Aztecs’ Fisher still knows how to relate to today’s players

That was then: A group of college basketball players that helped embed into the game a hip-hop culture with how they dressed and what they said and the music blaring from their headphones. They influenced a nation of fans, a team viewed as rebellious by some and yet merchandising giants for corporate America.

This is now: Those players have long since taken their final shots and moved into their post-basketball lives, but the coach who recruited them and led them to two consecutive national championship games in the early 1990s continues to produce winning teams and relate to kids far better than most in his profession.

Steve Fisher is 69 and decades removed from his final game instructing the Fab Five at Michigan, but has for the past 16 seasons continued what eventually should be honored as a Hall of Fame career by building San Diego State from the lifeless entity he inherited to the perennial Mountain West contender and NCAA Tournament side that plays UNLV at 8 p.m. today at the Thomas & Mack Center.

All the while, as trends changed and styles were redefined and the wants and needs of kids and parents of today’s selfish AAU world became even more demanding and unreasonable, the winningest coach in conference history has remained relevant and immensely popular with those young men he recruits and coaches.

“Coach Fisher is as steady as the wind,” said San Diego State associate head coach/head coach in waiting Brian Dutcher, who has been at Fisher’s side dating to the Michigan days. “There aren’t a lot of ups and downs with him. He’s the steady rudder of the ship. He’s believable. He’s credible. You sit across from him and look him in the eye and know he’s not feeding you some line. He’s sincere.

“The parents know about the Fab Five. The kids know about Kawhi Leonard. I’ve always said Coach Fisher’s best quality is that he listens. The world is full of talkers. A coach will call a recruit and talk for half an hour and the kid never gets to say a thing. Coach Fisher will listen to the kid for 20 minutes. Really listen. That’s a great quality.”

Fisher doesn’t micromanage, doesn’t feel a need to coach every possession, doesn’t want his players so tight during games that they feel a need to constantly look in his direction for guidance.

He lets them play, is all, and has done so well enough to win 518 career games and at least 20 in each of the past 10 seasons at San Diego State.

It long has been the position of the former math teacher that if you coach your players hard in practice and treat those hours as a classroom setting, games then become the exams in which those who are most prepared pass more often than not.

That through drills and film work and attention to detail when no one is in the arena, players should then succeed under bright lights and in front of a packed house.

But it’s not just for the passage of time and accumulation of victories that Fisher today is a different man than the one who arrived in San Diego in 1999.

It has been said that you will never know the joy, the love beyond feeling that resonates in the heart of a father as he looks upon his son. Fisher knows this sort of affection for his sons, Mark and Jay.

He also knows how incredibly unforgiving life can be.

Mark Fisher is in his 13th season as a member of his father’s staff, and it was announced in September 2013 that he had been diagnosed with ALS, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. He comes to work every day, still very much an integral part of San Diego State’s program, still a central voice in how the Aztecs prepare and perform.

“I do think the situation has made me a better coach,” Steve Fisher said. “For those hours in practice and games, I’m totally focused on what we need to do. But I don’t let things linger anymore. I don’t hold onto a loss as long as I once might have. I realize nothing is more important than family and your loved ones and being with them. Mark is very involved in all that we do, and I couldn’t be prouder of him.”

Fisher signed a three-year contract extension in November, and yet for a while now has sat down with wife Angie after each season to decide whether he will continue. He is just one of two current Mountain West coaches with either a regular-season or tournament title. Fisher has eight; Craig Neal of New Mexico has one.

And still, players in 2015 connect with him just as well as those from Michigan once did, those whose legacy lives in programs such as Kentucky today, who ushered in trends of conventional coolness to the college game.

In one breath, you can say Fisher exists in the same sentence as giants such as Bobby Knight, Adolph Rupp, Joe B. Hall, Al McGuire, Dean Smith and Jim Calhoun, coaches who led schools to the championship of the NCAA and National Invitation Tournament.

In the next, you see a current player draping his arm around him during a timeout or running up behind him for a bear-hug during a postgame interview.

“He’s just himself,” fifth-year senior JJ O’Brien said. “He doesn’t try to be someone he isn’t. He doesn’t fake anything because he knows we would see through it. He’s genuine. He’s balanced. Really levelheaded. He’s pretty unconventional compared to other coaches that way. Everyone has a perception of who he is and what he is supposed to be, but he doesn’t worry about that. He teaches us as much about life as he does basketball and draws from his own struggles that life has given him.

“He is hip in own way.”

That was then.

This is now.

Steve Fisher relates to those he teaches.

Nothing has changed, from the math class to the Fab Five to San Diego State.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ed Graney can be reached at egraney@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4618. He can be heard from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday on “Gridlock,” ESPN 1100 and 100.9 FM. Follow him on Twitter: @edgraney.