Sports: The Tulsa Twostep

            A series of little-known but fortuitous circumstances allowed Tom Izzo to return to MSU from Tulsa as an assistant coach, a move that became a pivotal turning point for MSU basketball.

            OPTIONS WERE CLEAR-CUT in 1986 for a graduate-assistant basketball coach making $7,000 a year. You could own a car, although it would be something on the level of an old, weather-beaten Oldsmobile. You ate fast food at night, or threw some bargain-priced frozen entree from the grocery store into your cart ahead of its final destination in a microwave oven.

            You hoped there would be a couple of functions or invitations coming your way that week. An event at Kellogg Center was always welcome, as was an invitation from Michigan State friends, where in either case you could count on digging into a full-course, salad-and-steak dinner, replete with a twice-baked potato, or maybe some of that terrific risotto that had become so fashionable, all of it accompanied by fresh vegetables and rolls and, as a grand finale, maybe by a scoop of ice cream splashed with chocolate sauce for dessert.

            Tom Izzo was trying to justify the quality of life at Michigan State as a graduate assistant under head coach Jud Heathcote. It was not easy when you were always broke, often hungry, and wondering just what in blazes you were doing at age thirty-one working for, literally, starvation wages.

            He had his degree in education from Northern Michigan University. He had the ability and freedom to work a gainful job. And yet, here he was, hanging around a Big Ten basketball team, making less than minimum wage, turning down chances at one coaching job after another.

            Michigan Tech: He almost took a job at Houghton in the Upper Peninsula, Izzo’s homeland, during his second year under Heathcote. It was the wrong place at the wrong time.

            Northern Michigan: His alma mater and Tom Izzo could have gone back as head coach—for $20,000 a year. When he balked, even his mother was angry with him for saying no to a job that would at least have moved him up a rung from poverty to the ranks of America’s economically stressed.

            YEARS LATER, DEEPER INTO IZZO’S COACHING CAREER, bigger opportunities, openings, or invitations would come his way: Western Michigan … Eastern Michigan … Central Michigan … Northwestern … Wisconsin. Some of them were good, some were within reach, some were a stretch. Wanting them would always be Izzo’s problem. He preferred to be at Michigan State, the place that for a young bachelor whose passion was coaching, was Utopia minus the paychecks.

            An Upper Peninsula native could kid about the difference in culture: How nice it was to go to the mall or to a movie theater in East Lansing and see more than one title playing.

            Heathcote was sensitive to his part-time coach’s struggles. He knew all about Tom Izzo’s energy, his emerging coaching skills and his decency. Heathcote was in the process of working out with Doug Weaver, MSU’s athletic director, an arrangement in April 1986 by which Izzo could legally (NCAA rules governing paid assistants were rigid) make $20,000 annually.

            “If we can get that done,” Izzo assured his boss, “I’m staying.”

            Heathcote responded in his familiar, cut-to-the-chase voice:

            “We can get it done. But you’re not staying. You’re going with J.D. Barnett at Tulsa. You can go down there and be in charge of recruiting. If Mike Deane (Heathcote’s top assistant) is gone from here in three or four years, we can talk about you coming back. So, you’re out of here.”

            J.D. Barnett and Heathcote were old friends from a trusted coaching fraternity. The network was important to head coaches in need of capable staffers and to assistants who looked to head coaches as placement directors. If he had to leave East Lansing—and the thought was killing him— at least he was going to a place Jud knew would be good for him. At least he was going to have a few bucks in his wallet.

            Tom Izzo’s first paycheck, which showed up two weeks after he began work at Tulsa, was for a comparative king’s ransom: $438. That was a month of take-home pay in his old job. He decided to celebrate. The next morning, Saturday, he went to a Tulsa mall and engaged in what was, for him, a reckless spending spree: He bought pants. He bought a couple of shirts. He went out to lunch. On a summer Saturday in Oklahoma, life for a young basketball coach was sweet.

