All The Right Moves

Foremost among Dan Fitzgerald’s vices is a virtual enslavement to the waggish anecdote.

So we’d better start with one.

The year was 1978. At Gonzaga University, they had just fired their basketball coach, Adrian Buoncristiani - in uniquely ham-handed fashion, since they’d really intended to do it the year before. Fitzgerald, then an assistant of some repute at Santa Clara, had been promised the job - only to learn that GU’s hiring posse felt its mission was to broaden the search rather than narrow it.

One finalist for the job became three finalists. Interviews were scheduled. Instructed to rustle up recommendations, Fitzgerald solicited every last favor - which is how it came to be one day that John Wooden had the school president on the horn.

Athletic director Larry Koentopp was dazzled.

“You actually know these guys?” he asked Fitzgerald.

When he flew up for his interview, however, Fitzgerald found himself bunking not at a hotel, but at the ramshackle rental house of Gonzaga assistant Stew Morrill - himself a finalist for the job. Morrill even drove Fitz to the interview.

In a Chevy Vega owned by … Adrian Buoncristiani.

“This is not good,” a highly amused Fitzgerald recalled thinking. “This is not the way it’s supposed to be.”

No, indeed.

But often it is this way: The Gonzagas of college basketball - schools which evolved into Division I mostly by accident - happen into a great young hire, who wins enough games in two or three seasons to lash together a bedsheet ladder and elope with the first rich suitor. The next hire isn’t so good, the program lurches and sways and perhaps even bottoms out - a casualty of few resources, flimsy commitment and faulty vision.

So how is it that Gonzaga basketball has become the model of success in the Northwest? How is it that only UCLA and Arizona on the West Coast have more victories in the past five seasons than Gonzaga’s 103?

And how is that a mere 19 years after Dan Fitzgerald was ferried to his new job in the fired coach’s beater that we finally have liftoff on his farewell tour?

Come to find out, this is the way it’s supposed to be - but hardly ever is.

Fitzgerald’s 15th season as head coach - two stretches separated by a four-year hiatus when he soloed as athletic director - hits the homestretch Thursday when the Bulldogs open West Coast Conference play against Santa Clara. The long goodbye has been in the works since the summer of 1995, when the school agreed to Fitzgerald’s wish to coach two more seasons and then turn the program over to longtime assistant Dan Monson.

Agreed somewhat reluctantly, it could be added.

“There was some sentiment of, ‘Why do this? Things are going really good now,’ ” Fitzgerald said. “But it’s the right thing to do. I truly believe that.”

And nothing - nothing - means more to Fitzgerald than doing it right.

“What’s the perfect time? Al McGuire - you walk away after you win the national championship,” he said. “But too soon is better than too late. I don’t think I can take the program much further, and I would rather see the program remain good than to keep coaching.”

But though he will remain as Gonzaga’s A.D., he won’t rule out coaching again somewhere else.

“Would I take another job?” he said. “Yes - but at 54 with my personality, there’s not a lot of guys phoning me up. Not with my tie selection. Realistically, it’s probably not going to happen.

“Besides, my wife once told me, ‘Deep down, I don’t believe you’ll ever leave. This place is just about hard enough for you.’ “

Asked what she meant by that, Darleen Fitzgerald laughed.

“I don’t ever remember saying it,” she confessed - knowing full well that in the labyrinth of her husband’s anecdotal database, attribution for any story can be community property.

Still, she knows precisely what it means.

“He couldn’t function in the ‘perfect’ place,” she said. “He’s better off when there’s a crisis every minute.

“He likes being the underdog. He’d rather be picked to finish last every year rather than first even one year. If everyone thinks Gonzaga is some rube school from nowhere, it makes him work harder.”

For instance, it was maybe a decade ago that Mike Montgomery, then coaching at Montana, stewed that “losing to Gonzaga is like losing to a CYO team.”

“Now the CYO team has a guy headed for the Hall of Fame,” Fitzgerald noted, a reference to Utah Jazz guard John Stockton, an early Fitzgerald recruit.

And yet no one has fertilized the po-folk profile of Gonzaga quite like Fitzgerald himself. In the context of Division I basketball, it is rooted in fact: Consider that Fitzgerald’s salary as A.D. and coach is in the $70,000 range, or roughly half of Lorenzo Romar’s base salary as the first-year head coach at Pepperdine. Let’s not even bother comparing recruiting budgets.

But Fitz can’t help but pile it on a little.

“When we came here,” he said, “the other Gonzaga in town was bigger athletically than this Gonzaga.”

This is the heart of the strange and wonderful fit Fitzgerald has forged with the school on the riverbank.

His mission as athletic director is to try and generate more resources for his department and staff, thereby ensuring survival in the 21st century. Yet he also cautioned that, “We got here by forming a pretty good callus. We have to be careful that it doesn’t become too nice.”

Same goes for his basketball team. If the Zags attract a more gifted player than they did 15 years ago - a fair assessment - they won’t continue to thrive without the tough guys and hard cases who built and sustained the program: Don Baldwin, Dale Haaland, Doug Spradley, Jeff Brown, Scott Snider.

Nor without the many who have actually paid for the privilege. Jarrod Davis and Geoff Goss were non-scholarship walk-ons who left GU as all-WCC players.

“He understood he needed to play a certain type of way with a certain type of guy,” said Ken Anderson, who played for Fitzgerald in the early ‘80s and later returned with a doctorate to join the faculty.

“He was very astute about understanding the culture of the place - its size and constraints and resources. He buys into what the university is all about, and deep down I think he loves the place.”

