Rick Majerus is a busy man. I had been trying to steal 10 minutes of his time for several days before he graciously invited me to meet him on a Sunday afternoon at the Chase Park Plaza.
Between practices, meetings with the athletic director and an exhibition game, not to mention preparation for tomorrow night’s season opener, Coach Majerus finally had time to talk.
It’s not every day that I’m given the opportunity to talk at length with a future Hall of Fame basketball coach. But there I was, waiting for him, with a list of questions about him: why Saint Louis University, how much longer will you coach, boxers or briefs? Okay, maybe not the last one.
But Rick didn’t want to talk about himself. He didn’t want to go into his 11 berths into the NCAA Tournament, his almost 500 career wins, or how a former walk-on has come to be known as one of the most prolific minds in the world of college basketball. No, Rick Majerus was there to talk about his plan to win with the SLU Billikens.
To talk about one, though, is to talk about the other. Majerus came to SLU having never had a losing season; the Billikens were last in the NCAA Tournament by a fluke Conference USA championship in 2000. When University President Lawrence Biondi, S.J., unceremoniously fired then-coach Brad Soderberg and hired Majerus, he didn’t hire the big man to just win games. The goal was the NCAAs, and Majerus was Biondi’s guy.
And, as of July, they found themselves on a wave of national attention: this was the year that Rick Majerus would be back in the Dance, everyone was sure. Finally, after all the struggles, SLU was on the map.
Then, on Oct. 13, with just 18 words, the foundations of the program were dismissed from school. In one paragraph, the program was starting over.
“This year is going to be the greatest challenge of my coaching career,” Majerus said. “I’ve never faced a challenge where you design a team, you build a team, you recruit a team, and then, all of a sudden, the guts are taking out of it. You’re driving a car without a battery.”
It’s not surprising that a man used to success, and easy success, occasionally laments his situation. Consider: you study for hours and still get a C on the exam. After all that work, nothing to show for it. So, I let Coach continue elaborating on his day-to-day attempts to grasp the situation.
“The timing of the decision was unfortunate … it’s gut wrenching,” he continued. “It’s hard for the fabric of the team. They all came in together, and then bam, two of your teammates are gone.
“And we revert back to where we were. Now instead of being the youngest, we’re one of the ten youngest. Players are playing out of position, playing more minutes than they are used to, and they are playing multiple positions at once.
But I feel that we’ve got to chart a course where we get better every day, and we have so far, and let the winning take care of itself. Put ourselves in a position where time, points and age work for us.”
As our conversation weaved into the details of the season (“if you have good practices, winning takes care of itself”), why Majerus agreed to play the national champions Duke (“I think it will be good for us”), and how he was offered a chance to leave SLU this year and return to ESPN, our conversation gradually drifted to where I had wanted to start.
Finally, we were talking about Rick Majerus, the man. You see, though caricatures often depict “Big Rick” as an out-of-control basketball coach more concerned with his dinner than his team, after 20 minutes of talking about his players, Majerus finally opened up about himself; what I learned is not what you’d expect.
Majerus quit his dream job, coaching at USC, to be with his mother; he has several times taken penalties from the NCAA to help his players; and this is a man that deeply cares about the success of his players off the court.
Majerus has no children, so it’s easy to see how each year he adds a few more sons to the Majerus family. He told me about how one former player is a spokesperson for State Farm, another is working in the Indiana governor’s office, and how only a handful of former players didn’t graduate.
He also understands how difficult having Majerus as a father figure can be.
“I don’t know if I’m a hard coach to play for, but I’m a truthful coach,” he said. “Some guys embrace that and others don’t. I’m always on them. I’m on them about their academics, the conduct of their life, and obviously basketball. But they get better…
“You don’t have to get all As, but you have to give an A-effort, and then I’ll help you get the rest of the way.”
Majerus also recounted how “the first person to call me on my birthday will be Andre Miller’s mom. My own sisters forget my birthday sometimes,” he laughed, “but I’ll get cards from former players and their families. I got the nicest letter from Kevin Lisch a few days ago. Those things mean a lot to me.”
Being a Hall of Fame coach has more benefits than free hotel rooms and no car insurance. See, Rick Majerus has a chance to change people’s lives. That’s an opportunity, he said, that makes all the hard rigors of the season worthwhile.
“It’s very rewarding for me to be able to help out those who can’t help themselves, those who are struggling with cancer,” he said. “Fortunately I can raise money to support charities that help way-ward kids, cancer patients, the Special Olympics, scholarship foundations to help underprivileged kids get to college, things that I’m very fond of.”
At this point, it was time to talk basketball again. After all, with the season just a few days away, Coach Majerus can’t worry too much about getting his 500th win or whether or not he’d return after his contract expires after the 2011-12 season. There are films to be watched, donors to court, interviews to do and charities to raise money for. And that’s just his Monday.
So I asked Rick Majerus one final question: at the end of the day, what surprises you about your team?
“I want to be pleasantly surprised by their maturity level and their effort,” he answers quietly. “We have a plan … but we take it day-by-day.”
Such is the life of Rick Majerus.
