Every time you thought John Chaney was crazy, he knew exactly what he was doing | Mike Jensen

I should have kept the tapes of the interviews, the laughs, the detours down side roads you didn’t know existed. Enough stories for tomorrow’s paper and … yeah we’re good through Thursday, just need to cleanse the language a bit. John Chaney rarely kicked you out of his office. It was still morning, Temple’s practice already done. At some point, you had to decide you had enough, maybe for the week, and since the stories didn’t type themselves, you grudgingly made for the door and probably a food truck across Broad Street.

Your job, technically, was to cover Temple Owls men’s basketball. Actual job description: Cover one man.

Writing about the games themselves, for Chaney’s last nine seasons in my case, a personal rule of thumb, you always left space for Chaney to be Chaney.

That was true right until Friday, when John Chaney died, age 89. Let Chaney be Chaney.

» READ MORE: John Chaney throughout the years: See how the legendary Temple coach built a legacy in Philly

He’d give you as much as you could take in. The simple act of showing up was big to him. You didn’t have to get to the entire early-morning practice. His assistants often ran the 6-6:30 portion … running, literally. Getting the conditioning in before Chaney, taking his overcoat off, saw something he didn’t like, maybe a badly-angled pass or some spacing being off. He’d stop everything in its tracks.

So it would go off the rails? Not if you’re a sportswriter. That’s when it got good. After switching over from the Villanova beat, fall of 1997, I showed up at my first Chaney practice. As it ended, I went down to the court to see him. Footwork on his mind, Chaney immediately started showing how if I put one foot in front of the other — the left one, move that up — ball-handlers should attack that foot, you wouldn’t have time to recover.

Whether Chaney intended it or not, I always took that conversation as metaphor, Chaney saying, Day One, “I’ll say a lot of crazy stuff, and you’ll write about it — just don’t forget, this is what I do.”

I covered the last two of Chaney’s five runs to the NCAA Elite Eight, each unforgettable; his induction to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2001; and also his slightly more forgettable final seasons before retiring in 2006.

Never really forgettable, though. My working theory about covering John Chaney was that every time you thought he was crazy, he showed he knew exactly what he was doing. And every time you thought he knew exactly what he was doing, he showed he was crazy.

» READ MORE: John Chaney, legendary Temple University basketball coach, dies at 89

Another practice, a few years later, right after a loss. Sitting up in the stands with an out of town reporter, the Owls practicing in McGonigle Hall. Chaney was on his big men for their alleged soft play. He used a phrase that would start a fight in a jail yard, then quickly looked up and saw a few people in the stands, said if there were any women there, they should leave.

His eyes weren’t great seeing distances by then. He saw a couple of men up in the stands. Who’s up there? An assistant coach told him it was me.

“Sitting up there like a couple of monks,” Chaney grumbled.

After the practice, players started shooting, their coach suddenly in a better mood.

“What are you doing up there, sitting incognegro?” Temple’s coach yelled with a cackle.

It wouldn’t work today. Somebody filming with their phone would get something way off the color chart that Chaney said, get it to go viral, and he’d lock up practice like most coaches. Instead, Lynard Stewart’s mother was liable to be over there in the side stands, and a couple of high school coaches from near or far were probably there checking things out. A printed itinerary of the practice schedule? Nah, that wasn’t Chaney.

By the time I began covering him, Chaney’s life story already had been brilliantly told. That wasn’t the job. Chaney was already an icon. If anything, the job was to tell people about the day-to-day task of being John freaking Chaney.

What was it like? Stealing money was usually my short answer. Chaney didn’t really believe in the words “off the record.” Maybe a “between you and me” every few years. Once he was blasting an opposing out-of-town coach so hard for negative recruiting, I actually asked him, just that one time, if it was on the record, since I wasn’t sure. “What do you think I’m talking to you for?” Chaney said, more or less. (I ended up on Tony Kornheiser’s national radio show the next day, deciphering what he meant.)

