offering Pearl its job if MU coach Tom Crean was hired away. The tide never rose. Nor did it this past off-season. Yet while success has brought many -exciting profits to UWM, permanency is not one of them. Not even the Promised Land has offered that.
Family Crossing
The children of Abraham did not remain in the land of Canaan forever. Wrested by -forces of aggression and persecution, they were forced to wander across the desert, into Diaspora, for the next 4,000 years. To Babylonia and Egypt. Across the Straight of -Gibraltar into Spain. Up through the Iberian Peninsula into Europe. In the face of expulsions, pogroms and the Nazi Holocaust, the fortunate found their way to America.
In 1921, a 12-year-old boy named Jack Pearlmutter slipped through the turnstiles of Ellis Island. He was from Tarnopol, Austria, where descendants of 15th century Polish Jews lived in relative amity. But the Russian armies had come to Tarnopol in the summer of 1917, and hundreds of thousands of people fled in the bedlam of World War I.
Carrying a letter from an uncle, Jack boarded a steamship unaccompanied in Marseilles. He found his way to -family in Boston, where a small community of staunchly Zionistic Jews settled in the heart of Catholic America. Nine years later, he became an accountant and wed a Hebrew schoolteacher from Poland. They had a son, who married the girl across the street, whose grandfather had fled Russia to escape conscription by the Cossacks. The young couple, too, had a son. By then, the family’s surname had been Americanized – to Pearl. And its epic had paused to roost for a while.
An old tether links the American boy with his Austrian grandfather and all that came before, spanning generations and oceans and deserts. Preceding every second-generation Jewish American is a collection of such stories, dire and untold, of nomads searching for a place to settle. But the story does not end with the contemporaries.
Bruce Pearl would spend a good part of his own life wandering in the diaspora: from Boston to Palo Alto to Iowa City, to a kind of occupational exile, to Evansville, Indiana, and to Milwaukee, where he would become one of just four Jewish coaches in major collegiate men’s basketball.
He couldn’t quite explain how this all came to be, how somebody who didn’t have to move, who didn’t like to move was drawn into this kind of profession and therefore drawn into the roving exercise of his ancestors. But then basketball had been a haven for American Jews since the turn of the 20th century, a means for the children of immigrants to establish their identity as Americans and Jews. Some sportswriters had even referred to it as a “Jewish sport.”
Around the time Barbara Pearl was lugging Bruce’s baby carriage up to the attic apartment of their brownstone in Boston’s West End, Red Auerbach, the Jewish son of a Minsk-born father, was leading the -Celtics to one of eight consecutive National Basketball Association championships.
A Wife and a Job
Pearl’s journey into coaching did not begin with a fire in his heart so much as it did with a burning in his knee. Growing up in the Boston suburb of Sharon, Massachusetts, he learned to play sports from the neighborhood milkman. He was strong and strapping, antithetical to the Jewish schoolboy stereotype. And though he was not particularly nimble, according to his father, Bernie, he was still a good-enough, heady-enough, scrappy-enough athlete to play three varsity sports and quarterback the football team. He was a live wire: popular and gregarious and predisposed to the schoolyard scuffle.
The injury from a blindside cheap shot on the football field would be the first big shot to his ego. But it wouldn’t be the last time life would take him out at the knees. As with the other trying moments in his past, Pearl looks at his knee injury as a fateful catalyst, a kind of adolescent reawakening.
“I probably wasn’t the kindest kid in the world up to that point,” he says, “but that changed. It absolutely changed. And I became a much better kid. And I knew it, as soon as I stopped feeling sorry for myself. I knew it happened. I knew it happened for a reason.” If he was just a jock before the injury, he claims to have been transformed into a more amenable jock afterward, more willing to include, more raring to explore.
While most of the Jewish kids in Boston attended Boston University, Pearl decided instead to go to Boston College, one of the oldest Jesuit schools in the country.
