The Whittler

To reach where John Chancy sits today, a man blinks back the tears when his first college recruit, the ghetto kid with the blind eye and the bullet lodged beside his spine, the first in his family ever to attend college, becomes an all-conference center and then walks into practice at the beginning of his senior year and says he's not going to play his final season, going to take the coach's two-hour sermons to heart, concentrate on graduating on time, get a good job...and does it. Kids like that, out there in the darkness, struggling to light a match—he can't walk away from them. He can't let them shiver. Whatever it takes, even crazy. When the proprietor of a Long Island motel refuses to turn up the heat in his players' rooms during a Christmas tournament, John asks the man to come to his room, jams a piece of wood into the index finger of a glove so it looks like a concealed gun, leaps from behind the door when the man enters, presses the makeshift gun to his head and screams, "We gel heal, you son of a bitch, or von get heat!"

To reach where John Chaney sits today, a man must have a wife who virtually never attends a game, who allows him, as Jeanne does, to compartmentalize his life, to hide from the world when he comes home, to hide even from her. A wife who uses quiet humor and patience to work around his blind spots, who has her own life, as a teacher and a traveler and a flea-market addict, and doesn't exploit his guilt that he's not spending more time with her and the three children. He must have assistant coaches who have a few of those traits too. At times he'll tell the university president to funnel his pay raises to them. Tony Pinnie and Charlie Songster at Cheyney State, Jim Maloney and Dean Demopoulos at Temple—a decade passes, and they won't leave his side.

A man must set his jaw as the team bus is getting ready to head to the airport for the Division II Final Four in 1978, and his sixth man appears without a necktie. He must leave the kid home. As he's showering a few hours before the national championship game, he hears a knock at his door, shouts out and learns it's the opposing coach, coming to his hotel room to wish him well—nobody has ever done that before. And suddenly he feels the old suspicion of anything new, of anyone who might be trying to get an edge on him, and so he bursts out of the shower naked and soapy, raising the ante, hugging and kissing the coach, leaving him covered with suds, then bids a cheery farewell and patters back into the shower, scowling. "Nothin' wrong with your last name being Trust," he says, "as long as your first name's Mis."

Nobody's going to pull one over on him. He'll croak, "Out!" at anything that's even close to the line when he's playing tennis; call timeout, for crying out loud, when he's trapped in the corner in a pickup game of basketball, and scream at the first fool who says, "You can't do that." His heart turns to jelly for all of society's losers—but goddam if he's going to be one of them. He beats that coach, by the way, who interrupted his shower. Wins the Division II national title with his sixth man sitting in his dorm, wins Pennsylvania's Distinguished Faculty Award for his work in the community, classroom and gym, but who notices? It's 1980, and the Big Five still has never had a black coach, still can't feel the hornet humming inside its nose.

He begins developing a vice. Eventually he'll tear out his closet door and have an extended clothes rack installed to fit all the $80 silk ties, the $120 shirts. Many will go for years unused in his closet, or he'll give them away five minutes after losing a game in them, or let them get so rumpled and untucked, you would never dream that anyone designed them. It's being able to buy the clothes that matters, not wearing them. It's final liberation from the Warwick Hotel toilet stall.

At last, in 1982, Temple offers to make him the Big Five's first black coach. He's 50. He won't have to straighten out a whole student body anymore, as at Gratz, or three or four classrooms of kids, as at Cheyney State. Just 10 to 12 kids a year, just one team. A man's born into crazy, and he keeps whittling.

He has crossed the moat, scaled the walls and found himself inside the palace, inside the system that all those years rejected him, and when they ask him if he would like to sit in the more spacious, easy-to-reach offices just inside the front doors of McGonigle, he just blinks at them. "My deepest-seated fear," he says, "the thing that would go against every fiber in my body, is that I would ever leave the common people. That I would ever become a high-and-mighty jackass."

Pigeon-toed, one pant leg up, he walks down to the dungeon.

So there they are. There's Arthur Ashe's head on the screen one night five years ago on Nightline, coolly arguing in favor of the NCAA's decision to take a year's eligibility from incoming freshmen who don't score 700 on their SAT's and average 2.0 in core curriculum, and to make them pay their own way during that ineligible first year. And there's Ted Koppel's head, quietly quoting statistics indicating that the new legislation is compelling the underachieve(tm) to produce better grades. And there's John Chaney's head—no, it's not his head, it's all heart—gushing metaphors about racism and stigmas and closed doors and crushed dreams, leaving Ted and Arthur blinking. You can't argue with John. To refute his argument is to refute his life.

He missed the civil-rights movement—survival was all his head had room for in the '60s—but, Lord, he's not going to miss the train now. He's a member of the executive committee of the Black Coaches Association, which is holding the boycott blade over the NCAA's neck, and he'll let the blade drop if things don't change soon. "Sure, graduation rates will rise under Proposition 48—what else are they going to do after you lop off the bottom?" he cries. "Do you only perpetuate yourself? Is that the only goal of higher education? To educate the educated? I wouldn't have passed that SAT test coming out of high school. Where would I be? Can an SAT measure heart? If a kid can't read in 12th grade, it's because he didn't learn in first grade! That's where our society needs to start! But we gotta keep the window to heaven open for poor kids! We gotta keep that hole open in the sky!"