Just before kickoff of Saturday’s Big Ten football championship came the sad news of the death of college basketball coach Rick Majerus.
Anyone who ever met Majerus has a story about Majerus, who successfully coached four college teams, beginning with Marquette.
Let’s start with Bob Wolfley of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, published where Majerus attended Marquette and first coached:
Majerus, who died Saturday in Los Angeles at the age of 64, belongs in there with guys like Abe Lemons or Al McGuire. Eccentrics. Basketball heads who had something more to offer, something other than an expertise about basketball.
They had a sense of humor, the gift of self-deprecation, which is not part of the job description for high level Division I college basketball coaches these days.
You tended to think about Majerus as a kind of Friar Tuck character – exuberant and dangerous in battle. He would entertain you while he was figuring out a way to knock you off the bridge and into the water below.
He never said anything about being Friar Tuck. He preferred thinking of himself as Uncle Fester in the “Addams Family.”
But, according to some accounts, he could be demanding to the point of being hard-hearted. And he was cavalier about his health that was entertaining on one level, but disconcerting and darker on another. Heart bypasses in the high single digits.
Using your poor eating habits for 40 years as comedy has its limits, but Majerus never stopped with the jokes.
“I’m in Hawaii all this month and Santa Barbara all of July and August,” he said to reporters in May 2004. “That’s a pretty good schedule. My biggest concern is people keep pushing me back into the water. I don’t mean the coaching water. I mean when I lay out on the beach, they think I’m a whale and give me a shove back in.”
Majerus was one of college basketball’s most reliable candidates for a job he did not occupy. He was college basketball’s favorite candidate.
Former Milwaukee Journal sports editor Bill Dwyre:
The man with the huge heart and similar body shape, the man who knew more about basketball than 99.6% of the human race and coached it every day of his adult life as if it were the Gospel, left us Saturday afternoon. The heart that was so gigantic, that gave so much of itself, in and out of the sport, could carry the load no more.
He had been at Cedar Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles for months. The lining of his heart was too thick, had carried the burden of well over 300 pounds for all too long. He awaited a new heart, but never got healthy enough to stay long on the active recipient list.
It was a quiet ending. He had a world of friends, including this typist who knew him from childhood days in Sheboygan, Wis., and newspaper days in Milwaukee. But few were allowed to see him in his final months. He was too proud. …
The weight was his scourge. When Majerus was an assistant at for Al McGuire at Marquette, including on McGuire’s 1977 national title team, McGuire was often merciless about the weight. It was a labor of love and futility. One day, McGuire took one look at what Majerus called progress and labeled it, “A deck chair off the Titanic.”
Majerus loved hosting friends at dinner. He would often start by ordering a dozen entrees. If you liked something, he’d order three more.
He single-handedly kept pizza stores in business. His life mantra was, “Never eat anything green.” …
He made his big splash at Utah, where he coached the likes of Keith Van Horn and Andre Miller and got to the 1998 Final Four.
On game day, he invited a friend to the pregame walk-through. When it ended, he called his players together and invited the friend to listen. Utah was about to play lightning-quick North Carolina in the semifinals. Utah consisted of huge, slow guys and Miller, soon to be a superb pro guard. Majerus told his team the strategy was to rebound, make an outlet pass and go, because “we are quicker than they are.” He said that once they wore down North Carolina, coach Bill Guthridge would have to call a timeout, go to a zone and then they had them.
The big, tall, slow Runnin’ Utes looked at him as if he had finally lost his mind.
That night, Utah got the ball off the boards and ran. Soon, Guthridge called timeout and went to a zone. Majerus had been right. He just hadn’t been specific. What he meant was that Miller, who took most of the outlet passes and dashed to the basket, was quicker than North Carolina.
The next night, Utah stopped running with a lead and about seven minutes left in the game and lost to Kentucky. Most of Majerus’ important NCAA Tournament losses came at the hands of Kentucky.
“They ought to just bury me at the finish line of the Kentucky Derby,” he said after one particularly galling loss, “and let those horses just keep trampling me.”