“I’ve spent a good portion of my life trying to break down stereotypes,” he says. “I was an athlete, and as a result I wound up having probably more non-Jewish friends than Jewish friends. But it was important for me that people who didn’t have as much exposure to Jewish people knew that I was not the stereotype, that you could be athletic. But I’m a regular guy and a regular person just like you. That’s part of the reason I went to BC – to convert the masses to fight the anti-Semitism straight up.”
His dreams as an athlete ended the same time his days as a coach began, so unsuspectingly. He had tried out for the basketball team, and though he hadn’t fared well enough to make the roster, Dr. Tom -Davis, the coach, found Pearl’s moxie so indispensable that he offered the sophomore a position as team manager.
If he hadn’t taken the position, Pearl wouldn’t have become best friends with a player on the team. Wouldn’t have met the player’s sister, Kim, one night at a post-game party. Wouldn’t have offered her flowers the next day.
The telephone rang on a Sunday a few months later when Pearl was in New Hampshire spending a weekend at Kim’s parent’s house. It was coach Davis, instructing him to return to Boston immediately – there was something important to discuss. So Pearl motored down Route 3 to Boston, not quite sure what to expect. Similarly breathless calls from Davis had in the past been brought about by Pearl’s high jinks. He had already been busted for streaking. But that was duck soup compared to the time he dressed up as the Boston College eagle mascot, climbed the basket supports during a game and started flapping his costume wings so hard the hoop trembled. He had moxie, all right, and it wasn’t always comically placed. Short of graduation, he had secured a well-paying job in New York with Colgate.
The phone call from Davis changed all that. The coach had just accepted the head position at Stanford University, and he was going to ask his 22-year-old student manager to join him. So Pearl is probably right when he says that had Davis not been offered the Stanford job right then, he would have never gotten into coaching. The paradox: “Unbeknownst to me,” Pearl says, “I had been training for this my whole life. I just didn’t know it.”
He married Kim a few months later at the urging of his parents. Bernie and Barbara Pearl did not mind that their son married an Italian Catholic, but they sure did mind if he traveled cross-country as a bachelor. Kim’s father didn’t mind that she married a Jew, just as long as they would settle on a religion to raise their children. They settled on Judaism and attended religious classes. They sold Bruce’s Mazda RX to pay for the wedding and drove Kim’s Chevy Monza to California, where nuptial life took hold in a mother-in-law cottage at the back of a wealthy woman’s house in Palo Alto. The ascent from ignobility began quickly, so much so that by the end of his first season, Pearl had climbed all the way up the bench to become the top assistant under Davis, at the age of 23.
Breaking the Code
Immediately, Pearl showed himself to be a daring recruiter, a man unafraid to go for top players or against top programs. But his appetite for the blue-ribbon prospects was far better served when, four years later, Davis took the head job at the University of Iowa. Pearl followed, along with his familial train – Kim, 6-month-old daughter Jacqui and two dogs named Moses and Coach. Davis had inherited a talented team, which would go 30-5 that first year under his direction and advance to the Elite Eight.
Fortified with Big Ten status, Pearl took his recruitment show on the road, paying court to the likes of Acie Earl, Shawn Kemp, Doug Smith, Alonzo Morning and LaPhonso Ellis. It didn’t much matter that he was a Jewish man going into homes of Midwestern Christians, just as it didn’t matter that he was a white man going into the homes of inner city blacks.
“The first time I saw him,” says Earl, a 6-foot-10 former Parade all-American who played at Iowa from 1989 to ’93, “I thought he was mixed with black. He knew all the slang. He would be playing the latest rap music. He always had the newest, freshest gym shoes.… He wore his hair faded on the side like a flat top. My mom thought he was black. And my dad thought he was part Mexican. It was his coolness. He used his coolness. He wasn’t one of those white guys trying to be black. He was just cool.”
Pearl’s holistic approach to recruiting was tantamount to that of a government agent trying to infiltrate the mob. The idea was to befriend everyone around the recruit, get to know everything you could that way. Earl recalls the time Pearl walked through the halls of his high school in Moline, -Illinois.
