If Johnny Jones is going to be his last college head coach, it’s certainly worth noting who was his first.
Dick Vitale.
Yes, as 64-year-old Brendan Suhr puts a bow on more than four decades of coaching basketball, he started in the college game with Dickie V. In between are more bounces on the hardwood than you can imagine, and now he’s at LSU, imparting the wisdom gained from NBA championships and Dream Team gold and paying all the dues a hoops junkie can muster.
So here’s how Suhr, a kid from North New Jersey, began his basketball pedigree.
Future legend and Basketball Hall of Famer Hubie Brown was his high school coach. A coach at a nearby high school was a young Vitale. And later, Suhr, while a college player at Montclair State, worked Vitale’s camps.
“I learned to coach at camps,” Suhr said.
And then he recalled other basketball people who worked those camps back in the day, like Mike Fratello, Richie Adubato and Brian Hill.
“So it was all coaches and I was 19 and they were letting me hang with them. When camp would end sometimes we’d go to a summer-league game, but in Jersey there are diners and we’d always end up at a diner near Montclair State’s campus and be there till 1, 2 in the morning diagramming plays on napkins.
“Jerry Tarkanian, Vitale, the other guys, that’s where I was learning. And the next morning at 8 o’clock miraculously we’d be back at camp.”
We’ll get back to Vitale and their time together in Detroit later.
“I started in college basketball with Dick Vitale at the University of Detroit and spent five years at Fairfield,” Suhr said, where he did good things with that program, but then spent the rest of his career in the NBA.
Suhr broke into the NBA as an assistant to Brown for the Atlanta Hawks in 1979. He later served as Chuck Daly’s assistant with the Detroit Pistons when the “Bad Boys” won two NBA titles, and was on Daly’s staff for the 1992 Olympics and the greatest team ever assembled.
He’s been an assistant for the New Jersey Nets, head coach of Grand Rapids in the CBA, and an assistant for the Toronto Raptors, Orlando Magic, the Pistons again in 2000-01, and then for the New York Knicks from 2004-07.
And that’s when his first ties to LSU began.
The family was in Orlando when Christina, a top-level gymnast, narrowed her college choices to Georgia and LSU.
“I wanted her to go to Florida, because it was 80 minutes from our house,” Suhr admitted. “I was making a speech in Hawaii and I get off the plane and I get a message from my wife (Brenda) that our daughter committed to LSU.
“And she was supposed to visit Florida in a few days,” he added with a laugh.
Christina came to campus five days before Hurricane Katrina. During her time at LSU, Suhr was working for the New York Knicks and only occasionally got to see his daughter, but his wife made regular visits. Christina is now a veterinarian in Denver.
“Now she’ll visit us,” Suhr joked.
But all that factored in when the LSU job opened up, because Brenda wife loved her time in Baton Rouge.
But before that, Suhr said he talked his predecessor as an LSU associate coach, Eric Musselman, into taking the job. And, when Suhr was considering the offer, he said Musselman told him it was “incredible and loved the opportunity.”
For the past five years, Suhr has had his own basketball coaching and consulting business and helped out the program at Central Florida. What compelled him to take a real job?
“I had won two NBA championships, I was involved with the Dream Team, but I told Johnny I really wanted to help and be part of (an NCAA) national championship. That was on my unofficial bucket list.”
He said the two of them talked about the job for more than three weeks and developed trust and confidence in each other.
“Not only were we going to a place that she loved, but I was going to a place and working with someone who I knew would be great for me and help me develop,” Suhr said. “I’m on this journey and I’m not even close to being finished to where I can get to as a coach. And he’s added so much to who I am with his relationships with his players and the way he talks to them and relates to people.”
“He’s been a great addition to our team. He’s a tremendous communicator and very knowledgeable on both sides of the basketball,” Jones said.
Jones, starting his fourth year back at LSU, added that in Suhr’s long career, “there aren’t many situations he hasn’t seen. He’s been able to share a lot of things with us and we’ve been able to make adjustments. He’s been a huge positive for us.”
The biggest thing is he wants to be here.
“I’m at the point in my life and I can do what I want, so to speak, where I only do things I love and want to do.”
Knowing that LSU was sitting on a team with a chance to have a breakout year didn’t hurt. He didn’t know Jones, “but we had an instant connection, like we’ve been buddies for 20 years.”
Sort of like his first boss. And here is the Vitale story.
Vitale got the job as the head coach at the University of Detroit. He hired the 21-year-old Suhr as his top assistant.
“Our relationship was so strong from working together,” Suhr said. “There were just two assistants then. Dick was making $17,000 and I was making $9,000. I couldn’t believe I was getting $9,000. I was thrilled.”
But they needed players.
“We don’t know one player. The Detroit Free-Press has the all-state team. That’s who we’re starting to recruit. Because he gets the job April 1 and the signing period back then was April 15.” Suhr laughed at the memory.
The first thing he did was go find a local star named Tom LaGarde, who eventually went to North Carolina, but was down to UNC and Kentucky. Suhr knew him from an all-star camp and asked if LaGarde would put Detroit on his top-five list to help out. He did.
Then they sought out a quarterback named Tony Dungy who was also a top basketball player even though Detroit didn’t have football. Suhr said they drove up to his school in Jackson, Michigan, walked in and asked to see him.
“Tony Dungy comes down and he looks as old as I am,” Suhr said, recalling that Dungy said he wanted to play football at either Michigan or Michigan State but didn’t get an offer so he was going to go to Minnesota.
“So I tell him my head coach is in the car and I’d probably get fired if he didn’t come talk to him, and Dungy says OK. So I bring Dickie V in and he makes his spiel to the kid. As Tony will tell you this story today that Dick is going on with all his enthusiasm about the University of Detroit, which Dick has only seen once, and about it being the best place for him.”
Dungy, of course told him he wanted to play football and that was that.
Dungy’s football career is well-documented, of course, capped by coaching the Indianapolis Colts to a Super Bowl championship.
“Dungy today says, ‘All I knew is there was this crazy guy with one eye going all over the place trying to convince me to go there.’
“And now,” Suhr says, “they’re somewhat neighbors in Florida and they love each other.”