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It isn't easy being Jerry Green—he may have brought glory back to UT's men's basketball program, but he still can't get respect from the Vols faithful.

by Brooks Clark

Here, in a nutshell, is the conundrum facing Jerry Green:

In the SEC and then the NCAA tournaments, which team is going to show up, and for how many nights in a row?

Take the past two weeks.

At home against Kentucky, Tony Harris broke down-court. Dribbling near the Wildcat basket, as two defenders converged on him, Harris made the initial moves for a lay-up, then, still looking up at the basket, deftly underhanded the ball behind his back to a trailing Isiah Victor, who floated the ball home.

Harris had never looked back. How did he know Victor was there? "I knew he was trailing," says Harris. "Isiah is always the one who runs the floor. I knew he was there all the way down the floor."

But how did he know Victor was right there? "It's a little instinct I got," he admitted.

That night the Vols beat Kentucky with tenacious, hustling defense, team offense (at times magical), and Harris' threes. "It's just gelled," explained Harris. "Everything is going right. Nobody cares who gets the credit."

Days later, Harris and Victor shot 1-for-9 and 1-for-5, respectively, and scored only four points each, in a 80-75 upset loss at Alabama. Days after that, Harris hit for 23 points against Arkansas and then Georgia to lead UT to a four-way share of the SEC championship.

"We're at the stage now of learning how to handle success," says Coach Jerry Green. "This is a great team to work with. They're resilient, flexible, with a great high side to them—this team can still get better. We need to develop the mental toughness that veteran teams with traditions of winning have, knowing how to act and react at the top level. We're not a very mature team, either from an age or a maturity standpoint, in handling the media, blaming others.

"We've broken down so many barriers since we've gotten here. Now we need to develop that mental class, that mental toughness that goes along with success."

Everybody knows this is a team with talent and potential, a 24-5 record and a lofty No. 11 ranking. They've won 20 games for three straight seasons and qualified for three NCAA tournaments—levels of success not seen in Knoxville since the late '80s. This is the first share of an SEC title since 1981-2. This season they've been ranked as high as No. 5 in the nation. To find a UT team in the top 5, you have to go back to 1968 and before that to 1958-59. "With all that talent they look like one of the teams that really could be a dark horse," says Greg Kelly, college basketball editor for Sports Illustrated.

At the same time, they're haunted by their pattern of inconsistency and their crash-and-burn in last year's NCAA, and—forgive them—some UT fans are still waiting to pass judgment on Jerry Green.

Without a sense of history, some local hoops fans might sound ungrateful.

"With that talent, he should be winning."

"Forget about those 20 wins. That's Elon, Radford—c'mon! Why doesn't he play the tough teams the way Pat Summitt does?"

"What about the last few minutes of Vanderbilt? How can you blow a 10-point lead with seven minutes to go?"

"He's Wade II," says one, invoking the name of a gentlemanly coach whose teams appeared to suffer for all the gentleness.

Says Green, "It's discouraging, sometimes, to be 24-5, ranked in the Top 10, and then read in all the newspapers across the state how bad a coach I am."

As Green sees it, the second-guessing has a bright side. "People have started caring about Tennessee basketball now. I've learned that anytime people care about you at Tennessee and you fail, even to the least degree, you're going to be blasted by everybody. It's a little bit different than any place I've ever been. You're going to be criticized here if you don't win or aren't as good as you should be. It's just the way of life, I think."

Treating People Right

With his easy-going demeanor, warm smile, and gentle Carolina accent, the gray-haired, 56-year-old Green has been compared to Andy Taylor. (One wag mentioned "country common sense.") There's something to that: Green was an MP and investigator in the Army, so he's been a lawman. And he does like to pick up his Gibson in moments of repose and strum a lick or two on the front porch. (Green mentions "Coal Town Road," "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay,"and "House of the Rising Sun" as favorites in his repertoire.)

Still, Green's 1950s childhood was decidedly closer to Norma Rae than Aunt Bee. He was born and raised in Startex, S.C., a "no-stop, no-light cotton-mill town" between Greenville and Spartanburg. His parents both worked their whole lives in the cotton mill. His father, Walter, was an alcoholic who had a hard time keeping a job and ended up suffering from gray lung, the disease in which cotton fibers clog the lungs. His mother, Maude, died in 1978 in an auto accident driving home after working the 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. third shift.