Retired Journal Sentinel sportswriter Dale Hofmann starts with this photo:
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There’s Al McGuire hunched over, near tears, looking like the other coach should be looking, and there’s Hank Raymonds with his left arm draped around Rick Majerus’ neck, a rolled up program in his hand. And then there’s Majerus in a coat and tie and those pants.
If the picture of the Marquette University coaching staff celebrating the last minute of its national championship season isn’t the best college basketball bench shot ever to run in a newspaper, it’s clearly in the top 10 and a lock as the runaway leader in Wisconsin. Dominating it is the No. 2 assistant on a three-man staff.
In extremely plaid pants.
The last of the three men died over the weekend, and with him went an appreciable swatch of the local social fabric. The fabric was polyester in 1977, and even then Majerus was stretching it to its limit, a warning from the menace that would kill him 35 years later. …
The literature is rich with stories of Majerus’ relationships with his players, more good than bad, but plenty of both. There were the four-hour practices balanced by the all-night session with the kid who’d just lost his father. You read lots of adjectives ranging from “demanding” and “earthy” to “compassionate” and “insightful,” but “complacent” never enters the discussion.
Majerus was simply passionate about his trade, and few people ever understood it or taught it better or loved it more. By all accounts, it cost him his one brief marriage. …
Ah yes, the food. As the tributes flooded in, it seemed like every coach, commentator and media member in America shared at least one meal with Majerus. It makes you wonder if he did all his coaching from a booth in the nearest pizza parlor. But that’s going to happen when a high-profile figure in any area of endeavor tops out near 370 pounds.
There’s another picture in the Majerus photo gallery of Ric Cobb, a one-time Marquette assistant who later coached at UW-Milwaukee, restraining Majerus as he came roaring off the bench to dispute an official’s call. I remember that because Cobb told me later that he’d never do it again. Majerus, he said, was so strong he almost broke an arm trying to hold him back.
Like everybody else, I had my own restaurant experience with him. It was breakfast at the Pfister, and as I recall, he ordered dry toast or something like it that wouldn’t satisfy a sparrow. He was on one of his many diets at the time, and even when Majerus couldn’t eat food, he talked about it.
A dedicated swimmer, he explained that it was his exercise of choice because fat people were more buoyant than skinny people. He also claimed that whenever he entered a pool everybody else left because there was never any water left when he jumped in. No one ever accused Rick Majerus of not having a sense of humor. Unfortunately, it was gallows humor sometimes.
After Marquette, the Bucks (as an assistant to another character, Don Nelson) and Ball State, Majerus went to Utah, where he coached the Utes to the NCAA championship game in 1998.
The Salt Lake Tribune’s Gordon Monson:
Rick Majerus was described once as … an interesting bunch of guys.
It was my description and I stand by it because that’s exactly what he was. In the middle of his time running Utah basketball, I joked with him that he was a man of many chins and many faces, and he guffawed about that. It was one of the few times we shared a laugh together. Often, we were at one another’s throat over one thing or another.
But, good lord, the man could coach. And he will be remembered for that.
He didn’t always use attractive language or imagery on the court with his players, and sometimes he was downright crude and verbally abusive, but his basketball methodology was a thing of beauty. If you needed a coach to get you a win, or get you 25 wins, his name would be near the top of anybody’s list. …
One thing about Majerus, when he grabbed a hold of any discussion topic he deemed worthy, you had best get comfortable. I talked with him for seven hours, all on the phone, that day and night, the last call coming from him at midnight and ending at 2 in the morning. We never came to any agreement, and I wrote my column expressing my point of view.
He phoned me the day the column ran to thank me for my fair treatment of him in our disagreement. It’s something he never did again. …
We had our battles. But Majerus always returned phone calls. If you asked him the simplest of questions, he fired off on a circuitous verbal journey that had about 20 pit stops for subject changes along the way. Our discussions and disagreements were almost always fascinating. I asked him about zone defense and we ended up talking about labor unions. I asked him about transition defense and he waxed on about constitutional law. …
“Rick is tough to read because he’s a lot of different things,” Chris Hill once said. “He’s a guy who is absorbed mentally in a lot of interests, but who gets totally engulfed in coaching basketball. His practices are the most organized in the world, but his office is a mess. The way he prepares a team is very organized, but you look at his car, and he can’t even find his keys. He loves to win, but he takes pleasure from his players succeeding academically.” …
The man was a tyrant and a bully, a genius and a virtuoso.
