The Game Of His Life

"What kind of pen are you using?" he asks.

Come again?

"Pilot G2," he says, inspecting the implement. "That's a good pen. They make another one called the G6. It's got a bigger grip on it. That's a good one too."

Meyer is famously particular about his learning tools. He became so renowned for stopping his clinics to ask coaches about their pens that LSU women's associate head coach Bob Starkey sent out a mass e-mail after the accident requesting that colleagues send pens along with their cards and letters. (A box in Meyer's office now overflows with well-wishers' writing instruments.) Then there's Meyer's ever-present dictaphone, a digital recorder that he'll pull out of his pocket—during practices, conversations, even games—whenever he makes an observation or encounters a new idea. "If he was going to meet with Barack Obama, he'd probably pull out that recorder if Obama said something cool," says Meyer's son, Jerry.

Meyer developed his capacity for hard work while growing up on a farm in Wayne, Neb., but he gravitated instead to baseball and basketball, which he played at Northern Colorado. The intricacies of basketball, in particular, fascinated him. Summitt can recall driving with Meyer to a clinic in West Virginia once when they talked hoops "literally the whole way up there," she says, with Meyer taking verbal notes on his recorder the entire time. That thirst for ideas hasn't abated, even as Meyer has kept winning, grown older and changed schools. (Meyer resigned from Lipscomb in 1999 because he thought the school's move from NAIA to NCAA Division I would put financial stress on the school.)

Meyer has always relied on the bedrocks of man-to-man defense and motion offense, but he isn't afraid to adapt: After the introduction of the shot clock and the three-point line in the 1980s, Meyer cranked up his slow-down offense so much that his teams started averaging more than 100 points. "A lot of times you get people who've coached a long time who just do the same thing," says Northern State athletic director Bob Olson. "Coach is always on the cutting edge."

"Every single day he wants to learn something new," says Baruth. In the world of Don Meyer, ideas are oxygen. "When you're through learning, you can forget it," Meyer says. "When you're not learning about your profession or how to deal with people or life, then it's over. All windows are shut. Whether you're 15 or 50 or going down the homestretch, you've gotta keep learning."

That was the same approach that Meyer brought to his hospital recovery. One of his coaching friends sent him the book You Gotta Keep Dancin', in which author Tim Hansel details his response to 20 years of chronic pain following a mountain-climbing accident. "It talks about God using pain to teach," Meyer says. There was certainly an excess of pain for Meyer to learn from, most of all after doctors amputated his left leg six inches below the knee two weeks after the accident. ("If you need to take the leg, take it," Meyer told them. "I can coach without it.") The most excruciating moment came the first time they changed the dressing on Meyer's leg, pulling the gauze off the exposed muscle and nerve tissue so it could be washed out in a whirlpool. Oh, the pain. "On a scale of one to 10 it was a thousand," says Meyer, who sang the hymn Peace, Perfect Peace during the ordeal.

"We gave him a very high dose of intravenous morphine, and it did not even touch his pain," says Dr. Jonathan Stone, Meyer's rehabilitation specialist at Avera McKennan Hospital in Sioux Falls. "It was probably as severe a pain as anybody could possibly experience."

YET MORPHINE isn't the only antidote for pain. From Day One of his hospital stay Meyer's support system kicked in as word spread among his former players and the coaching community. Carmen spent all eight weeks by his side in Sioux Falls, a three-hour drive from Aberdeen. Meyer's three children, seven of his eight grandchildren, and dozens of friends and former players made the trek to his bedside. "He never spent a night alone," says Carmen. Wade Tomlinson, who played on Lipscomb's record-setting 1989--90 team, flew in from Indiana the day after the wreck. Meyer had been there for Tomlinson after his toddler son, Riley, died in a drowning accident in '99. "When Coach found out, he dropped everything, came to my house and stayed to [speak at] the funeral," says Tomlinson. "There's no way I could repay him for all the things he's done for me."