“[Other coaches] were intimidated by him because of how good he fit in,” says Earl. “He knew all our girlfriends’ names. He knew everybody’s mother. He knew a lot of people’s high school coaches. He knew everybody’s boy who hung around him. He knew all the boys. He knew everything. He’d tell our boys, ‘Tonight, keep them out of trouble.’ Pearl was ahead of his time.”
Many assumed that Pearl was on the precipice of a major promotion, destined for greatness at a young age. He hadn’t even run out of his 20s yet and was already an established assistant coach at a Sweet 16-caliber program, already considered one of the best recruiters in the country. It would only be a matter of time now before the phone would ring and a Division I athletic director would offer him a head coaching job.
In the summer of 1989, a phone conversation did indeed change Pearl’s life.
The recruiting battle for Deon Thomas, a 6-foot-9 wunderkind from Chicago, had boiled down to a duel between the University of Iowa and the University of Illinois, between Pearl and another young up-and-coming assistant named Jimmy Collins. Thomas would eventually choose Illinois. But in portions of a telephone conversation he later had with Pearl, Thomas reportedly claimed that Collins had offered him $80,000 and a Chevrolet Blazer as an inducement to sign. Having heard such rumors before from an acquaintance of Thomas’, Pearl secretly recorded the phone conversation and forwarded the tape to the NCAA, which opened a massive investigation into the Illinois program. It became one of the largest scandals in modern college basketball history, wringing wet with media coverage over its 16-month duration.
Illinois was eventually cleared of the major allegations of the investigation, and Thomas denied that a bribe had been offered. He claimed any recorded statements of his made on the contrary were meant only to placate Pearl, to get him off his back. Thomas then turned the tables, accusing Pearl of several offenses – everything from offering to double any bribe Illinois made, to stalking him to the red-light district of Amsterdam when Thomas’ high school team traveled to the Netherlands that summer, to threatening blackmail if Thomas chose to go to Illinois. The NCAA never investigated the claims, and a wiretapping lawsuit Thomas filed against Pearl was dismissed in court.
But over the next 15 years, the millstone cast an interminable shadow over Pearl’s career (see “Tip-off,” below).
During that time, he has remained tacit, hoping silence would conduce memories to fade. They haven’t. And the story was only further dredged up when he took the UWM job, an unintended result being that every year he would have to play Horizon League rival Illinois-Chicago, a program Collins has coached for the last eight seasons.
Pearl contends that the decision to bring charges against Illinois was really no decision at all.
“We did not turn them in,” Pearl maintains. Three times, he says, the NCAA contacted him about high school players he was involved with (Kemp, Smith and -Thomas), as part of its protocol for monitoring the recruitment of top-flight prospects. He says Davis and Iowa athletics department officials signed off on the decision to record Thomas as a means of gathering evidence.
“The [recording] equipment I used had a stamp on it: ‘Property of the University of Iowa,’” says Pearl. “My superiors were aware that I was taping Deon Thomas. They gave the equipment to do it.” The only decision that was left to Iowa was what to do with the evidence.
“And while there were some private discussions between Tom Davis and [Illinois head coach] Lou Henson… there really hadn’t been a decision made by Iowa to do anything,” Pearl says. “Then, when you get asked [for the tapes by the NCAA], you’re faced with an even more challenging ‘What do you do?’… So we decided to provide this evidence that there were some things that were taking place that may have been inappropriate. I was the witness. One of the best defenses is to discredit the witness. And that’s what took place in the state of Illinois by many newspapers and sports people.”
For his part in the probe, Pearl was effectively expelled from the coaching fraternity. Whether it was with honor or duplicity, he had broken the code of silence that has long concealed the college basketball recruiting process. For that, he was cast a pariah, his dreams of head coaching put on indefinite hold.
