Heathcote could deck many halls

When is going into a Hall of Fame not recognition enough?

OK, never. It is a fish not to be thrown back.

And the fact that the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame is inducting Jud Heathcote in just its fourth class Sunday in Kansas City is sign enough that, as the coach himself said, “It’s not a consolation prize.”

Be nice if it could be just the salad course, though.

A couple of years ago, some Heathcote friends and protégés – like his Michigan State successor, Tom Izzo, and Jim Brandenburg, who followed him at Montana – launched a campaign to get him voted into the big basketball house, the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., which just installed another Spokane legend, John Stockton, a couple of months ago. Testimonials were solicited and impassioned letters were written.

“I told them the pros run that now,” Heathcote said, “and the only way a college coach was getting in was with 700 wins. I said you’re wasting your time.”

Nonetheless, the time was ours to waste. Some of us actually enjoy butting heads with the star-chamber mentality.

The Naismith hall is, indeed, truly a subsidiary of Stern, Inc. The game’s figures who gained fame primarily in college account for only 25 percent of the inductees over the past decade. The notion that a great college player – say Travis Grant, who will be inducted with Heathcote this weekend – without professional bona fides could be Springfield worthy is anathema, though it does reflect a greater societal myopia (as does the preoccupation with draft “busts”).

So the college hall, birthed in 2006, was the right creation at the right time. Naismith inductees with college significance are grandfathered in as part of the “founding class” – so Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, the principals along with Heathcote in the 1979 NCAA title game that changed the face of both the college and pro games, will be honored Sunday, too.

But the distinctions remain arbitrary, and unfortunate. Take Heathcote’s reference to 700 wins.

He has them. But only if you count high school victories from 14 years at West Valley and freshman wins when he was Marv Harshman’s assistant at Washington State. Bringing the water to the basketball desert that was Montana before his Michigan State opportunity came along was not a career fast track, either.

These were dues paid honestly, in a fashion that helped grow the game in each place. And they remain a point of pride every bit as meaningful as the national championship.

“To be Marv’s assistant for seven years was a great way to break into college coaching,” he said. “We loved our five years in Missoula. But you don’t spend all that time in high school if you want to coach in college now. It’s a thing of the past. So often, it’s the people you know that push you in the right direction.”

Which is the other half of the Heathcote equation.

His coaching “tree” has a thick trunk and many branches (and deep roots, since you could argue it began with Harshman). Fifteen men who coached directly under Heathcote at Montana and MSU became college head coaches themselves; 23 more who coached under those men followed. They led programs at 41 different NCAA Division I schools and a dozen small colleges. Six who played or coached for Heathcote were also NBA head coaches, for a few games or a few seasons.

Not that any of it was a birthright.

“I would tell them, ‘You can coach as little or as much as you want – but I don’t have time to coach the coaches,’ ” Heathcote recalled. “I was too busy coaching the team. But anyone could stop a practice, blow a whistle and say something.”

His bluster and hard-edged humor were daunting enough that few took him up on it at first. In some cases, Heathcote found it comical – as when he inherited Brandenburg as his staff at Montana.

“That first year, Jim was the worst assistant I ever had,” he said. “I’d offered the job to Don Monson, but he turned it down because he’d have to take a salary cut from high school – and then I found out they’d already told Jim he could stay on. So I told him he could stay for a year, but that he was on ‘probation.’ Well, he was afraid to go to the can by himself.

“But the next four years, he was as good as any assistant I had.”

Jud’s assistants – that may be another group that deserves its own hall of fame.