Does the place love him back? Most of the time.

It’s a pretty good sign - and a good thing - that on most game nights Martin Centre is now packed and noisy enough that you can no longer eavesdrop on his verbal vivisections of officials. The response to GU reaching the NCAA Tournament two years ago was properly ga-ga.

Certainly he is the most high-profile personality on campus now, and it was probably no worse than a tie before the Rev. Bernard Coughlin semi-retired into his current position as chancellor. Now, it’s one thing for Bob Knight or Dean Smith to be better known than their presidents; they run national programs.

How does it play at little old GU?

“I’m sure we’ve got people on campus who disagree with me or don’t like me,” Fitzgerald said, “or don’t like my style. I think there’s very few people who don’t respect what we’ve done.”

He’s not just talking about the 17 victories a year, but of the program’s graduation rate and community involvement. He’s talking about the nights the Bulldogs give to the last drop - the nights they defend like dogs and pass and pick - and don’t win. “Gonzaga’s been damn lucky to have him around,” said Carroll Williams, Fitzgerald’s blunt-spoken former boss at Santa Clara.

“Like many of us who work at small Catholic universities, you’re often taken for granted and you accept that. At the same time, you’re given a lot of freedom to operate and build and run your program the way you see fit. The fact is, he found a place he felt comfortable in.”

Fitzgerald seconded that.

“They’ve let me do what I want to do,” he said. “If you don’t have a lot of resources, you’d better not stand in the way of people who want to get it done.”

Some notes on getting it done:

Fitzgerald pointed out that “a lot of things happened that made us look smart when we really weren’t so smart.”

Stockton would be one of those. By the middle of Stockton’s freshman year, Fitz felt he had a future pro - “but six months before that, we weren’t sure we should recruit him.”

Then there was the move in 1979 from the Big Sky to the WCC the equivalent, for GU basketball, of hitting from the blue tees instead of the whites.

“Now the league has come back to us,” Fitzgerald said. “Where there used to be 10 guys headed for the pros, now there aren’t 10 guys who were recruited by Pac-10 teams.”

But there may have been no bolder move than the one Fitzgerald and his staff took in 1990 - when they redshirted the talented group of Davis, Goss, Matt Stanford, Scott Spink and Eric Brady while the team struggled through an 8-20 season that turned out to be the most ironic foundation conceivable for the success of this decade.

“Sometimes you have to have the courage to put yourself into a make-or-break situation,” Fitzgerald said.

And that’s as good a way as any to define Fitzgerald’s relationship with his players: make or break.

He has broken a few in 15 seasons, and made many more who saw wisdom and caring behind the invective.

“He tests us, mentally and physically,” said Bakari Hendrix, a forward on the current Bulldogs team who Fitzgerald revealed was on the verge of leaving the program in the fall - and is now one of its more productive players.

“He doesn’t hold anything back. And if you get in his doghouse, it takes a long time to get out. If you’re not intense and ready every day, he doesn’t give you a lot of chances. But I think players become better here than they might at other schools.”

Yeah? Even with that 1950s offense he brought to GU - the mysteriously named “flex,” surely not shorthand for flexible?

That’s right - the offense that led the WCC in scoring the past two years.

“He’s opened things up offensively a hell of a lot,” said Anderson. “And I think he’s more tolerant of people making mistakes - except maybe the point guard.

“He’s too good of a coach to not adapt to the changes in the game like the clock and the 3-point line. And that gets overlooked a lot - for all his theatrics on the sideline and his good media presence, his strength as a game coach and preparation coach isn’t always recognized.”

And his often caustic approach, rather than being a turnoff to the sensibilities of the modern player, may actually help bridge the age gap.

“There’s give and take,” said Brown. “And the bottom line is, he’ll do anything in the world for his guys as long as they show up and play hard - and that lasts long beyond their playing days here.”

So Brown still laughs at the darts about his negative jump-reach. Current freshman Richie Frahm remembers Fitzgerald wondering if his high school gym was only half court, seeing as how Frahm was so deficient on defense.

But as Brown said, there’s give and take. So when Jim McPhee once observed, at a from-here-to-eternity hall of fame banquet emceed by Fitzgerald, that “you know you’re in trouble when you’re counting on Fitz to speed things along,” no one laughed harder than the coach.

And no one is more moved by the bond that’s taken hold. Two dozen of his former players chipped in to make a $1,000 donation to the American Cancer Society in Fitz’s name this fall. When he inspected the list, he discovered that one of the donors was a player who had been cut from the program.

Darleen Fitzgerald wants to set the record straight.

“I get the feeling people think I’m behind him retiring or not going anywhere else,” she said. “Dan has had several opportunities to leave and it’s been his decision. It’s his career. This is where he wanted to stay.”

Only two men have coached longer in the WCC Williams, who lasted 22 years at Santa Clara, and Jim Brovelli, a high school teammate of Fitzgerald who split 15 years between two schools. Fitz’s stay at Gonzaga, including the A.D.-only years and a two-year stint as an assistant to Buoncristiani, actually runs 21 years.

Asked why, Fitzgerald shrugged.

“I’m a cause guy,” he said. “Our cause was we didn’t have squat.”

Dan Fitzgerald’s first glimpse of Spokane came from behind the wheel of a U-Haul, waiting for a green light at Division and Main. It was 5:30 a.m. The year was 1971.

“This,” he thought to himself, “has to be a good basketball town.”

It wasn’t. It’s better now. To suggest he’s the reason requires the boldest of brushstrokes, but those are the kind that suit Dan Fitzgerald the best.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 4 Color Photos

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review