            It was not as if he were being overpaid or under-worked. Barnett drove a hard office. He wanted his staffers in their offices at 7 a.m. and preferred that they work through the evening, preferably until midnight or later. Nothing pleased J.D. Barnett more than to bring influential alums by the basketball offices well into an evening and display to them how hard his assistants were laboring.

            Izzo had been in Oklahoma for eight weeks when the phone rang, on a Tuesday, a few days into June 1986.

            “What are you doing?” asked the caller, a head coach by the name of Jud Heathcote.

            “Just sitting here.”

            “Buy a house yet?”

            “Nope.”

            “You haven’t bought a house yet?”

            “No. I just got settled into an apartment.”

            “Well, hang on,” Heathcote said. “Mike Deane is interviewing at Siena College. If he gets it, that opens up his slot and I want you back here in it.”

            Thoughts spun in Izzo’s mind throughout that day and night and into the next day. He was on the verge of getting the job he most wanted, in the town he most loved. He would live Michigan State basketball 24/7 as Jud Heathcote’s top assistant. Each time the phone rang, Izzo picked it up, hoping he would hear Heathcote’s voice.

            But there was no call Wednesday. Nor on Thursday. He decided to phone Heathcote for a status report.

            “Bad news,” Heathcote said. “Mike’s not taking the job.”

            One half of Izzo wanted to dissolve. Disappointment on this level was crushing, particularly when you had spent forty-eight hours knocking at heaven’s door. The other half was relieved. He did not look forward to a farewell conversation with J.D. Barnett. It would not be well received and, conceivably, might be damaging to his career.

            Izzo focused on happier thoughts, such as the next morning’s breakfast. He and Barnett were meeting in the morning with a local car dealer, Ken Tate, a Tulsa booster who would hand Izzo the keys to a gorgeous new car. It was one of the legal perks an assistant coach on Izzo’s level could expect at a place like Tulsa.

            Early the next morning, a half hour before they were to leave for breakfast and for the new assistant coach’s first drive in his new wheels, the phone rang in Izzo’s office.

            It was Heathcote.

            “You’re not going to believe this, but Mike wants the Siena job back.”

            “Is he taking it?”

            “I don’t know. Hang on.”

            Twenty minutes later, another call.

            Heathcote: “They offered Mike the job.”

            Izzo barely heard the words as Barnett began yelling from the corridor:

            “Tom, c’mon, we’ve got to meet Ken.”

            Izzo was in a bind he could never have imagined.

            “Jud,” he said, in a desperate whisper, “what am I gonna do?”

            Heathcote decided to table discussions for the time being.

            “I’ll get back to you,” he said.

            Tate, the Import Motors mogul, was a convivial gent, delighted to be placing in a new coach’s hands the keys to a Datsun 300ZX. Cars carried a particular status in Oklahoma. It was the sort of favor friends of Tulsa’s athletics wanted to confer upon loyal coaches—emphasis on loyal.

            Izzo was soon tooling through Tulsa in his new wheels, so absorbed by the pure bliss of driving a hot new automobile he could manage only one thought: “If my friends back home in Iron Mountain could see me now.”

            His spirit was simultaneously sinking. He might be giving back the car that very night, at least if he survived Barnett’s reaction when Izzo told him he was leaving for East Lansing.

            Breakfast moved into lunchtime and beyond and still there had been no follow-up from Heathcote.

            At 11 p.m., Izzo’s phone rang.

            “I’ve got it all worked out,” Heathcote said. “I’ll call J.D.”

            Izzo thought for a moment. Doing the decent thing trumped doing the easier, uncomfortable thing.

            “No,” he said. “I’ll call him.”

            Izzo’s roommate during his first weeks at Tulsa was a graduate assistant coach named Ron Jirsa, who years later would become an assistant at Georgia under Tubby Smith and next the head coach at Marshall. Jirsa had been around when assistant coach Kevin O’Neill—he was destined to become head coach at Northwestern in 1997—left Tulsa in similarly spontaneous fashion for Arizona earlier that year.