"Basketball was good for me," says Green. "It gave me a sense of purpose. It was something I did well that gave me some pride, which people need as they're coming through." Green was also a state pole vault champion. But after high school, the only future in sight was the mill. "Everybody I grew up with was working in the cotton mill. In that era, young people were expected to help their families out with the bills. Nobody had ever gone to college, and we were not really in a social climate that anyone ever would go to college."

One morning, after Green had worked all night, his coach from James F. Byrne High School, Jim Jack, picked him up and drove him over to Spartanburg Methodist, a local junior college, explaining "You need to be in school, boy."

"He did something for me he didn't have to do," says Green, who says he is therefore "relentless" in making sure his players pursue their degrees.

Green played two years at Spartanburg Methodist and two for Asheville-Biltmore (now UNC-Asheville). One day, stultified in an economics class at Asheville-Biltmore, he asked himself what he wanted to do for a living. "I knew then that I wanted to try to be a coach."

Green got his BS from Appalachian State in 1968, and after serving in the Army earned his Master of Education degree from East Tennessee State in '71. In graduate school he met Nancy Peden, whose father, John, bottled Orange Crush in Gastonia, N.C. (They have one son, Travis, who's in graduate school at Georgia Tech. Nancy directs the Tennessee Junior Science and Humanities Symposium, a grant program housed at the UT School of Education that encourages high school students to do research in science, engineering, and math.)

After six years as a high school coach, Green became assistant coach at UNC-Asheville in 1976 and head coach in '79. In nine years Green built the program into a winner and elevated the Bulldogs from the NAIA, to NCAA Division II, and then to Division I.

Carolina Lineage

In their reluctance to give Jerry Green the benefit of the doubt, it's possible that Knoxvillians might not have an appropriate appreciation of his exceedingly correct coaching pedigree. Through his own North Carolina roots and his four years as assistant coach to Roy Williams at Kansas, Green traces a direct line to Dean Smith and the University of North Carolina Tar Heels, where Williams was an assistant for 10 years.

Williams and Green met at a Dean Smith basketball camp in the early '60s and became good friends coaching at the UNC camp for 15 years. Williams used to watch Green play at Asheville-Biltmore and thought he was the dirtiest player he ever saw. "I played hard," says Green. "I don't know how good I was, but I always tried to play as hard as I possibly could."

"He was kind of like the brother I never had," Green has often said of Williams. In his 10 years under Smith, Williams learned "the system" of quality basketball, unselfish team play, and character-building that forged the characters of a string of superstars like Phil Ford, Sam Perkins, Vince Carter and was epitomized, of course, by His Airness Michael Jordan.

When Williams got the head coaching job at Kansas, he hired Green.

Says Green, "It was at Kansas that I learned to treat people the way you want to be treated, use your head and heart to handle people, how players should act and react. I'd been around basketball, knew how to coach basketball, but I didn't know how it worked at the top level until Roy and I went out to Kansas. Roy had worked with Dean and North Carolina and we were able to pass along many of the ideas about how to treat people and be treated."

In defense of Knoxville doubters, they've heard all this before. Wade Houston was touted as the next best thing to Louisville's Denny Crum, who learned it all from John Wooden at UCLA. Kevin O'Neill (heaven help us) was supposed to be the second coming of Pac-10 baron Lute Olson. Heck, this is the town that thought Chris Whittle was the next Henry Luce. We want to believe, but once we're nipped a few times, we get shy.

In 1993 Green got his break as a big-time head coach, at Oregon. After two 10-win seasons, Green led the Ducks to three straight winning seasons, including their first NCAA tournament since 1961, and, in 1997, an appearance in the Top 20.

In Eugene, Oregon, the priorities are A) long distance running, B) Nike shoes, C) love & peace, and D) all of the above. At one point UNLV tempted Green with a nice package, but the fit wasn't right and Oregon kept him until Doug Dickey did a-courting go.

Hired in a Hurry

In gaining the full confidence of the difficult-to-please Orange faithful, it may also be a lingering—and unfair—disadvantage for Green that he was hired at the end of a somewhat frenetic search process in which his name surfaced only after many others, leaving the unfair impression that he was the last partner available when the band played last dance.

When Kevin O'Neill packed up and moved to Northwestern in March 1997, the UT Athletic Department was forced to embark on a search process reminiscent of movie plots in which a scion must find a wife within two weeks in order to inherit millions. In a matter of weeks, the search SWAT team entertained thoughts of a half-dozen top-drawer coaches and offered the job to at least two of them. There were pratfalls and miscues, but at the end of the spree, the searchers found a Southern boy with a big-time track record who wanted to return home and who, in his 50s, seemed likely to stay a while.

