Gonzaga Puts Its Faith In Monson

Royal succession has never been a day at the beach. Refer to your notes on Mary, Queen of Scots or Philip of Anjou.

Coaching succession can be knotty, too. So when Dan Fitzgerald passed the baton of Gonzaga University basketball to his assistant, Dan Monson, on Wednesday with two years of lead time - Monson takes over after the final buzzer of the 1997 season - it appeared the Bulldogs had set an NCAA Division I standard for the smooth transition.

A no-brainer? No question.

But hardly a no-painer.

And Monson did not let his special and emotional moment of fulfillment pass without many expressions of gratitude: to family, to friends, to mentors and colleagues, and to a school which demonstrated a bold faith too many other institutions wouldn’t.

“It’s an unbelievable thing for me,” Monson said, “but it’s also good for the profession.

“In a time when people are hiring guys solely because of what they can do to win, what Gonzaga is saying is that there’s a lot more to it than that. It’s saying that here’s a guy who understands what we’re doing, what we’re about - and though he may be inexperienced, he’s going to do it the way we like it done.”

That’s a mouthful. No wonder it took more than a year of campaigning and convincing to spit it out.

“This was difficult to get done,” acknowledged Fitzgerald, who will remain as athletic director after his final two years of coaching. “Not from a resistance factor.

It wasn’t, ‘No.’ It was, ‘Great idea - later.’

“To look into the future when things are going good now and make a change is threatening. Everybody plans. Good leaders listen and make proactive changes, and that’s what ours did.”

That the leader in question, the Rev. Bernard J. Coughlin, is being elevated to the new position of chancellor and making way for a new president complicated the process.

In effect, he was making his successor’s first hire. Now his successor’s first act can be to thank him.

“I have great confidence in these two men,” Coughlin said, “but this wasn’t a decision simply made by me. I spent a lot of time talking it over with Duff Kennedy, the chairman of our board of trustees. Because the next president is going to pick up what’s being done today, this was not an administrative decision but a board decision.”

Nearly 50 of the nation’s 305 Division I coaching jobs have changed hands since the end of last season. In only one of those was the succession greased as thoroughly as this.

The man who greased it was in the audience Wednesday - Jud Heathcote, late of Michigan State, best friend of Monson’s father, Don, and one of Dan’s treasured mentors. He was able to guarantee his longtime assistant, Tom Izzo, the MSU job with some relentless arm-twisting.

“If you’re interested in keeping good people at your institution,” he said, “you have to make a commitment at some point in time or they move on to greener pastures.”

Certainly that’s been an option for Monson, who has not only paid eight years of dues at GU but has been as much of an architect of the basketball program’s unprecedented recent success as his boss.

“I hitched my wagon to a good horse,” Monson said. “Fitz has been adamant that as long as he was the AD here, I’d be the next coach. I just felt like I believed in the school, what it stood for and what it wants out of its basketball program.”

Not only was it the job he wanted, it was the one he deserved.

“We couldn’t hire somebody two years from now who would do a better job than Dan,” Fitzgerald said.

Now Fitzgerald has done this once before, in 1981, for four years (his wife, Darleen, teased Coughlin that “this time we’re going to make it stick”). He recalls that one as a necessary move at the time.

“But I regretted it,” he said. “I wasn’t ready to leave the competition.”

Nor is he ready now - hence the two-year weaning period/farewell tour. It is noteworthy that Fitzgerald has been a head coach in the West Coast Conference for 13 seasons - equal to the league’s seven other coaches combined. Never has basketball been such a catalyst on campus, or the need for continuity so great.

“Some programs will always be measured by certain coaches,” Monson said. “UCLA’s coaches will always be measured by what John Wooden did. Michigan State’s will be measured by what Jud did. I think Idaho is still measuring its coaches by what my father did. And for the next 50 years, this program will be measured by what Fitz has done.

“They’re doing this for a reason, and I don’t think it’s for me to come in and reinvent the wheel.”

Best of all, Dan Monson doesn’t have to reinvent himself.

“He’s a great fit,” Fitzgerald said. “It wasn’t love at first sight. But he’s grasped the strengths and weaknesses here and knows they won’t change. Not weaknesses - obstacles, and not necessarily bad ones in the big picture. But he’s comfortable with them, and I’ve always thought that this place requires guys that are Zags and not guys we convert.”

Guys who can make a succession look smooth, no matter how much history is behind it.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

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