            “You better hold onto your ass,” Jirsa said when Izzo gave him the news late that night. “He wouldn’t even let O’Neill clean out his desk.”

            At 8:15 the next morning, Izzo’s phone rang.

            “Tom,” Barnett said, a crackle in his voice, “what’s going on?”

            Tulsa had that week interviewed former University of Minnesota assistant coach Flip Saunders, who was going to take a restricted-pay job on Barnett’s staff (in step with NCAA rules on staff numbers and compensation).

            Saunders was friends with Mike Deane, whose appointment at Siena had appeared that day in the Minneapolis newspaper. Saunders called Barnett to ask the logical question:

            “Is Tom going back to Michigan State?”

            Barnett in turn called Izzo, saying: “Flip’s looking for you. He wants to talk with you.”

            Barnett paused and said: “Did Jud call you?”

            For moments that seemed like minutes, Izzo was silent.

            “Yeah …”

            “Are you taking the goddam job?” Barnett roared.

            “I’ll be honest, J.D.,” Izzo answered, “I’d like to.”

            Barnett followed with a barrage of blue language and expletives.

            After the first salvo, he barely caught his breath before he hit Izzo with more thunder. 

            “Turn that car in immediately! And get out of that office! I want that car in twenty minutes!”

            Izzo by now had ceased being embarrassed. He was mad. He had done nothing wrong except agree to join an old boss who had stuck to an earlier commitment and now wanted him back after Deane had departed for Siena. If Barnett wanted to come down on someone, blame Siena for hiring Deane.

            Now without transportation, Izzo called Jirsa for a ride. The car keys he had owned for twenty-four hours were back in the custody of Import Motors.

            “I’m not allowed to pick you up,” Jirsa said, embarrassed that Barnett had given screw-him orders to a fellow assistant coach.

            Izzo said he understood. He called a cab from the car dealership and was dropped off at the basketball office, where he planned to clean out his desk as an ugly exit unfurled.

            It wasn’t necessary. Barnett had already purged Izzo’s office of anything remotely attached to an assistant who had been on the job for all of eight weeks.

            It was now 4 p.m. Izzo had not heard a word from Barnett. No final orders, no calmed-down farewell, nothing. He decided to call his best friend, Steve Mariucci, who was now on the staff at Southern Cal.

            “Just get out of there,” Mariucci said, disgusted at how a young man’s career obligation—to say nothing of his freedom—had caused a head coach to come so unglued.

            Izzo headed to the airport, two duffel bags in tow, and caught a 5:30 p.m. connector to Lansing. Tulsa was in his rearview mirror. East Lansing, here comes Tom Izzo, carrying a few bruises from Barnett’s verbal artillery but relieved to be going back to the place he knew he was supposed to be.

            Izzo understood what he would be doing when he rejoined his old boss, Heathcote. He would be recruiting—happily so. He was now Heathcote’s right-hand assistant and top talent scout. Finally Tom Izzo could get on with a personal goal of making the state of Michigan the Spartans’ private recruiting province. It was Nirvana for a thirty-one year-old man who was hungry and determined to bring in kids who for too long had been finding excuses to go to Michigan, Syracuse, or anywhere but East Lansing.

            Izzo had no idea where, or how, his career might evolve at Michigan State as he settled in as top assistant to a head coach who had not yet turned sixty. It was a little early to think about inheriting Heathcote’s job. It was equally early to think of becoming a head coach anywhere on a major Division I level until he put a bit more muscle on his resume.

            This article was excerpted with permission from Lynn Henning’s new book, Spartan Seasons II:  More Triumphs And Turmoil Of Michigan State Sports (Sports Seasons Publishing, 2006).  Henning is a 1974 graduate of Michigan State and is a sportswriter and columnist for the Detroit News.  His new book is available for $27.95 at bookstores or online at www.spartanseason.com.