Green was interviewed in a hotel room at the Final Four in Indianapolis—and things had to happen fast. Could he come back to Knoxville? Could he decide right now? A less down-to-earth person might have turned up his nose at the indignity, but Green was all humility and graciousness. "I wasn't the first choice but I was the right choice," he said at the press conference. "As for me and Tennessee, I think it's kind of like Forrest Gump says, we go together like peas and carrots."

The Antidote

This was a polar shift in tone from O'Neill, the brusque, straight-talking New Yorker who never fit into the polite, self-effacing Knoxville culture and never tried. He worked his recruiting magic, boating All-America high schoolers, but in his coaching he made "defense" a profanity. On the floor, his teams appeared to be fighting World War I—digging into trenches and fighting over small patches of territory. "He just didn't feel that we had the personnel to push the ball down the floor," explained long-suffering guard Aaron Green. Of course, this soporific strategy was attendance poison.

Happily, Jerry Green believes in filling up large arenas. He believes in teams that run fast breaks and score 100 points. "We want to get rid of the black curtains," he said, referring to the drapes used to block off empty upper-deck sections.

Before doing anything else, Green had to "re-recruit" Tony Harris, an All-America point guard from Memphis who, with O'Neill gone, might have had little interest in UT. Green flew to Memphis and earned Harris' endorsement.

When he went shopping for an assistant, Green hired an old friend, Chris Ferguson, an assistant at Virginia Tech with a reputation as an excellent recruiter. In 1987, Green had hired Ferguson, then a high school assistant, to assist him at UNC-Asheville. "He's got a great rapport with parents and players," says Green. "They like and trust him immediately. I saw that sparkle in his eye when he was coaching in high school. He will be a great head coach."

In that first season, UT made the NCAA tournament for the first time in nine years, and Green's recruiting team successfully recruited Vincent Yarbrough, the All-Everything-certain-future-pro from Cleveland, Tenn. All the excitement earned a too-high No. 9 preseason ranking in '98-99. Brought to reality by early losses to Arizona, Miami of Ohio, and St. Joseph's, in mid-season the Vols beat Kentucky 47-46 in Lexington. After a particularly low moment, an 88-82 upset loss to Mississippi State in Knoxville last Feb. 6, Green took his offense back to the drawing boards. Realizing that his players were young and sometimes had difficulty making decisions in a non-structured motion offense, he put in a series of set plays and patterns. The team then won its final six straight, punctuated by a 68-61 victory over Kentucky, completing the first sweep of the Wildcats since 1979. But true to the up-and-down pattern, they were immediately eliminated from the SEC tournament by a 62-56 loss to Mississippi State, then in the NCAAs won a lackluster game over Delaware, followed by the inexplicable embarrassment of a 81-51 defeat at the hands of Southwest Missouri State, a school best known for a drama department that produced Kathleen Turner and John Goodman.

Last spring, Tony Harris ventilated in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, saying critical things about the structured offense, about his teammates and coaches needing to get tougher, and about himself needing to be a little less coach-able and instead get back to doing his own thing. Green saw this frustration for what it was and let it pass. Sounding a little bit like Andy, Green told Mike Strange of the News-Sentinel last May, "Tony is an American. He can say and do whatever he wants to. I'm not going to discourage him from saying what's on his mind. That's up to him."

This is a team full of talent that works best when it's freewheeling. Green's challenge is to get the chemistry right and keep things under control at the same time. Harris is a volatile and necessary part of the chemistry.

"Tony is really a battler," says Green. "He's so intent on that challenge that sometimes he needs the ball in his hands and sometimes he needs the ball in other people's hands. He's very consistent at times and inconsistent at times. One thing about him is that if he has a bad night shooting, he does play defense and he does get assists." Freshman Jon Higgins, a guard from Ohio, has been an unexpected surprise—"a stabilizing force on offense," says Green—taking over the point guard duties at times and allowing Harris to set up more shots. Along with Higgins, two other mainstays at guard are freshmen—Terrence Woods from Memphis and Harris Walker from Chattanooga.