“I think it really kept him back,” says Earl, who chose Iowa over Illinois. “A lot of people were scared to mess with him, scared to have him on the staff. [He] was like a convicted felon.” In Illinois, Pearl was like Napoleon, so loathed that when Iowa played at Illinois the following season, he was advised by his athletic director to stay home. This past spring, Jay Price, an Illinois assistant coach, called Pearl to talk about scheduling. Price wanted UWM to play a game in Champaign. It was an innocent request, but Pearl forlornly declined.
It remains unclear what lasting effect Bruce Pearl’s tape recording has had on the world of college basketball. Was it, as Pearl suggests, a necessary purification the sport must undergo periodically? Or was it a move that will shutter basketball programs for years to come? To this day, Pearl serves as the status quo’s most damning example of what happens when you speak out, and no coach has made such an accusation against another member of the club since.
“I could get you 10 coaches on the phone who will list 15 programs who are cheating – on an off-the-record basis,” says sports journalist and best-selling author John Feinstein, who has written extensively about the nefariousness in college basketball. “That’s the code. I have had coaches say to me, ‘I don’t want to be Bruce Pearl.’”
Says Pearl: “I’ve been asked a question: ‘If you had to do it again, would you?’ And I answer it reluctantly. Reluctantly, I would say yes. Reluctant, because it hurt me. Reluctant, because it hurt Deon. Reluctant, because it hurt Jimmy. Reluctant, because it hurt Illinois, their fans and their university. Reluctant, because it was a pain in the butt to the people in Iowa. Reluctant, because there was enough of a percentage of the population that thought I was wrong. I understand that. I am an idealist. Having gone through this, I’m more of a realist.”
Rebirth
There are many rungs on the college coaching ladder, and that is its blessing.
In April 1992, a twin-engine plane carrying two envoys from the University of Southern Indiana arrived in Iowa City. The Division II school had an opening for its head basketball coach, and former Indiana coach Bob Knight had given Pearl an endorsement. The pair scoured the campus for opinion on Pearl, asking as many people as they could about the coach. On the flight back, Bruce Baker, a USI trustee, jotted down a list of 16 reasons why Pearl would be a good fit, beginning with: “No. 1: Good understanding of what Division I recruiting was all about.”
Once Southern Indiana’s interest in Pearl became known, a swarm of incendiary letters, faxes and calls poured into the USI athletics office from anti-Pearl Illinois fans. But Baker’s dossier outweighed the criticisms, and the school offered the beleaguered Iowa assistant his first head coaching job.
And so it was that the Jewish coach’s road to redemption would begin in Evansville, Indiana, on the banks of the Ohio River, where scarcely a synagogue could be found.
“It was South,” says Pearl. “Shit, it was a little too close to Kentucky.”
“It was way too close to Kentucky,” says Kim. “I didn’t care for it. It was a little too red neck. Very red neck.… My kids were the only Jews in their school. So when we had Jewish holidays, they had to go to school because school wasn’t closed.”
Provinciality aside, there were still good people in Evansville, zealous basketball fans to boot. Pearl reckoned it a desert that needed to be crossed. He was an anomaly for sure, and his head-turning East Coast chutzpa, not native to the heartland, rubbed some the wrong way at the start.
But in Indiana, a basketball coach is only an outsider if he can’t win. And winning, Pearl was convinced, he could do. Piece by piece, he would uplift this program, which had finished the previous year 10-18. By his first season, he vowed, the record would flip. When he set up his bank account, he made 1-8-1-0 his PIN number. Instead, the team went 22-7 Pearl’s first year, and it took him only two more seasons to win the whole damn Division II national championship.
Oh, Evansville soon loved its new coach: all of his charm and cheek, his sidelines lather and foot stomping tied together by his trademark suspenders. “I’ve never seen a guy who could sweat through a suit,” says Rick Herdes, an assistant to Pearl and now USI’s head coach.
They loved the Jewish basketball coach so much they asked him to be marshal of the annual Christmas parade – yes, an East Coast Jew shepherding a town of -Southern Baptists. He went to their golf outings and their men’s gatherings and their Rotary Club meetings. He spoke to their churches and led their prayer readings.
