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EVENTS
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CNNSI.com GROUP
COMMERCE
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Back on the bench Retirement just didn't do it for Spoonhour or Jobe
By Marc Lancaster, CNNSI.com Charlie Spoonhour had always liked Las Vegas, and Ben Jobe was simply tired of doing chores. That's all it took for a couple of sixty-something guys to get off the couch and get back to the bench, where they'd spent most of their adult lives. And they couldn't be happier with their decisions. Spoonhour, 62, is the new coach at UNLV, two years after retiring from the game following a successful seven-year run at Saint Louis University. Jobe, 68, is back for his second stint at Southern University. He stepped down as coach at Tuskegee after the 2000 season and spent last year at home -- a year that made it all too clear to him what he really needed to be doing with his life. "Well, retirement can be very boring," said Jobe. "I had one of those 'Honey-Do' contracts that your wife gives you. I learned to wax floors and wash windows, things I had never done because I've got a great wife and she never asked me to do menial things while I was working. "But as soon as I stopped working, that was it. It was a little more than I had bargained for." Luckily for Jobe, a former employer provided the perfect escape route from another year of cleaning. On March 19, Southern fired Tommy Green, a former Jobe assistant who had replaced his mentor as head coach before the 1996-97 season. Two weeks later, Jobe returned to the Baton Rouge, La., school he led to four NCAA tournaments between 1987 and 1996. "This is the best job I ever had, so I'm glad this job opened up," he said. "I think it was more divine intervention, so to speak. I think somebody was looking out for me." Jobe can only hope that feeling carries over to the court, where he'll need all the help he can get this season. Southern lost four seniors from last year's 11-16 team, and this year's roster features eight freshmen. That means, for the first time in 30 seasons as a head coach, Jobe will be in a rebuilding rather than reloading mode, and he'll be doing it with players a full half-century younger than he is. The situation isn't quite as challenging for Spoonhour in Las Vegas. The Rebels had a disappointing 16-13 finish last year after firing coach Bill Bayno in the middle of the season amid the latest NCAA sanctions on the program. Spoonhour's hiring didn't exactly fire up Rebels fans at the time -- you will never hear the words flashy or slick used to describe this guy -- but he may have been a perfect fit. Spoonhour has always run clean programs, and he's always been a winner. He brings a .651 career winning percentage to the desert, and made eight trips to the NCAAs in his 16 years at Saint Louis and Southwest Missouri State. Unlike Jobe, who says he isn't a fan and rarely watches a game he's not involved in, Spoonhour stayed immersed in basketball during his retirement. He attended men's and women's games at Saint Louis, and would regularly drop in on his former assistants who were coaching high school teams in the area. He also did radio and TV work for Missouri Valley Conference and Conference USA games, along with a national radio gig during the NCAA tournament the last two years. When UNLV athletic director Charles Cavagnaro called Spoonhour to see if he might be interested in replacing interim coach Max Good last spring, all the pieces fell into place. Spoonhour was ready to come back, and he'd always liked Las Vegas -- as did his wife, Vicki, who had lived in the city before. "The truth of the matter is, I wouldn't have come back just anywhere, it had to be someplace special like this," he said. "I've always sort of flown by the seat of my pants. I've never had a master plan, like 'six months from now, I'm going to be doing this.' Some guys can see five years down the road, but I've just never done that, I've always gone by feel. I've changed jobs, and when I've changed, it's usually been because something intrigued me or I just felt it was the thing to do. "In this case, I felt like it was time to get out of coaching at the time -- I never said 'burned out' or anything like that, because I don't think I was. I just didn't enjoy the wins as much as I fretted over the losses, and it remains to be seen how I'll handle it here. But I'm going to try to have a little better perspective on everything than I did." Spoonhour has kept himself busy in the offseason and preseason by installing his new system and evaluating the talent on hand. The Rebels lost their go-to player from last year, big man Kaspars Kambala, and are moving more to a motion offense and pressure defense. They return only one double-figure scorer, forward Dalron Johnson (12.3 ppg), but Spoonhour has confidence in the group he has to work with, even if it takes a while to get everyone on the same page. "It's hard for kids to think and play, it's very difficult, and that's what we've got our guys doing right now," he said. "I don't expect us to be a smooth basketball team until after the first of the year." It's an interesting scenario for both coaches, taking over programs that are at least a couple of notches removed from their glory days. This is not the UNLV team that was a Final Four mainstay a decade ago, nor the Southern team that pulled off the greatest win in school history, the Jobe-engineered upset of Georgia Tech in the 1993 NCAA tournament. At their age, neither Jobe nor Spoonhour has the luxury of implementing a long-term rebuilding plan. Both coaches said they intend to build on the already strong basketball foundations at their respective schools and return to their rightful place -- regular trips to the NCAA tournament. As for how long they'll stay around this time, well, that's anybody's guess, especially in Spoonhour's case. "It's the usual great Spoonhour plan: There is none. I'm going to stay here as long as I feel good and the people here at the university are happy. I haven't drawn a line in the dirt and said, 'Well, in four years, I want to be sitting in Key West.' "What I would like to do in the time I'm here is, I'd like to see us come back and be very positive about our program and about our total sports program, I'd like for that feeling to permeate. And, as I told [the administration] the other day, I'd like to coach well enough for them to give me some seats when I got out of it." Jobe, meanwhile, is just happy to get out of window-washing duty again. A five- or 10-year plan? He doesn't even want to think about that. "Don't expect me to be here for 10 years, that's for sure," he said. "I'll probably be dead in 10 years -- I definitely won't be able to see the court unless I'm standing in the middle of it, I'll be so old. "I don't know, I'm going to let health determine that. It depends on how I feel, if I feel good, and if I'm successful -- if I'm not successful, I wouldn't even ask them to let me stay. Then I'll have to try to find a hobby or something."
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