Chaney loved crazy road atmospheres, but he didn’t like losing, not after getting a technical for crumbling a cookie on the court after it had been thrown at him at St. Bonaventure. No comment afterwards? Please.

“I’ve been here a number of times when I’ve been hit with coins and toilet tissue and everything else, while a Brother stands over there and looks at it,” Chaney said at the press conference. “If this is a Christian organization or Christian university, it would behoove them to do something about it.”

» READ MORE: John Chaney by the numbers, a Hall of Fame coach and mentor

He wasn’t easy to play for, and you understood that. Players such as Pepe Sanchez and Rasheed Brokenborough, smart men, gifts to sportswriters themselves, always made that clear. Maybe once a season after a game Chaney would announce his usually open locker room would be closed, no talking to players, and you knew what that meant — buckle up. He intended to go off and didn’t want any rebuttals from the locker room.

Maybe once a year you’d also get a phone call from star executive assistant John DiSangro, “Hey, got a minute … ?”

To debate with Chaney, you had to understand, his journalistic critiques were often on point, if loud. Once I wrote something, I believed, that didn’t line up with his thoughts. He took me through the steps that led to his own thoughts. Loudly. Profanely. But still somehow respectfully. (Don’t try that at home.)

The first time I got one of those calls, before I was covering him full-time, he argued why I was a bleeping idiot and I argued my points on why maybe I wasn’t and it may have ended with him hanging up. It definitely ended with him having the Atlantic 10 commissioner write our sports editor blasting the point made. (The Atlantic 10 a second-tier league? There were more than two tiers, I correctly told Chaney. Yeah, that didn’t go over well.)

Going forward, you found that if you just held the phone a couple of inches from your ear for a couple of minutes, gave Chaney space to rant, the phone call would usually end in laughter. He wasn’t looking for a correction, just an understanding of the facts.

I also didn’t quite understand yet how the argument itself was good for his soul, that Chaney would argue with Jehovah’s Witnesses who came to his house about God, to the point they’d bring a boss back, and he’d berate the boss Witness, only willing to let God himself settle the argument. (In the meantime, get away from his door.)

I wasn’t on the beat yet when Chaney went after John Calipari after a game at Massachusetts, but I was there, filling in for an injured beat writer. The game was close, Chaney was calm in his press conference after losing, and the two Philly writers stayed for a couple of minutes listening to Calipari before heading to Temple’s locker room to talk to Owls players.

Our mistake? Not knowing Chaney’s mood change in the previous five minutes. We passed Chaney coming the other way in the hallway. Mike Kern of the Daily News had the line I’ve quoted ever since — “It was like passing Lee Harvey Oswald with a glazed expression on his face.”

» READ MORE: Mike Kern's reflections on the John Chaney he knew

It turns out Chaney had heard second-hand about words Calipari had with one of the refs after the game, and to say it set him off, history can judge that. I was talking to Temple star Eddie Jones when DiSangro raced back into the locker room to say Coach was going after Calipari. If you watch the tape — and you should, for old time’s sake — you’ll see Jones enter the picture, towel around his waist.

We’d missed Chaney’s opening gambit — “I’ll kill you … I’ll kick your a--.” Had to listen to tape recorders to pick up the words. I remember a force field around Chaney in the locker room later. (He called the A-10 commissioner later that night and said, “I [screwed] up.”)

I missed the 2005 Goon-gate episode with St. Joseph’s and its aftermath, a family member in the hospital. That fallout went on, too. It may have been the beginning of the end.

I wasn’t covering him during his early years fighting the NCAA over initial-eligibility restrictions, but I covered the issues, which brought me into contact with Chaney and exposure to his ideas, which came from his own background. History rarely proved him wrong in those views.

On the road, if he was at a new stop, Chaney would trot out some of his favorite Chaneyisms. “A blind man ain’t got no business at the circus,” that kind of thing. At a brand new stop, Ole Miss I believe, he yelled out, just before stepping into the press room, “Anybody got any bourbon?”

