LOS ANGELES – Mick Cronin, at 53, is now the youngest college basketball coach to reach 500 victories. In his mind, that and five bucks might get you a tall latte if you drink the stuff.
His coaching legacy means little to him. And after Sunday’s brutal slog of a game, a 69-61 UCLA victory over Ohio State in which the teams combined to shoot 29.8 percent in the first half – that’s right, 20 for 67 – and compiled a couple of weeks worth of turnovers and bodies hitting the floor – the important things to Cronin were getting the victory and having the opportunity to honor the late Bill Walton during the day.
(No, Mick did not wear a tie-dye shirt. He did wear Walton-themed shoes, though.)
This isn’t the time to reflect on a career, anyway, with UCLA (20-8, 11-6) a half-game out of the coveted double-bye in the 15-team Big Ten postseason tournament in 2½ weeks in Indianapolis, and with NCAA Tournament seeding still in the mix.
But even if it were, for Cronin it probably wouldn’t be.
Getting to 500 “means I’m old,” he said with a laugh, though lots of us would scoff at that characterization.
“When you first start coaching, you don’t dream you’re going to be the coach at UCLA,” he said. “So for me, I got to coach at my alma mater (Cincinnati), at UCLA, and at maybe the best … job to get in the country for a first-time head coach (Murray State). You could mess up with the media. It didn’t matter. There was no media. You were not going to get railed by the Paducah Sun.
“So,” he added, “I’ve had some really, really good jobs and obviously I haven’t scored a point. So it’s really not about me.”
Mick is an acquired taste, for sure. He says what he feels, and his heart is often on his sleeve – you just knew Sunday afternoon that he would have loved to say more about the work of officials Earl Watson, Randy Richardson and Tommy Nunez, but discretion in this case is the art of not facing the wrath of the conference office.
That said, he already had a certain portion of the UCLA fan base in an uproar after Tuesday night’s 64-61 loss to Minnesota, when he roasted his players publicly for not following the scouting report and “worrying about the wrong things,” and voiced frustration over the fans’ groans every time the Bruins missed a free throw that night. (Which happened a lot.)
We see, and react, to those moments, as some letter writers (and, admittedly, some of us in the media) did. But the main issue is whether his players accept that hard coaching and criticism, and the lessons that are meant not only for getting a group of players to March Madness but setting them up for life beyond UCLA.
It’s not for everybody. But the guys who understand it, and take the lessons to heart, stand to eventually benefit.
“He taught us a lot about how the real world works,” said junior guard Skyy Clark, a transfer from Louisville.
“He’s definitely tough on us. Some days we walk into practice and he’s just on us the whole day. But if I really sit back and look at it from a different perspective, you can tell he cares about us and he’s looking out for our best interests.”
And, added Eric Dailey Jr., a sophomore transfer from Oklahoma State, “He teaches us a lot of lessons that don’t apply to basketball, a lot of real life situations. I know y’all, some of the media, (talk) about how he coaches and everything, but that’s real. He’s just a real coach, a real person, and that’s really what you need to survive in this real world.
“He’s taught us to save money, taught us how to manage money, taught us how to be a good person through basketball. Just the discipline side of it, he yells, but everything in the world’s not going to be nice and pretty. That’s making us tough for the real world.”
As Cronin put it, he’s not worried about the blowback, and he’s not really worried about what players think of him now.
“I worry about when Skyy and Eric are 28,” he said. “Are they going to say that I cared about them enough to be hard on them and try to teach them right from wrong?
“Sometimes I say stuff I shouldn’t say. I’m well aware of that. I can be too hard on them, OK? But I’d rather err on that side because I wake up worried about what they think when they’re 28, not when they’re 18. ‘When you’re 28, what was Mick Cronin all about? Did he let me do things I shouldn’t have been doing just because I was scoring points for him? Or did he sit me down and try to change my ways as a man?’
“And to me, that’s way more important than winning 500.”
He puts public reaction in the same basket as thoughts of that coaching legacy, to be stowed in the corner.
“Jeff Van Gundy (former Knicks and Rockets head coach and currently a Clippers assistant) said this, and he’s somebody I have great respect for … he said: ‘Legacy is the most overrated thing in life,’ ” Cronin said.
“The all time win leader’s Mike Krzyzewski on the men’s side. I would think he would be more concerned with what they say about what kind of father he was, what kind of person he was, than how many games he won. Because I got news for you, okay? There’s a lot of government people in the last week or so that have had their jobs taken from ’em, by our own people. There’s a lot of people that could care less that the Bruins won today.
“… I just think legacy is overrated.”
But here’s an indication of what does matter: The three UCLA players who came to the interview room, Clark, Dailey and Aday Mara, all wore T-shirts commemorating No. 500. To them, it was important.
jalexander@scng.com