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When Bob Knight died a couple of months ago at the age of 83, he was remembered as a successful college basketball coach with some distinct personality flaws.
The New York Times headline referred to Knight as a coach “known for trophies and tantrums.”
Joey Meyer, the former DePaul men’s basketball coach who died Friday at the age of 74, was perhaps the antithesis to Knight, lauded by many as a terrific human being who enjoyed limited success as a college coach.
No one had a bad word to say about him because Meyer treated everyone the same, with respect and kindness. Not a bad legacy for anyone, and in hindsight, his coaching record was more impressive than he was ever given credit for.
Family, friends and former players came out to St. Vincent DePaul Church in Lincoln Park on Wednesday night to memorialize Meyer at a wake. Funeral services and a Mass will be held at St. Vincent’s at 11 a.m. Thursday, with Joey’s son, Brian, delivering the eulogy.
Tom Kleinschmidt, the former DePaul player and now the head coach at DePaul Prep, stayed close with Meyer since first being recruited at Gordon Tech when he was 15 years old. They went to Pat’s Pizza for dinner a few months ago before Meyer was sidelined by back surgery.
“Joey was a leader,” Kleinschmidt said Wednesday at the visitation. “The calming nature, the mentorship, the discipline ... He had no problem telling you good things and when you needed to straighten up a little bit. People loved playing for him, and I learned the X’s and O’s from him. But just the relationship I built with him, from 15 to 50 years old, says everything you need to know about Coach Joe.”
Following in the same footsteps as a legend is always hard. When that legend is your dad, the degree of difficulty becomes magnified.
Doing it in a sports-crazed town like Chicago? The pressure was enormous.
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Meyer spent several years as the heir apparent before finally succeeding Ray in 1984 when the program was still at its peak. He took the Blue Demons to seven NCAA tournaments in 13 years, with a .594 winning percentage, but never was able to meet the level his father had in 1979 when Mark Aguirre and Co. went to the Final Four.
When the Blue Demons finished with a 3-23 record in 1996-97, Meyer was forced by the DePaul administration to resign, ending 55 seasons of the Meyer dynasty on the North Side.
“There’s a sadness to me because it’s the ending of almost a dynasty,” the late TV analyst and Marquette coach Al McGuire told the Tribune. “It really is the length of a Chinese dynasty as far as a father and a son at one school. You won’t see anything like it again. You hardly even see it in corporations today.”
Meyer took the fall with grace. If he was bitter over the decision, he never showed it in public. In a Chicago Tribune interview in 1999, two years after his dismissal, Meyer joked that his “middle name is 3-23,” referring to that final season record.
Meyer wanted another coaching job, but was resigned to the fact it would probably not be at a program as established as DePaul was back in the late 1990s.
“I have a lot of faults, but an ego isn’t one of them,” Meyer told the Tribune’s Ed Sherman. “People say don’t sell yourself short, but that’s probably the level I’ll come back at.”
Meyer eventually returned to coaching an NBA D-League team in Fort Wayne, Ind., but never returned to the college scene, except as a radio analyst on Northwestern games. The university that ousted him has since fallen from prominence, with its last men’s tournament appearance 10 years ago.
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Meyer was not a big self-promoter, and perhaps that was why a once-promising career stalled. He was never as animated as other prominent coaches, perhaps with the exception of a 1994 win over No. 6 UMass.
“I told my assistants they were going to see one crazy idiot,” Meyer said after that game. “I wanted my players to see my emotion.”
But that was not Meyer, and he knew it.
“That was one of the few times Meyer was visibly emotional,” Tribune reporter Bill Jauss wrote.
Meyer was instrumental in the success his dad had, as an assistant coach and recruiter in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Local high school stars Aguirre (Westinghouse) and Terry Cummings (Carver) helped take the program to new heights, including the Final Four appearance by Aguirre’s team in 1979 when they were still the small school under the L, playing at tiny Alumni Hall.
Aguirre told me at the visitation Meyer was recruiting his teammate, Eddie Johnson, when he asked him to “think about” DePaul.
“I didn’t even know where DePaul was,” he said. “That was the first time I met him, and thought it was so cool to meet a coach. He wasn’t recruiting me, but getting to know me. That made him different. When he introduced me to Coach (Ray) at the camp in Wisconsin, that was pretty much it.”
Joey Meyer also helped recruit Andy Pancratz and Dave Corzine of Hersey, and Proviso East’s Joe Ponsetto, who paved the way for the dominant teams that succeeded them. Some Public League coaches later blamed Meyer for the lack of recruiting city players — a development that led to a highly publicized summit meeting — claiming DePaul abandoned the strategy that made the program what it was.
When you tell kids today DePaul was “bigger than the Bulls” from ‘79 until the mid-’80s, they look at you like you’re crazy. But as strange as it seems now, the Blue Demons ruled Chicago and made it into a college basketball town. Until Michael Jordan arrived on the Bulls and started winning in the late ’80s, it seemed like DePaul would be kings forever.
“Without a question we were (bigger) back then,” Aguirre said Wednesday. “But time picks its own story. It was the right time for us, and we took advantage of it.”
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None of Meyer’s predecessors at the helm of the Blue Demons have had a winning record, and current coach Tony Stubblefield is experiencing the same kind of recruiting problems Meyer had back in the mid-’90s. No coach can overcome a talent gap, and getting top recruits to even consider DePaul has always been a difficult task.
Loyola’s emergence under coach Porter Moser in 2018, when it went to the Final Four, showed how Chicago could rally around a winning college team. But keeping a program at such a high level is not easy with so much turnover and competition, as Meyer discovered almost three decades ago, and current Ramblers coach Drew Valentine is finding out now.
Alas, when it comes to college hoops, Chicago is a fair-weather town. Win, or get ignored.
But Meyer was there for the golden years on Belden Avenue and in Rosemont, and when the Meyer family reign ended with his ousting in ‘97, he simply accepted the bad news and moved on.
“To the finish ... Joey exhibited another family trait,” Jauss wrote. “He did not whine.”
In the end, Meyer’s resiliency and love for the game kept him going, no matter where he coached. Kleinschmidt said seeing the outpouring of love for “Coach Joe” over the last week showed how much he meant to Chicago basketball fans.
“Just a great man,” Kleinschmidt said. “He will be dearly missed by many.”