Confession: If I wasn’t on deadline, I enjoyed when he sidetracked into politics. I knew professionally the next 15 minutes of tape were going to be unusable. The man was up to speed on current events, though. He read everything, and a news channel would be on all day in his office.

Covering him, you got it confirmed, for all the craziness, he most valued being a basketball coach, just as he had at Sayre and Simon Gratz and Cheyney, winning the chess game, getting on a player for four years about defense and then maybe shocking that player by stating his trust in covering an opposing star player during the NCAA Tournament.

His players had to grow tired of hearing the same practice-halting lectures, and the same words about footwork and other fundamentals. Maybe Chaney harped on the same five fundamentals all the time, but those five fundamentals were what you needed to play at the highest level. Seriously, five Elite Eights out of a little office with no windows, a program run out of his back pocket. It gets more mind-boggling as the years roll on.

Always ready to stir it up, Chaney was good for our business, and he knew it and we knew it and he knew we knew it. Also, you couldn’t get one over on him. Temple was about to play Duke in the 1999 Elite Eight at the Meadowlands. Chaney had a ritual of giving away his ties after losses. (Later in his career, he slowed that down when there were more losses.) The day before the Duke game, four local reporters were shooting the breeze with Chaney after Temple’s practice. Three of the reporters said they had ties from Chaney that season. One reporter had two or three. (Kern, of course. Kern earned them. He was the all time best at getting Chaney revved up.)

But the ties. I said, “You know how many I have?” I made a hand motion — zero.

Chaney didn’t say a word. The next day, Temple vs. Duke, players walking on the court for the tipoff, after the anthem and introductions, a Temple manager sprinted across the court and told me, “Coach said to give you this right here, right now.”

A rolled-up tie. It was maybe the only time he gave one away before a loss.

Were we too easy on Chaney? By letting him be him, I don’t think so, but I’m not partial in that debate. He wasn’t a bully and he was no racist, despite the emails you’d get. (Just this one time, save them folks.) He claimed to hate fans, the bandwagon kind, but he loved people.

» READ MORE: What John Chaney meant to me and the Black community in America | Marcus Hayes

He made you view the sport itself from a different prism. I’m ruined forever coming up with any definition of what constitutes “good hoops.” A 57-51 barnburner featuring two teams shooting 36% but committing few turnovers now often qualifies and I blame Chaney.

In his retirement, after finishing his final press conference by saying “Excuse me while I disappear,” I’d call him when I knew I wanted to build a story or column around the conversation. Too often when somebody died. Jerry Tarkanian. (Chaney loved Tark, because Tark would always play him, even was willing to be a sacrificial lamb the night Temple opened the Liacouras Center.) John Thompson. Peter Liacouras himself.

You wouldn’t call John just to get a quote. That would be wasting the call. I still remember his home number from memory. Best time to catch him was late, when he was home from shopping, ready to watch the NBA late into the night.

You couldn’t forget Chaney’s age, that he wasn’t, in fact, going to pick up that phone forever as health problems mounted, many stemming from his diabetes. (One time he would not pick up the phone, the 25th anniversary of a famous event. “Call Calipari” was the message back.)

I went to his house in Mt. Airy only once, a few years back. I’d written about his great friend Speedy Morris and Speedy’s extensive coaching tree and since it was just before Christmas, Chaney wanted to give a shiny copy of that printed tree to Speedy, “with a case of beer.”

Come to the house, he said. That had always been off limits back when he was coaching. (“Don’t tell Kern,” Chaney said when he opened the door.) It took a while for Chaney to answer the door since he’d come down the stairs on a moving chair. He raved about how that worked, explained the details of it.

In recent years, taking a couple of days off, I’d often include a mental asterisk to myself: *Unless John Chaney dies. That was my line of demarcation. What replaces that * now? Nothing, honestly.