John Blanchette: Montana coach Tinkle takes aim for glory days

There are 41 men coaching Division I basketball at their alma maters, give or a take a Friday night firing. Each knows his diploma guarantees nothing but a subscription to the alumni newsletter and the annual appeal for a donation.

On the school’s end, the arrangement has a few more givens. It gets the coach’s passion – to protect memories as well as win – along with his understanding that he doesn’t need to put his fingerprints on every square inch of the program, since he’s left a few already.

Or, as Wayne Tinkle put it when he took over for Larry Krystkowiak at the University of Montana last spring: “I certainly don’t have a bunch of lob plays to put in,” he laughed, “because they never ran any for me.”

This was in his first few days on the job, the part his old Montana coach, Stew Morrill, told him would be mostly euphoria.

“Then,” Morrill advised, “panic will set in.”

Now he is past the panic, too, and into the game-to-game plod. Tinkle brings the Grizzlies to Cheney tonight for the usual combat against Eastern Washington after winning at Portland State to open the Big Sky Conference season. Montana (7-7) hadn’t won a true road game this season and after a dreadful loss to Portland the Grizzlies didn’t seem to have much going for them.

“Then I told them before the game, ‘Let’s not forget we’re the two-time defending champions,’ ” Tinkle said. “We hadn’t mentioned that until now, but now’s the time. Let’s get some of the swagger back. We’re not an arrogant team and I’m not an arrogant coach, but there are times you have to play like a champion.”

For Montana the last two years, that time has been March.

Back-to-back trips to the NCAA tournament restored some of the swagger the program enjoyed more than a decade ago, and no one enjoyed it more than Tinkle – in particular the 87-79 upset of Nevada in last year’s first round, UM’s first NCAA victory since 1975.

It’s just that he’d imagined himself being the one to take the Grizzlies back to that glory.

A graduate of Ferris High School, Tinkle took his game to Missoula – back in the days when Gonzaga didn’t have the right of first refusal on any Division I big man from Spokane. He carved his name into the Grizzly record book, spent 12 years gadding about Europe and the states as a pro and finally returned to Montana to coach, as an assistant first under Don Holst and then under Pat Kennedy.

When Kennedy fled after two years, Tinkle had every reason to think he’d be the head coach. Except that Krystkowiak wanted the job, too.

Tinkle had been Krystkowiak’s understudy before (“I had him kick sand in my face”) when the latter was on his way to becoming UM’s all-time leading scorer. That cachet, a nine-year NBA career and a stint as a CBA head coach made Krystkowiak a sexier choice – and left Tinkle “sour for the better part of a day.

“If it would have been handled differently, it wouldn’t have hit me as hard. But I’d been told behind closed doors it was going to be mine. Then it went the other way. Larry offered me a chance to stay on and my wife finally told me, ‘You knucklehead, the reason you came here to start coaching in the first place was to get things back to where they were. Maybe the two of you working together is what it’s going to take.’ “

Now that Krystkowiak’s ambitions have taken him back to the NBA and an assistant’s job with the Milwaukee Bucks, the mission belongs to Tinkle.

Of course, there are different definitions of “getting things back to where they were.” The impossible-ticket, loud-and-rowdy atmosphere of Montana basketball in the 1970s and ‘80s may never be duplicated. There’s a football culture now, and some boneheaded management helped kill much of basketball’s appeal and goodwill.

All Tinkle can control is the program’s tenor and toughness.

“John Stockton was over here taking his son for a look at the campus and he came up to say hi,” Tinkle recalled. “We got to laughing about the old pickup games at GU. Clay Damon would come back from UW with Paul Fortier and some other guys. (Craig) Ehlo was living in Spokane, and the Gonzaga guys and even Larry from time to time. Johnny used to dominate those open gyms – who came through the door and who didn’t, and how if you didn’t work hard, run the floor and play smart, you were going to be told you weren’t welcome back.

“Even over here in the summers with Larry and I, we’d go 4-on-4 and there were 16 guys waiting. Lose and it was going to be three games before you’d get back on the court. I remember guys punching the glass out of the fire extinguisher case when they lost. That’s what you’re always trying to instill – the passion and desire you need to play this game. The players who set that tone, and the coaches – that’s a pretty tough posse.

“We want to do right by them all.”

And they keep up. They all get the alumni newsletter.