I never interviewed or covered anybody else like him, like all the guys that were him.
Rest in peace, Rick Majerus. Rest in peace.
One of the great what-ifs came in 2001, when, after leaving Utah, Majerus was briefly a candidate to replace Brad Soderberg at Wisconsin. (Soderberg went to Saint Louis, where Majerus ended up replacing him.) I’m sure Madison-based sportswriters were disappointed when Majerus decided against pursuing the job, even though Bo Ryan, himself a quote machine, ended up with the job.
After Majerus worked a while for ESPN, he became the head coach at Saint Louis.
The St. Louis Post–Dispatch’s Bernie Miklasz:
If you had a problem? Rick to the rescue. If you had a medical issue, he was on the phone with names of doctors and recommendations for treatment. (One time I had to tell him: Coach, I have a head cold. I think I’ll be OK in a couple of days. I don’t need to fly to Los Angeles to see a specialist. But thank you.)
If you didn’t have a father, or a trusted friend to guide you through a troubling stretch of life, the big man filled the void. As a basketball man, he coached “help” defense. As a human being, Majerus was help defense. …
Majerus was there for Keith Van Horn, his brightest star at Utah. The coach received a late-night call in 1993. It was Van Horn’s mother. She had shocking news: Keith’s father was dead. A sudden heart attack took his life. And Van Horn’s mom didn’t know how to tell her son. She asked Coach Majerus to do it.
Majerus, of course, was there. At 2 a.m., he took Van Horn to a diner. They sat down. The coach told the freshman the worst words imaginable: Your father has died. Van Horn broke down in tears. Majerus consoled him. They sat there all night, telling happy stories about their late fathers, eating breakfast, and handling the pain. They cried together. They shared bagels. They hugged. They talked some more.
When Van Horn finally walked into the morning light of Salt Lake City, he was ready to face the tragedy. Van Horn said he entered that diner as a kid, and by the time he left, he’d become a man. Majerus pulled him through.
Majerus never had kids of his own, but he raised plenty of them through basketball. On the court, off the court, whatever was necessary. Whether the player needed calm advice, or an old-school cursing out, Majerus was there. He was always there.
That’s why senior St. Louis University power forward Brian Conklin sobbed in the interview room in March, after the Billikens competed like crazy only to get eliminated by Michigan State in the NCAA Tournament.
It was Conklin’s final game for SLU. The finality of the occasion overwhelmed his emotions. Most of all, Conklin knew he’d never have another chance to play for Majerus, to learn from Majerus. The inevitable change that’s inherent in life’s passages would take Conklin away from the coach he loved. And Conklin cried. Majerus was always there for him. What would Conklin do from now on?
“He’s a great coach,” Conklin said that day. “I couldn’t imagine playing for a better coach, a better person. He doesn’t just teach you about ball, he teaches you about life.” …
I hope Rick Majerus knew how much he was loved. I hope he realized that he’d made a tremendous, positive impact on so many lives. You’re going to have to forgive me for making this personal, which I don’t do often, but I cried on Saturday night, and I don’t even know how I pulled myself together to write this wholly inadequate tribute to Rick.
In a previous column, written in late August, at the time Majerus took his leave of absence, I explained our friendship. And how we tried to help counsel each other as we each trudged through our lifelong conflict with obesity. Majerus knew what I was going through. I knew what he was going through. It was our bond. It was a bond I wish we didn’t have.
When I received word of Rick’s death, I was sitting in the living room of our home. My wife was nearby. I lost it. And I hope this doesn’t make you uncomfortable, but I want to share what I told her: “I know you probably understand this, but I want to say it anyway. You and anyone else that cares about me owe a lot to Rick Majerus, because he played a major role in my turnaround. He was a factor in my decision to do whatever I had to do to get healthy and lead a better life. Without Rick Majerus, I don’t know if I’d still be here.” …
We know about the basketball stuff, but I’ll always treasure Majerus for his teaching, his lessons. The way he helped the Millers, the Van Horns, the Conklins and even the lowly sportswriters. When we were together, I could feel his immense desire to live, and somehow he transferred that to me, before it was too late.
