When sons also rise, comparisons follow

During his first year as basketball coach at DePaul, Joey Meyer and his players were standing around the airport waiting for their plane when a fan approached. “Hi, Coach, how ya doin’?” said the fan. Meyer stuck out his hand. The fan ignored it. Instead, he greeted Meyer’s father, Ray, who was now an ex-coach traveling with the team as a broadcaster.

“He walked right by me,” Joey Meyer said. “The whole team was laughing at me. It was a perfect example of what I had gotten myself into.”

What Meyer got into is what Murry Bartow got into at Alabama-Birmingham — that is, learning what it’s like to follow a successful, even beloved father as coach in the same program.

Now John Thompson III, the new coach at Georgetown, gets to find out.

Even though he was head coach at Princeton (the others were assistants) and five years have passed since his father retired, the comparisons will be inevitable. John Thompson III said he has spent his entire life being John Thompson’s son — but not in this job. How much pressure that adds to an already pressure-filled environment remains to be seen.

“It was real hard for me,” said Meyer, now coach of the Asheville Altitude of the National Basketball Development League. “I think my situation was different from the Thompson situation because there was a body of work in between, and that makes it a lot easier. But he will still be in [his father’s] shadow.”

Few shadows loom as large, in every sense. John Thompson’s legacy as an empire-builder only grew as the program struggled under Craig Esherick. Moreover, Thompson remains a vocal, highly visible presence on the local sporting scene. At 6-foot-10 and well over 300 pounds, he is among the world’s biggest talk show hosts. He hasn’t exactly left the room.

Like John Thompson, Gene Bartow created something out of nothing, except there really was nothing. UAB never had a basketball program until Bartow got there in 1977. He coached for 23 years and won 366 games before retiring in 1996 and turning things over to his son, who had played and coached for him.

“It’s an unusual situation, I would tell you that,” Murry Bartow said. “At UAB, Gene Bartow was it. He came from UCLA and started the program. He was the athletic director. We played in a building named after him. People always wanted to compare me to my dad.”

Bartow coached the Blazers for six seasons. He had a good record (103-83), but nothing like Gene’s and he was fired in 2002. After taking a year off, he was hired at East Tennessee State and last season led the Buccaneers to a 27-6 record and an NCAA tournament berth.

“I kind of knew what I was getting into at UAB,” he said. “We went to three postseason tournaments, but even in my fifth and sixth year, when I’d be introduced to somebody at a restaurant or something, it was still as Gene Bartow’s son.”

Bartow said he and Meyer established a bond “from going through what we’ve done.”

Said Meyer: “We’re kind of similar people, very close to our families, and we’re kind of sensitive to the father-son relationship. It was a hard situation. Hard for him and hard for me. It’s just part of it.”

It is a rather small club (one that also includes Scott Drew, who followed Homer Drew at Valparaiso before going to Baylor). Now it has a brand new member.

“It’s difficult,” Murry Bartow said. “Obviously at Georgetown, Coach Thompson is such a legend and even though [his son] is not directly following him, he will be compared to his dad. In a lot of ways, it’s not fair. But it is reality.”

Joey Meyer was offered many bites of reality, and not just at the airport. Ray Meyer has to be the most adored college basketball coach never to win a national championship. For more than four decades, 1942 through 1984, he was the gaptoothed, grandfatherly face of DePaul basketball, as much a Chicago institution as Mayor Richard Daley and Ernie Banks.

In Joey’s first season (1984-85), DePaul went 19-10. Not bad, right? Except that in Ray Meyer’s last season, the Blue Demons were 27-3.

“I may look stupid, but I’m not,” said Joey Meyer, who sat by his father’s side as an assistant for 12 seasons. “I knew it would be a tough situation. … It was always there, always a shadow. Everybody kept asking me, ’What would your dad have done?’ or ’What does your dad think of this?’”

Meyer, whose Asheville team will play for its league championship Saturday, won nearly 60 percent of his games at DePaul. His teams made seven NCAA tournament appearances and had six 20-win seasons before he was fired in 1997 after the Blue Demons went 3-23.

“After I had some success, it was easier,” Meyer said. “But the first year was brutal. The second-guessing. I felt the pressure. But when you follow a great coach, there’s always that comparison the first couple of years.”

Gene Bartow need not be informed of this. He will forever be known as the coach who replaced John Wooden at UCLA in 1975. Bartow’s teams went 52-8 over two seasons but failed to win the expected national championship. Wooden, after all, had won 10 in 12 years. Bartow was practically run out of town, ending up in Birmingham.

“I really didn’t think that through very carefully,” said Bartow, a special assistant with the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies. “I should have had more intelligence than to try that. We won big, but it wasn’t a fun experience.”

Bartow said he did not apply that experience to his son’s because everyone, from the university president on down, thought Murry was a perfect fit at UAB.

“We didn’t talk about it,” Gene Bartow said. “Murry had played there and coached there, he had worked for [then-Indiana coach] Bob Knight for a while. We thought it was a natural. We didn’t give much thought to the minuses.”

Of which there were a few.

“It’s a little different, there’s no doubt,” Gene Bartow said. “Rightly or wrongly, there are a few more pressures.”

Bartow said when he heard John Thompson III was hired, he thought of a quote ascribed to former President George H.W. Bush about his son. “John will make an enemy or two or three or four,” Bartow said. “But he gets his dad’s enemies, too.”

It is hard to imagine Ray Meyer having any enemies. And he is still in demand. At 90, he goes to an office at an accounting firm in suburban Chicago where he answers mail and talks on the phone.

After Joey Meyer took over and took the heat, Ray suffered as any parent would.

“I’d hear fans say, ’He’s not as good as his dad,’ and things like that, and that hurt,” Ray Meyer said. “I just bit my tongue and kept on going. To be honest, I never thought it would be as bad as it was. It was always a comparison.

“It’s very difficult for the son to follow the father. It will be a little different at Georgetown because John [Thompson] has been away from the job for a couple of years. I think it will be a smoother transition than with Joey and me.”

Ray Meyer and Gene Bartow say they were there to lend advice and assurance but only when called upon. Joey Meyer and Murry Bartow say they had open lines of communication with their dads, and they were of great help. When called upon.

The good news with all this is that John Thompson III, by virtue of his parentage, has grown up with the game, if not been immersed in it, since childhood.

“Being the son of a coach, he understands the business and has a great feel for the way it works,” Murry Bartow said. “He knows what he’s getting into. The bottom line is, if a guy can coach and put blinders on and stay focused, he can get it done. I’ve seen what he can do at Princeton. I think he’ll do a great job.”