Despite infamous shove, Cal’s Montgomery hasn’t lost touch

SAN JOSE, Calif.

If anything, the shove exposed the urgency that has attached itself to Mike Montgomery’s legacy. Perhaps it was for motivation’s sake, of driving his best player to greater heights. Perhaps it came from that cavernous place that said the moment was big, the game was bigger, and not many of either are left in his coaching career.

Cal basketball makes as much news in the Bay Area as another Fortune 500 company setting up shop, so you know when headlines are pointed toward hoops in Berkeley, something of note has occurred.

It did in February, when during a home game against Southern California, Montgomery shoved junior Allen Crabbe with both hands to the chest during a timeout.

Montgomery was chastised by his university president, reprimanded by his conference and summarily ripped by media who found the action shameful.

And you wondered: Had he lost touch?

“I see a guy who realizes the end is near,” San Jose Mercury News sports writer Jon Wilner said. “He just turned 66 and has told me many times, ‘I’m not doing this at 70 like (former Arizona coach) Lute (Olson) did. I’m not that guy. I can’t be like that.’

“People who know him say he will go a few more years. I think he might have hung it up by now if he had some sort of hobby. But he’s not a golfer. He’s a basketball coach.”

The team he will direct against UNLV in an NCAA Tournament game today at HP Pavilion isn’t nearly as good as those he built over 18 seasons at Stanford, when Montgomery’s name almost always would be included among his profession’s best. He shared space at the same table with the Krzyzewskis and Boeheims and Williamses and so on.

Montgomery won at a place no one had for 50 years before his arrival or since he departed, a place where academic standards always trump final scores and overall records.

He was the perfect fit for Stanford and its demand for scholastic excellence while pursing athletic greatness, and it never was going to be that way elsewhere.

“Stanford is unique, a one-shot deal,” Montgomery said. “There is no place like it. You have a specialty pool (of players) you can recruit from, and if you figure out how to get them, you’re going to be pretty good. I don’t think I fully understood the differences between (Stanford’s culture) and what everyone else deals with in college basketball. Cal is a great school. It’s demanding. But we haven’t distinguished ourselves as well as we did at Stanford.”

Wilner describes Montgomery as a mad scientist far more excited about sitting in a film room than dealing with the dark and seedy underbelly of college recruiting, a man whose idea of fun is a night of X’s and O’s and not pandering to AAU coaches or inner-circle enablers who glorify 17-year-olds. He likely never will have the stacked rosters of fellow Pac-12 teams UCLA and Arizona because of it, but no team has a better conference record than the Golden Bears since Montgomery arrived in 2008.

He spent two losing seasons as coach of the Golden State Warriors and had surgery for bladder cancer in 2011, the latter of which caused Montgomery and his wife to re-examine how long this coaching business should last.

It’s ironic. If the Bears defeat UNLV today, it will be the first time since 1998 that a Montgomery-coached team beat a higher seed in the tournament. In his final six years at Stanford, the Cardinal made it out of the second round once.

He took them to Elite Eights and Sweet 16s and a Final Four but in the end lost in March earlier than most expected or a seed line suggested.

Montgomery’s teams aren’t built for deep NCAA runs, for a tournament setting where all those offensive sets he has drawn over the years are negated by the need simply to make a play, to realize five seconds remain on a shot clock and someone needs to create something. His never have been the most freewheeling of teams.

“Has he been as locked in the last few years at Cal as he was 10 to 12 years ago, when he had Stanford rolling? No. That’s natural,” Wilner said. “That happens with time. But he’s still a very good coach.”

A Cal player spoke Wednesday about a time when he was 6 and happened to turn the TV on one Saturday afternoon in March. A basketball game was being played, and the announcer was talking about a university named Stanford and the outstanding job its coach had done in leading the school to a Final Four.

The player: Allen Crabbe, the recipient of a two-handed shove in February.

“Playing for a coach like him, you can’t go wrong.” Crabbe said. “That’s why I chose to come to Cal.”

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 98.9 FM. Follow him on Twitter: @edgraney.