Majerus was there for me. He was there for anyone who needed him. This sad day doesn’t end our relationship. Rick Majerus will be there for me forever.
Sports Illustrated’s Seth Davis:
If you’re a college basketball reporter of a certain age, you almost certainly have a go-to Rick Majerus story.
Here’s mine.
It was the fall of 1996, barely a year after I got hired by Sports Illustrated. The magazine assigned me to write a scouting report on Utah for our college basketball preview issue. So I flew to Salt Lake City to watch the team practice and interview a few players as well as its charismatic, enigmatic coach. Before I left, I asked my veteran colleague, Alex Wolff, for some advice. “Talk to Majerus about stuff other than basektball,” he said.
Unfortunately, when I got there, Majerus didn’t want to talk at all. It’s not that he was opposed to being quoted — Lord knows, he liked being quoted — but rather because he was in a rush to get to a Utah Jazz game. “You’re only going to use one or two sentences, right?” he said. “So let me just give you one or two sentences.”
I told him as politely as I could that my magazine had paid the expense of flying me across the country to interview him, so I was hoping to deliver more than a couple of sentences. Majerus offered to let me ride with him back to his hotel and interview him while he got ready for the game. First, however, he was concerned that I might be hungry.
“You’re Jewish, right?” he asked.
“Yes, coach.”
“You want a bagel?”
“No thanks, coach.”
So we rode in Majerus’ car back to his hotel. That’s where he lived — the Salt Lake City Marriott. He had his own suite. It wasn’t anything extravagant. He simply liked the convenience. Majerus didn’t want the hassles of renting an apartment or owning a home. At the Marriott, he could come and go as he pleased, order room service, have the place cleaned every day. As I often joked with him over the years, he must have accrued more Marriott Rewards points than any customer in the history of the franchise.
Anyway, Majerus jabbered about his team all during the car ride, the walk through the lobby, the trip up the elevator. I kept my tape recorder running the whole time. He continued to talk as we entered his hotel room. Having just left practice, he was still wearing his sweatsuit. He took of his jacket. He took off his shoes. He took off his shirt. He took off his pants. He took off his socks. He took off his underwear.
And there stood Rick Majerus, all 350 pounds of him, quite literally a man in full. Just the way God made him.
“Gee, I hope I’m not embarrassing you,” he said.
Over the years, Majerus would laugh whenever I reminded him of that first close encounter. He was a man with many quirks and warts, as well as a total lack of self-consciousness. He was also quite smart. I just looked up the scouting report I wrote on the Utes that week, and darned if I didn’t use two sentences from our entire conversation.
If you’re a college basketball reporter of a certain age, you probably also have some eating-with-Rick-Majerus stories. The man was always eating, always too much, often late at night. There was the time when I rode with Majerus and a couple of his buddies back and forth to the Utes’ game at BYU in Provo. (Majerus preferred not to travel with his team. He figured the players could use a break from him.) He told me that I could ride back to Salt Lake City with him as long as the team won. If they lost, he would ride with his assistants, and I would have to find another way back.
They won. He drove me back to Salt Lake and we ended up at a downtown diner at 1:30 a.m. As I reported in my story, Majerus ordered the super stack of pancakes topped with blueberries, bananas and chocolate chips (with extra butter and syrup), two eggs over easy, a toasted English muffin and two orders of bacon. “A lot of people say hunger is the best seasoning,” he told me. “I think winning is.”
Majerus won a lot, and he ate a lot. I remember another occasion when we had dinner in a restaurant with about a dozen people. I don’t remember where it was, but I do recall that Wayne Embry, who at the time was the general manager of the Cleveland Cavaliers, sat between us. I couldn’t get enough of listening to the two of them talk ball. I also remember that when the waitress came over to take our order, Majerus laughed and said, “Just keep bringing us food. I’ll let you know when to stop.” …
When the news broke Saturday night that Majerus had died of heart failure at the age of 64, those of us who have covered him for a long time were sad but hardly surprised. We knew Majerus had been in the hospital since he stepped down two months ago as the coach at St. Louis. This very public man had disappeared from view; even his closest friends had not talked to him. Nobody knew the extent of his health problems, but what little they found out wasn’t good.