“We have got more plaques with praying Jesus hands and crucifixes than you’ve ever seen in your life,” says Kim.
All the while, Evansville sensed they were cashing in on a limited-time offer. Even after his tenure had exceeded fans’ utmost hopes, even after he turned down the Middle Tennessee State job in 1996, they sensed this wouldn’t, this couldn’t go on forever, that Bruce Pearl’s future was really somewhere else. Out there, on the horizon, there was a land that offered greater promise. Says Hall: “Most people understand when you have a competitive person, a driven person like Bruce, there’s always another challenge out there.”
So when the clock ran out, they named a street in honor of their coach and his nine years of service – Bruce Pearl Way – and they sent him on it.
Milwaukee Road
In Milwaukee, athletic director Bud -Haidet had jarringly come to a similar awareness about his own coach’s impermanence. He had just received an unexpected phone call from UW-Madison athletic director Pat Richter. Having been turned down by its A-list of coaches in the wake of Dick Bennett’s retirement, the Badgers turned their attention to Wisconsin native son Bo Ryan, whose drastic restitution of UWM’s Panthers beginning in 1999 was like Pearl’s first few years at USI. After six consecutive losing seasons, the Panthers would go 15-14 in Ryan’s first year. And although he would stay for only one more season, his full-dress darning of the program had brought Milwaukee back to respectability, back to a place of hope.
“I thought I was staying at Milwaukee for 15 years,” says Ryan. “So what we didn’t do was try to do quick fixes. We tried to… make things better for the long run.”
It was Haidet’s task to make that so. And he had a lot of good things going for him. UWM was a Division I program in a strong conference, in a basketball-rich state, coming off back-to-back winning seasons and endowed with latent resources. It offered great promise for its next shepherd. But it invited great risk, as mid-major coaching finds itself caught in the middle of expectation and resources. “They want to be champions,” Pearl says, “but they don’t have the wherewithal.…”
The involuntary path and years of roving had led Pearl to a most unimaginable place, to Southern Indiana, and contentedly so. But was it enough? Enough to settle there? And if not, would there be another opportunity if he passed this one up? Approaching his 40th birthday, Pearl was concerned about being cast as a Division II guy, knowing all too well the chronic effects of the pigeonhole.
“I didn’t want to sit on the porch some day and go, ‘I wonder if I could have coached Division I,’” he says. “Because I was -happy there and settled in and I was at a job where I was going to win 25 games -every year, and if we could win our league, we were going to play for the national championship. I was in a great place… I got comfortable.”
Naturally, moving was uncomfortable. It had always been that way for Pearl. So it was Kim who took charge, as she had done in the past, prodding her husband along the path.
While Bruce had grown up cloistered in Massachusetts, Kim, born in South -Carolina, spent time in five states before college. It’s not easy being a basketball spouse, married to a man and a sport. Three times, her labor was induced to accommodate Bruce’s recruiting schedule (the Pearls have four children – two boys and two girls). And then there was the day Bruce studied game film with his assistants in his wife’s hospital room.
“That’s just my life,” Kim says. It was her uncle, legendary North Carolina State coach Norm Sloan (now deceased), who called Pearl in the dawning hours after USI’s ’95 national championship and crystal-balled its significance. “You don’t understand what you’ve just done,” the old coach told the younger one. “You won’t understand it for years, but this is a big deal.”
With the kids howling and Bruce dithering, it was Kim’s elbowing that may have ultimately brought the Pearls to Milwaukee. For the first several months after accepting the job, Pearl would drive from home to Indiana every other weekend, and each time he returned to his job, he’d be carsick with -uncertainty: “What have I done? What have I done to my family? Are we going to be okay? Is Milwaukee going to accept us like -Evansville?”
But of all the questions that have dogged Bruce Pearl, matters of acceptance have never proved an impasse. In year one, Pearl led the Panthers to their first winning conference season since they began Division I play. They lost in the first round of the Horizon League tournament to Jimmy Collins’ Illinois-Chicago with the media playing up the Deon Thomas scandal angle. The next year, they defeated UIC and Butler in the league tournament to advance to the NCAA tournament for the first time in school history.
