(EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second of a two-part piece about former St. Bonaventure basketball coach Jim O’Brien. It was written three years ago for a booklet celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Bonnies’ appearance in the 1970 NCAA Final Four. However, due to an unexpected response from advertisers, there was no room for this story in that publications was ne ver printed.)
Norman Clarke, now a 62-year-old elementary school physical education teacher in Toronto, admitted the transition from coach Jim Satalin to Jim O’Brien was tough.
“Coach O’Brien was different because he sat down and talked to you about what the plan was individually,” the former Bonnie guard said. “He was here for him, as head coach, making his mark and doing the best for himself as well as the program. It was a different feel and it took awhile to adjust and accept him as head coach. After having the coach that recruited you and such a good relationship with him, it was strange.”
But Clarke conceded, he grew to really like O’Brien and the real problem was the players he brought in.
“Part of the issue was his recruits were very much AAU-type players as opposed to the consummate team players (at Bona) and that had an effect on the outlook of the team,” he admitted. “The team was not as connected or as close-knit as we were prior to (O’Brien’s) arrival. We had young guys coming in from New York City who were all about themselves rather than the team and making sure the Bona basketball program had success.
“There was a selfishness and I think that hurt the program for a bit,”
But O’Brien admitted that was the product of different recruiting approaches.
“Elmer Anderson went to Boys and Girls High in Brooklyn, Sam Graham and Alvin Lott, played at Cardinal Hayes in the Bronx,” he said. “We had a little bit of a connection, Cardinal Hayes was in the Catholic League in New York … that’s where I played. So I knew a lot of people there and I had the Brooklyn connection going.
“I think the thing that will surprise people is that Mark Jackson and Olden Polynice both visited St. Bonaventure. Mark ended up going to St. John’s and had a great career in the NBA and Olden had a great career at Virginia and we had both of those guys visit St. Bonaventure. At the time, we thought ‘That’s pretty good’ to get guys of that caliber to at least visit.”
O’Brien admitted, “We thought we had a little connection in New York … you always go to the areas where you know people and people who know who you are and get a little bit of a foot in the door to get done what you need to get done.”
IN HIS four seasons, O’Brien took St. Bonaventure to a 67-51 record, but 10 of those losses were by three points-or-fewer.
He invested himself in the community, right down to playing in an Olean softball league as well as for the city’s elite travel team.
As Engelhardt recalled, “I’ll remember three things about Jim: how competitive he was, how intense and how loyal.
“He was a genuinely good guy … very warm and humorous.”
Pete Dougherty, who covered the Bonnies for the Times Herald during O’Brien’s four-year tenure, agreed.
“I rarely did a phone interview with him,” Dougherty recalled. “I always went down to his office and he was always available. There were times he didn’t like what I wrote, but he never took it personally. He was really good to deal with.”
He also remembered O’Brien brought his own approach.
“Jim couldn’t believe they didn’t have any recruiting files at Bona … he basically created a recruiting system,” Dougherty said. (Basketball secretary) Jeannie Stady was involved in that transition to create all these recruiting files of kids they were going after and I’m not sure she accepted O’Brien at first, but they grew to like each other a lot. “Recruiting files were a big deal to him and he was really organized it that area.”
The other thing he remembered was O’Brien’s frustration at the Bona fan base’s preoccupation with the school’s live skein of consecutive non-losing seasons that ended at 28 with the 1984-85 season (14-15).
“He didn’t like all the fuss over the streak of consecutive non-losing seasons,” Dougherty said. “That’s all he heard about and realized that fans didn’t really understand the changing dynamic of college basketball, especially in the era of conference play.”
AND THAT reality produced the only real issue that O’Brien had with SBU fans, when he announced, before the 1983-84 season that the Bonnies would play Little Three rivals Niagara and Canisius only once per season.
“I initially got a lot (of negative feedback) from different areas,” he said. “I understood the importance of the Little Three and I thought that was a tremendous rivalry. The thing that came across was ‘This thing has been going on forever and here’s a guy who’s an outsider and comes up here and is going to stop this … where does he get off doing this?’
“I don’t think people understood at the time that decision was made through the university. A lot of discussion was going on (about joining a conference) when I got the job as something we should think about. If that’s what they wanted to do, I became the spokesperson because I thought they were right. The leagues, the way they were, playing too many other teams twice a year perhaps wasn’t the way to go.”
O’Brien added, “You give and you get. Syracuse kind of pulled that whammy on us, as well. (Coach Jim) Boeheim and I were friendly . My first year they came and played at Olean, but it was after that they tried to bully us a little bit. That’s when Jim said, ‘If you still want to play, we’re not coming here every other year, we’ll come here every third year, but you’ve got to come to us twice.’
“We were trying to establish who we were and I didn’t like the idea of succumbing to that. At that point we stopped playing for a little bit.”
THESE DAYS, at age 73, O’Brien’s voice is weak, the product of a paralyzed vocal cord suffered during surgery. But his energy, enthusiasm and sense of humor remain.
Ask him about his key memory of coaching the Bonnies and the answer comes quickly.
“The passion and the importance of St. Bonaventure in that town,” he said of his four years at SBU. “Not a lot of people totally understand the level of interest that the people of Olean and those in other parts of Western New York have in that school. I certainly didn’t know it until I got there and I really appreciated people coming to the games … they supported the program.”
O’Brien admitted, “I think it’s still a difficult job and Mark (Schmidt) has done a tremendous job there. I just remember that people were really nice to me … we were a young family at the time. I got to be friends with some people that I’m still friendly with. “In general, it was a terrific school … the administration itself was really good because they understood the importance of having a good basketball team and they tried to do what they could to let the coaches be successful. It was rare that they said a hard, emphatic ‘No’ to the things that we asked for.”
He concluded, “I owe a debt of gratitude to St. Bonaventure and I will always have a very special place for the university because that’s the place that gave me my first chance without ever having been a head coach. That opportunity led to the next. I still follow their scores, pay attention to what they’re doing … I have great affection for that school.”
(Chuck Pollock, a Times Herald senior sports columnist, can be reached at cpollock@oleantimesherald.com)
