Fran Dunphy served La Salle and the Big 5 better than anyone

When La Salle hosts Duquesne on Wednesday night, at the on-campus arena that should have been built at 20th and Olney long before, it will be the 1,000th game of Fran Dunphy’s head coaching career in college basketball.

No one has written a story or post or anything at all this year that mentions Dunphy’s march to this mark. No one has apparently asked him about it, and he has spoken to no one publicly about it. Just 33 head coaches have reached 1,000 games in the history of college hoops, and Dunphy was poised to pass this milestone without a word until La Salle announced Thursday that he will retire at the end of this season.

Dunph’s making it official, huh? OK, let’s check to see exactly how many games he’s coached …

The relative silence over that relevant statistic says something about Dunphy and something about La Salle. Anyone who knows Dunphy knows that he was never going to volunteer that information, to bring it up himself. Not him. Not his way. No such ego. But it was also a reflection of the state of La Salle basketball. Was the program relevant? Did it matter? How many people, outside of the university community and the thin halo of interested parties around it, were paying attention?

» READ MORE: La Salle coach Fran Dunphy, ‘Mr. Big 5,′ to retire from coaching at the end of the season

That reality is what makes what Dunphy did in returning to his alma mater, taking over the program in 2022 and guiding it to a 43-51 record since, so unusual and meaningful. He has 623 victories in his career, the most of any Big 5 coach. He won nine Ivy League championships at Penn, won five regular-season and tournament championships at Temple, and qualified for the NCAA Tournament 17 times. He had nothing left to prove to anyone. He was already a respected and beloved figure within Philadelphia’s basketball circles. He is 76 and could have spent these last several years golfing, catching up on time with his family, and no one would have wondered where he’d gone or why.

Instead, he couldn’t shake the belief that he had a duty to return to La Salle — to his alma mater, where he’d been a terrific player himself, a member of the 1968-69 Explorers, arguably the best team the city has ever seen. So he acted on that loyalty, that sense of obligation. The university was going to renovate and upgrade Tom Gola Arena, transform it into John Glaser Arena, into a place that didn’t feel like a second-floor, second-rate gym anymore. A time of some change was ahead. The program needed a leader who had credibility with outsiders and insiders alike. The place needed him. In the end, he wouldn’t, couldn’t, say no.

College basketball coaches take jobs for a lot of reasons. Service isn’t often one of them.

» READ MORE: Fran Dunphy reflects as he is recognized in 2022 class of the La Salle Athletics Hall of Fame

It was always incorrect to think of Dunphy as a potential savior at La Salle, as a figure who would lead the Explorers to an out-of-nowhere run in the Atlantic 10 or — let’s really stretch our imaginations here — to the NCAA Tournament. The challenges of the job, of coaching at a university that only recently truly began to understand and acknowledge basketball’s place in its culture and identity, were simply too great for him to overcome.

I once spoke to a coach who, before Dunphy agreed to come back, was approached about La Salle’s head coach opening. Rebuilding most programs, this coach said, required a long climb up a steep hill. Rebuilding La Salle’s program would be like scaling a skyscraper. You have to go straight up. Good luck.

The money isn’t there, especially now in the age of name, image, and likeness and pay-for-play. The necessary alumni support isn’t there. Look at Dunphy’s record with the Explorers again: 43-51. That’s not quite mediocre, but given the resources available to Dunphy there, it’s closer to a miracle than you might first think. If Dunphy didn’t get more out of his teams at La Salle, there wasn’t more to be extracted.

“Having a guy like Dunphy,” former La Salle guard Khalil Brantley once told a reporter, “I feel like I’d run through a thousand brick walls for this man.”

The obvious and appropriate precedent for Dunphy’s return was his mentor and former coach. When Tom Gola graduated from La Salle in 1955, he had led the Explorers to an NIT championship at Madison Square Garden, an NCAA championship, and another appearance in the national championship game. Then, with the program on probation and under a cloud of scandal in 1968, Gola took on the dual task of coaching the Explorers and restoring the program’s reputation. What his former point guard did wasn’t so different.

» READ MORE: For 42 years, Mark Quigley helped keep the lights on at the Palestra. The community he found there changed his life.

“He was so filled with pride about La Salle, and he wasn’t that far removed,” Dunphy once told me. “For me, it’s a much different thing. It’s been 50 years since I’ve been here. But you could tell he had great pride in what it was and what he did.

“When you’re young, you don’t have the same appreciation,” he continued. “And that’s why I see these kids, and when you’re trying to put an older head on that younger body, sometimes it just doesn’t fit, because I lived that, and I didn’t appreciate it when we had it. We knew we had something different with him. He was La Salle. That was the most important thing. So it meant a lot to us. Then, when he steps away and we get older, we say, ‘Man, how lucky were we?’”

A thousand games … and then a few more. A coach who was a Philadelphia institution … and something more. Seventeen years at Penn, 13 at Temple, these last three just for the sake of La Salle’s stability and future. No man gave more to the Big 5, to the city’s basketball community, to a school he knew so well. Man, how lucky has everyone around here been?