Inevitably, two years after he made the toughest move in his life, folks around here wondered if Pearl was about to move again.
“Certainly,” Pearl acknowledges, “that’s what happens to you in coaching when you’re hot. You’ve got to make hay while the sun shines. And you look every year who takes jobs, who leaves.… Certainly, that’s the time to go. Why not after we [went to] the NCAA tournament, why not after we won one in the NIT? Because I just don’t have my name out there. I don’t have an agent. I don’t have my résumé updated. And there hasn’t been that no-brainer job. It hasn’t opened, and it hasn’t been offered. That’s the only circumstance I would ever leave here.”
But sitting at a dining room table at Brynwood Country Club one noonday last June, steeping a pot of tea and poking at the breadbasket, his wife spoke expectantly about a move to the next level.
On the Precipice
To its credit, the UWM job has been polished since Pearl’s arrival. On April 30, in a blissful post-season banquet at the Milwaukee Hilton’s Empire Room, Pearl announced the creation of the school’s first endowed scholarship fund for men’s basketball players. A month later, the school broke ground on a $42 million addition to the Klotsche Center that will include new lockers and offices by next summer. The recruiting has gotten easier. Media interest has risen. Yet there remains plenty of headroom for a man looking to build up, a fact Pearl delicately nutshelled one day this past summer when he pointed to the 20-inch Zenith in his office and said, “There’s not a lot of Division I coaches who have a television like that in their office.”
Of all the “statement wins” the team has notched, however, it has yet to pull off a big upset in Pearl’s tenure. He will have two opportunities to amend this, with back-to-back road games in December at Kansas and Wisconsin, both scheduled to be broadcast on ESPN Plus. Moreover, there’s a test of endurance amid rising expectations – the pie-in-the-sky benchmarks set by mid-major programs like Kent State, which reached the Elite Eight three years ago, and Gonzaga, which has beaten so many high-major teams in so many NCAA tournament games that it’s now considered one itself. Maybe these tests are enough. Maybe the slow cultivation of this program will provide years of challenge before Pearl feels stagnant. Then again, you have to wonder how gratifying the task of upkeep is after all those years of crossing deserts and climbing ladders.
At last year’s Final Four, discussions took place between Pearl and a few other schools – phone calls and chats, all unofficial, nothing serious, he says. He doesn’t have an agent. His résumé has not been updated. He says he hasn’t put his name out there. But it’s out there nonetheless.
This October, in keeping with what is customary, UWM presented Pearl with a five-year contract extension that will increase his salary by about $90,000. He will earn $275,000 this season, with the opportunity to deposit $300,000 in 2008.
Yet there are no delusions about purchasing a warranty on Pearl’s future. “Even if he signed a 10- or 15-year contract,” says UWM assistant athletic director Charles Lang, “is that going to stop someone from approaching him? Probably not.… Can we sign him to a deal that makes him not look anywhere? Maybe, maybe not. At this point, probably not.”
Sooner or later, the telephone will ring. Some April day, a call will come to the athletic director’s office. He’ll sigh dolefully, then walk down the hall to find his basketball coach sitting at a desk. He’ll say he has another school on the line interested in discussing a job opening. He’ll say, “You need to listen to this.”
And then, with the past on his mind and a 4,000-year-old narrative forever in his blood, Bruce Pearl will pick up the phone.
The decision will be wrenching. His quest, after all, has always been the Promised Land.
Daniel Libit is a Madison-based writer. This is his first feature for Milwaukee Magazine.
Tip-Off Illinois Coach Jimmy Collins takes it to his accuser.
Since Bruce Pearl brought damning allegations of illicit bribery against Jimmy Collins, the once-maligned Illinois assistant coach and current Illinois-Chicago head coach has kept his hands in his pockets and a file of evidence in his fireproof safe.
