ST. LOUIS – Charlie Coles is talking with his fists, shadow boxing his point of how badly he wants his Miami University basketball team not to be embarrassed tonight against defending champion Kentucky. His satin red warmup appears the blur of a changing stoplight. He runs his fingers through thin, untamed strands of hair. The coach can’t sit still.
No one seems more alive in the Trans World Dome than Charlie Coles.
Maybe because Charlie Coles died a little more than a year ago.
He died. His face turned blue. His eyeballs rolled backward to face his brain. He had no pulse. He died.
Coles doesn’t remember a bright white light or the soft touch of an angel on his hand after he collapsed in cardiac arrest nine minutes into a basketball game last Feb. 28. All he can recall is waking up in a Kalamazoo, Mich., hospital with a tube stuck down his throat and an IV in his arm. Everyone else at the 1998 Mid-American Conference quarterfinal will never forget the chilling sight of Coles facedown on the court in front of the Miami bench, two physicians and a trainer pounding on chest trying to revive him.
“It was the scariest moment of my life,” says Miami’s all-world Wally Sczcerbiak.
Szczerbiak recalls sitting in silence for two hours with the rest of the RedHawks in a strange locker room waiting to find out whether or not their coach would make it. The call finally came. Charlie Coles would live. Still shaken, the players then didn’t know whether to continue the game against Western Michigan. Szczerbiak spoke. He asked the question: What would Coach want us to do?
So they played.
When Coles awoke in a hospital bed he scrawled on a piece of paper: We won? We won? We won?
They won.
A year later, they have won their first two NCAA tourney games. Tonight at approximately 10:15 (EST) is the no-chance one against Kentucky. But Coles and his kids believe in miracles.
Like their coach, the RedHawks are living on borrowed time. Isn’t it exhilarating? Every breath travels slowly until it reaches ‘the pit of the lungs. The senses are times ten. Every color is majestic, every smell that of baking bread, every touch that of a new basketball.
St. Louis is Eden.
It’s not hard to think Charlie Coles came back to life for this. “It’s amazing, I’m worried so much about the game,” he says. “I think about it from time to time, yeah, sure. And you know? I’m lucky, dang lucky. But we’re here and I just want our team to play well.”
As he stretches, there is the slight bulge in his chest. What looks like a pack of Marlboros is a defibrillator, the only sign this man with the Clark Gable mustache has a heart problem. Delores, Coles’ wife of 35 years, who along with their two children, Chris and Mary, watched him die that night from the stands, urges him to take it easy. But it’s a losing battle.
Coles – a star guard at Miami from ’63-65 before coming back as an assistant in ’93 and then taking over as head man after the ’96 season, when Herb Sendek went to N.C. State and the team pressed the university to end its search at Coles – has wanted to coach basketball since he was eight.So this … “This is the ultimate,” he says.
Kentucky coach Tubby Smith spent part of yesterday at a wake in Indianapolis for a UK recruit who collapsed and died on the court during a game last Friday. Seven-foot John Stewart wasn’t as lucky as Coles. He was to buried with the No. 53 Wildcats jersey he never got to wear.
“I am truly blessed,” says Coles, now 57. “At times, I wonder, ‘Why me?'”
When Coles was born his mother’s best friend wanted to call him Lazarus. But Coles’ father had just been sent to Germany during World War II. His father was Charles. But Lazarus – actually Lazzie, then Lassie – somehow stuck as a nickname.
How fitting. In the bible, Lazarus was the man from Bethany who died only to emerge from his tomb four days later wrapped in bandages when Jesus summoned him.
Charlie Coles. He once died. Now he lives in the Sweet Sixteen.