Furthermore — and let’s be honest here — we have always known that this was not a man destined to live a long and healthy life. He liked to project himself as a jovial, Falstaffian figure, but it is obvious he was also a sad, depressed, lonely man. He had lots of acquaintances but few close friends. He loved two things: Basketball and food. In the end, those things consumed him, not the other way around.
Majerus was more complicated than all these colorful anecdotes would suggest. He was charming, affable and available for national writers like myself, but the local beat guys couldn’t stand him. You always heard horrible stories about Majerus’ antics in practice, his treatment of people in the basketball office, especially his assistants. He belittled his players so badly that they transferred at an alarming rate. During one time-out huddle, he famously challenged a player’s manhood by grabbing his testicles.
And yet, when his St. Louis team lost to Michigan State in the round of 32 in last season’s NCAA tournament, senior Brian Conklin broke down in tears at the postgame news conference. He wasn’t crying just because his team lost. He was crying because he wouldn’t get to play for Majerus anymore.
It was all a part of the great Rick Majerus dichotomy. Another of my SI colleagues, S.L. Price, put it best at the end of his lengthy 2008 magazine profile of Majerus: “There goes the happy coach, back in his element. There goes the saddest man you ever saw.”
ESPN.com’s Gene Wojciechowski:
They say Rick Majerus died of heart failure. They’re wrong.
The Rick Majerus I knew was all heart. His life, all 64 years of it, was a breadcrumb trail of random acts of kindness. I’m not sure I can recall a conversation with him that didn’t begin or end with, “How can I help?” …
I read the wire story lead on his death, the one that described him as “the jovial college basketball coach who led Utah to the 1998 NCAA final and had only one losing season in 25 years with four schools.”
He wasn’t jovial in practices. Or games. Those were intellectual cage matches for him. Whatever the spread was in those games, Majerus was worth at least three points, probably more.
That year Utah (Utah!) reached the national championship game and actually led Kentucky at halftime, Majerus and the Runnin’ Utes had to beat No. 1 seed Arizona in the West Regional final and then No. 1 overall seed North Carolina in the Final Four semis. I was embedded with Utah as part of an ESPN The Magazine assignment.
Usually after wins, Majerus would hunker down with a postgame pizza and game video of the next opponent. But after the 25-point victory against Arizona and its NBA roster, Majerus could be found in the hotel whirlpool, sipping on an umbrella drink.
That was the same night, as he floated off the court in Anaheim, Calif., he spotted me in the tunnel and said, “Give me a hug, Polish Falcon.”
The Columbia Journalism Review might not like it, but when the 300-pound Majerus cornered you for a hug, well, you were getting a hug.
And it was the same night the coaching staff and players sprayed each other with soft drinks and stood happily in the shower area for an impromptu team photo. The innocence and joy on their faces still makes me grin involuntarily.
Majerus was 10 of the smartest people I’ve ever known. The Jesuits educated him well. He was a coach, but he could have been a councilman. He lived in a hotel during much of his career, but his suites often were filled with books. He’d call at night just to talk about a Maureen Dowd column he had read an hour earlier.
He won games, lots and lots of them, but I swear he cared more about seeing his players get diplomas than victories.
He could charm an entire national press corps. He could alienate an entire local media corps. He could hold court. He could hold grudges.
Majerus didn’t suffer fools. He was brilliant, complex and demanding to a fault. He also was loyal, caring and giving to a fault.
He thought the NCAA was dumber than a chia pet. He despised the hypocrisy of rules that lacked a gram of common sense. So, sure, Majerus would take a doggie bag of leftovers to a foreign player on his roster who was alone and homesick in a dinky off-campus apartment during the Christmas holidays. If it was a violation, Majerus could live with the shame.
I too have a Rick Majerus story because of one of my sports announcing highlights, the 1999 Utah game against “tiny Ripon College.” (Majerus and former Ripon coach Bob Gillespie were friends, and Gillespie once was briefly hired as an assistant for Majerus before he changed his mind and returned to Ripon.)