After a much-hyped January 12, 2002 game in which Pearl’s UWM Panthers clobbered Collins’ Illinois-Chicago Flames by 26 points, Pearl approached the visiting UIC bench and extended his hand, to which Collins sheathed his and derisively walked off the court. When asked about the rebuff after the game, Pearl said, “I think the act speaks for itself.”
It eerily echoed a post-game -pantomime between the men more than a decade before and made clear that, despite the time lag since the Deon Thomas scandal that brought about their antipathy, the ice has not thawed. On January 29, 1991, after Illinois beat Iowa in Champaign, Pearl extended his hand to Collins, who waved it off, later stating, “You shake hands with friends. Bruce Pearl and I are not friends.”
Speaking to Milwaukee Magazine last May in his Chicago office, Collins, 55, suggested that little, if anything, has changed since. His anger toward Pearl remains biting and inflexible as he continues to blame Pearl for ruining his career and bringing pain to his family. Once thought to be a likely successor to Lou Henson at Illinois, Collins had to wait until 1996 to get his head coaching debut at a far less prestigious program at UIC.
Like Pearl, the scandal won’t let go of Collins, despite his success. But while he laments this fact and the constant media rehashing, he was quite forthcoming during a one-hour interview, his smooth remonstrations refined by years of talking about this very subject.
Collins’ time-honored account of the incident has held that Pearl was initially hoodwinked by a confidant of Thomas’, a “street kid” who had him convinced that Illinois was offering the player money. He says that Pearl eventually “knew” that no money had been offered, and he questions whether the Deon Thomas tapes had been doctored. While the NCAA was investigating Illinois, Collins’ attorney did a counter-investigation of Pearl, producing a transcript that was included in the school’s response to the allegations. (Collins refused to furnish his copy, and attempts to gain access to the report through the NCAA, Collins’ lawyer and Thomas’ attorney were unsuccessful.)
“I know that in the long run he knew he was wrong,” says Collins. “I know he knows it now. I don’t give a damn what he says.… He knows what I was making then. He knows that I don’t have no damn money to give that kid. And that’s all it would require – for Bruce to come up to me and say, ‘Hey, you know what, I was wrong.’”
He characterizes Pearl’s actions against him as amateurishly self-indulgent and narcissistic. “He was a young guy trying to make some footprints in the sand,” -Collins says, “and he used me to step on. But I think by now he knows it didn’t happen, because if it had happened, believe me, I wouldn’t be at this desk talking to you. The NCAA would have seen to that.”
Pearl has maintained that he was only following orders from the NCAA and his school when he recorded a telephone conversation he had with Thomas in 1989. Having been made aware that Collins spoke to Milwaukee Magazine about the scandal, Pearl tried to diffuse the situation weeks later, saying that a mutual respect has evolved between the two Horizon League head coaches over the last four years and that the door to reconciliation has been unlatched. He says he regrets the pain Collins suffered because of the investigation but stops well short of saying he regrets his decision to turn the tapes over to the NCAA.
Pearl is not the only one who has brought accusations against Collins and the Illinois program – the list includes former Indiana coach Bobby Knight and former Notre Dame coach Digger Phelps – and Collins has long carried a shady reputation as a recruiter. Still, it is Pearl who has drawn the most ire, which flared up again when he took the UWM job. After the latest handshake fuss, Horizon League commissioner Jon LeCrone issued a decree to both coaches to cool it.
But Collins continues to sizzle about the tapes, the scandal, the handshake he perceives as one-upmanship and the comment Pearl made afterward about how the action spoke for itself.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Collins asks. “So now, if you want the action to really speak for itself, I’ve got these transcripts.… Believe me, I keep them in a vault. I’ll never let them burn up. If a fire comes up into my house, they are in a burn-proof vault. And I tell him: Every time you want to toss mud, we’ll toss. Otherwise, you keep my name out of your mouth and I’ll keep your name out of mine.”
UWM plays at Illinois-Chicago December 4.