Looking Ahead

So how will this year's tournament season be different from last? "This team has shown that it can show up and rise to the competition," says Green. "Last year's team could be shaky at times. We didn't show up for a half against Auburn, a half against Florida, a half against Arkansas, a half against Mississippi State, both halves against Delaware and Southwest Missouri State. But this team hasn't shown that tendency. We were guard-oriented, which means that if someone has a bad night, you're in trouble." This year they've generally been more patient and been unselfish in taking more passes to get better shots. "There were two games that were anomalies," says Green. "Against Vanderbilt and the Kentucky game away, we reverted to the way we used to play last year and earlier this year. We shot the ball too quickly and took hard shots. Our Achilles Heel is the quick, bad shot."

So now we'll look to see how Jerry Green the chemist stirs Harris, Higgins, freshmen guard Terrense Woods, and Harris Walker in with forwards Victor, Yarbrough, C.J. Black, and freshman Ron Slay.

"When Isiah's in a rhythm, this team really goes," says Harris. But Victor has been uneven. "Some games he comes in with a high energy level and sometimes he has low energy and just blends in," says Green. "Sometimes he goes too fast. He puts himself in a non-win position, and he gets offensive fouls. I talk to him about it on a day-to-day basis. I tell him to slow down and he'll be 10 times better."

With his limitless talent, Yarbrough is as quick as a guard, has the size (6'7", 210 pounds) to guard big men, and is able to leap high for rebounds, even when he neglects to box out his opponents. With all that, he's still just a sophomore who's adding different facets to his game all the time.

C.J. Black, a 6'8" senior forward, has been showing some leadership qualities. Says Green, "He's leading by saying and by doing." Against Alabama, while others were faltering, Black graded out a perfect 35-0 on his defensive plays. "He's playing maturely, and when one of the others wants to shift the blame off of themselves, he calls them on it. Right now he's almost a player-coach."

Freshman Ron Slay enters a game like Errol Flynn swinging in on a rope. He brings energy and panache, and never has a down night. He's dapper in his white headband, the Adidas logo aimed directly ahead like a third eye, or more precisely like a laser aimed at his opponents. "He is just an energizer. He energizes the arena," Green says. "The unusual thing is that it doesn't matter whether he's at home or away. He just has that attitude of, 'I'll play you at home, or away, or in a garbage can.' He's a pretty solid young man off the court, but when he goes across those two lines, everything seems to change. He's a different guy. He has his own itinerary. He'll never be a follower. He'll choose to be a leader. For a freshman, he's one of the most consistent players on the team."

During last week's game against Arkansas, Slay weaved his way through a crowd in the lane, jump-stopped, then finger-rolled a shot not quite over the front of the rim. As it wavered and started rolling away from the hoop, Slay, following his shot amid a crowd, tapped it home. "Who got that?" pondered the TV announcer. Backpedaling back down the court in triumph, as if aware that he had been lost among the bodies, Slay jerked his right thumb toward his chest, claiming the credit he deserved.

A few minutes later, as Slay was ascending for an in-your-face, that's-it, go-home jam, a Razorback defender extended his arms like a child preparing to dive, met Slay in mid-air and brought him down to the polyurethane. As Slay spun on the floor, he crossed his legs and arms like a yogi, appearing to meditate for a TV instant, then brought his palms outward, St. Francis-style, for a split second of transcendental connection with the crowd, as if to say, "There was to be a jam, then there was no jam. Praise to Buddha!" He then rose and shot two free throws to help ice the game, much as his jam would have.

"He's a heck of an athlete," says Green. Around Halloween, Green says he saw Slay easily jump over a rack of 12 basketballs then dunk while wearing a Freddie Krueger mask. "Not many people are brazen enough to try a thing like that." They don't keep stats on things like that, but they should.

Green's challenge is to make it all come together. Interestingly, he doesn't use any of the psychological profiling tests that Pat Summitt and Kevin O'Neill have used. "I don't like to get opinions of my players from other people," he explains. "I was in education and taught most of my life and I learned that desire sometimes makes up for a lot of mental and physical deficiencies. Desire puts you over a lot of obstacles that a test can't put you over. Work habits can also do that. So we don't do testing and we may never do it."

And, of course, the only tests that matter in college basketball start right now, when there's no allowance for a bad game. The Vols must win three games in a row in the SEC tourney and six games in a row in the NCAA. "If we can get everybody on the same page," says Green, "play with alot of enthusiasm, box out and collectively not make the stupid turnovers, we're going to see if we can peak through the rest of this month."

March 9, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 10
© 2000 Metro Pulse