Why did Utah play Ripon? Because, said Majerus, ”I know the guy from Ripon, I’m from Ripon, I used to eat a lot of Ripon good cookies and I hope he brings me some Ripon good cookies. We’re throwing a party for him. We’re going to make a lot of money and he’s going to make what he thinks is a lot of money. It’s a great friendship and that’s why we’re playing the game.”
I interviewed Majerus after his New Year’s Day practice the night before the game. (Practice started right after the 1999 Rose Bowl, the end of which I saw in our hotel room — the University Marriott in Salt Lake City, the same hotel Majerus lived in during his years coaching the Utes — to which I ran up to get my tape recorder. The sequence was: Go in, turn on the TV, find the recorder, watch the game-ending quarterback sack, cheer, and run out the door.)
I asked Majerus seven questions. I got 15 minutes of answers. I had to run half of the pregame interview during halftime, because the answers were just priceless. You could tell right away that whenever Majerus had had enough of coaching, some TV sports operation would welcome him with open arms and a lunch or dinner buffet.
The story goes beyond Majerus, because on the morning of the game, we discovered we had outsmarted ourselves. We made our plane reservations through O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, because, we reasoned, O’Hare never closes due to bad weather. The morning of the game, the first thing we heard on TV was the 23 inches of snow hitting Chicago, with plane flights already being diverted several days later. So our first activity the day of the game was to go to the Salt Lake City airport and reschedule our flight from Sunday to the following Wednesday. (Happily, the University Marriott extended our group rate for the next three nights, including their epic daily breakfast buffet. I’ve been a fan of Marriotts ever since then.)
That same blizzard dumped 18 inches of snow in Ripon. The game was not on TV, so the radio station’s news and sports director claimed that that was the highest rated program in the radio station’s history, with a captive audience listening. Ripon scored the game’s first eight points but lost 74–49.
Ripon fans congregated in the hotel’s restaurant after the game. So did Majerus, where he ordered a club sandwich. Which he apparently forgot about, resulting in the mother of one of the players and ourselves eating Majerus’ club sandwich.
We didn’t run into Majerus after that, but we had an extremely pleasant three days after that being “stranded” in Salt Lake (temperature 50 degrees) due to “bad weather.” When we got back to O’Hare, our car was encased in two feet of snow and ice, and the temperature was below zero.
Majerus should get the last word, or words, from this collection:
“Nobody thought I’d be a great coach. I’m the kind of guy you’d expect to be driving an 18-wheeler through town.”
“We’re at the WAC tournament and they want us to show the kids a film on gambling. And we’re staying on top of a casino. I asked them where do they want me to show the tape, at the blackjack table, the craps pit or when the boys are checking out their Keno numbers?”
“I like practice, I love teaching, I love to see a kid get a degree and an education. I enjoy the college campus. I love the theater in our campus. I like the campus life. There’s a travel club on our campus, and I’ll go to those lectures. In an NBA player’s life, how can you make a difference? I mean, you might be able to make a little bit of a difference, but I think I’ve impacted all my players more than any pro coach they’ve ever played for — both from a basketball standpoint, but more importantly, from a lifestyle standpoint. (Keith) Van Horn just asked me to be the godfather for his baby. It was fun to sit through Andre (Miller’s) graduation, to see his mom smile. It was fun to see Hanno (Mottola) come from Europe and realize his dream. It was fun to see Drew Hansen get in Stanford Law School. The other night, one of my players had a really bad family problem and I really did enjoy offering a perspective on it and seeing if I could help him out. A lot of people that are very wealthy throw money at their problems, but it’s fun to help them work through it. I love the fans and the college students. I like the alumni association deal. I like the rah-rah and all that. I like the band rather than that fabricated music. I like the fact that we have students that are cheerleaders that really care, as opposed to a dancing girl team of hired mercenaries.”
“In the late 1990s with Utah, we were in a regional, and coach [Al] McGuire was there and I asked him to talk to my team. He talked to them and then asked for any questions. Someone said to him, “How good was coach as a player?” He said, “Let me explain something to you, ‘We had an Indian mascot named Willie Wampum when coach played. I would have put the mascot before I put coach in the game.”
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