John Blanchette: Long Beach call soothes Monson

Say what you want about good jobs and bad jobs, good hires and second choices, money and naked ambition.

Sometimes it’s just about mutual need.

There’s something about Dan Monson’s resurrection as the head basketball coach at Long Beach State on Saturday which speaks to that. A good coach deserving – and getting – another turn at bat, and a school in pursuit not just of an unsullied resume but a wisdom born of experience in low moments as well as triumph.

The 49ers, even if they didn’t fathom it at first, needed Dan Monson and not a young gun on the make. And he needed them.

“It was great being home with the kids every day, but that’s a lot harder than this,” he joked. “I needed a job again so I could get some rest.”

Of course, he said this from the wheel of a rental car in Las Vegas, bound for a big high school meat market, barely five hours removed from his introductory press conference with the clock already ticking on his five-year contract.

Yet over the telephone, Monson sounded as happy and at ease as he’s been since steering Gonzaga on that farfetched ride to the Elite Eight in 1999. Employment will do that. Even if he’s taking over a program that will lose 93 percent of its scoring from a 24-win team that made Long Beach State’s first trip to the NCAA tournament in more than a decade. Even if rules violations committed on the previous watch will result in some sort of NCAA sanctions. Even if his program will forever be a footnote amid the L.A. glitz of the Lakers, Dodgers, UCLA and USC.

He’s tanned, rested and ready. Well, maybe the tan comes later.

The rest was not exactly voluntary. It was on the last day of November that Monson resigned seven games into his eighth season at the University of Minnesota – but as the $1.1 million payoff and the increasingly empty seats at Williams Arena hinted, it wasn’t a moment of mutual need.

Or at least he didn’t acknowledge it at the time.

“When you’re in the middle of it for that long, you never realize how mentally tired you are,” he said. “I always thought people saying that meant they were soft. But there is merit to the grind on your mental side.”

He had given seven years to trying to scrub the Gophers clean from an academic scandal. And despite some on-court successes – an out-of-nowhere NCAA appearance in 2005 being the high point – he was undone by the lingering sanctions, the rigors of the Big Ten, a delusional constituency and, yes, by some significant misjudgments of his own.

It was a hard, hurtful time.

So he took his wife on the honeymoon they never had and escorted his young ones to the school bus stop. He didn’t answer his e-mail for six weeks. He went to Iowa and Indiana to audit coaching friends Steve Alford and Kelvin Sampson. And when the coaching merry-go-round started in March, he started looking for a job.

It was a hard and hurtful time, too.

Santa Clara wouldn’t give him so much as an interview. He was a runner-up at Denver. Northern Illinois hired another victim of the big time, Ricardo Patton. His achievements didn’t seem to matter as much as his prominent failure.

Someone actually wrote that he got more credit for Gonzaga’s rise than he deserved, which made it obvious the writer had never talked with anyone associated with the Zags program. And as for Minnesota, well, there are people there who think Tubby Smith is the coach now because it’s a better job than Kentucky.

“I’d be less than honest if I said it wasn’t difficult,” Monson said. “But it’s the nature of the profession.

“Obviously, there are things you would have done differently, but I am proud of what we did at Minnesota, and it was very gratifying to have Tubby acknowledge it at his press conference.”

And it was gratifying that Long Beach called him, not the other way around.

Again, Monson isn’t kidding himself. He knows that up front they were probably more enamored of young assistants Kerry Keating of UCLA and Cameron Dollar of Washington – and reportedly offered the job to Keating before he took Santa Clara’s invitation instead.

But he also knows his Minnesota trials helped sell him to a school that will soon endure its own. The difference is, the sins aren’t nearly as ugly as at Minnesota, any sanctions won’t hurt as much and he’s better prepared for the rough year or two ahead.

Rough or not, he was ready.

“After a month away I looked around and thought, ‘Where’s my team?’ ” he said. ” It didn’t take long to know I wanted to keep doing this.

“It’s what I do. It’s what I know.”

It’s what he needs.