ATLANTA — John Beilein was already well into his career, and he was still toiling away at Canisius College, and by rights he should have been trying to collect every victory he could, every accolade he could, every short boost up the ladder of his profession.
This was 1995, Madison Square Garden, the consolation game of the NIT. Virginia Tech had blown Canisius’ doors off in the semifinals, ending the Griffs’ run through the JV brackets, but Beilein still had plenty to play for. Beat Penn State, win a 22nd game at a school he personally had revived from dust, be one of a handful of teams to win its last game of the season.
“If you’re a climber,” Mike MacDonald, then Beilein’s top assistant, says, “then that’s the perfect place to start padding your resume.”
But Beilein never has been accused of that. He was already in his 20th year as a head coach by ’95, had toiled a couple of years at Newfane (N.Y.) High School, put in three years at Erie County CC, another one at Nazareth, another nine at LeMoyne, and three at Canisius. Slow and steady, and all that.
So Beilein did something shocking that night at the Garden: when he announced his starting five, he included a senior walk-on named John Gorman.
“What the hell,” Beilein told MacDonald, now the head coach at Medaille College in Buffalo. “He deserves it.”
In coaching, as in life, good deeds rarely go unpunished.
“We lost by two,” MacDonald says. “But John would’ve done that again. He’d been a walk-on at Wheeling Jesuit. He knew how hard the walk-ons work, especially the seniors. And it’s no accident that John Gorman is driving down from Carolina this week like a lot of his old players are. He’s a teacher. And what he teaches sticks.”
It is probably a sad commentary on the business of basketball, and of coaching, that Beilein is an outlier of sorts, a universally admired coach who’s even more appreciated as one of the sport’s good guys, who left Canisius for Richmond, and Richmond for West Virginia, and West Virginia for Michigan — never in a rush, never too soon, always after he had left a place better for having worked there — to pursue a vision he’d shared with his wife, Kathleen, at the start of their marriage.
“One of these days,” husband had told wife, “I’m going to be one of those guys in the plaid sports coats who gets to coach in the Final Four.”
In his own way, he is the bizarro version of Rick Pitino, the patron saint of the Coach on the Make, who hurried and hurtled his way up the ranks, a head coach by 24, a pro coach by 32, an NCAA champ by 42. Pitino’s son, Richard, is already on that speedy treadmill, named this week as Minnesota’s head coach at 30.
Now, understand: there is nothing wrong with that path. But there’s also something quite remarkable about Beilein’s. For instance, he never has spent one day as an assistant coach. The first job at Newfane High was the head coach of the JV. That was 38 years ago.
He is a small-town kid, out of Burt, in Niagara County in the Western Wing of New York state. His mother’s cousins were the Niland brothers — Fritz, Bob, Ed, Preston — who were one of the main inspirations for the fictional Ryan brothers in “Saving Private Ryan;” Bob and Preston had died at Normandy, Edward was a Japanese POW, and Fritz was shipped home once the others’ fates were determined.
But other coaches were born in Rockwellian bliss, and have shed those core values quicker than it takes to call a 30-second timeout.
“At the core, he’s a teacher, and he teaches fundamentals,” MacDonald says. “I always laugh when I hear guys call him an ‘offensive genius.’ It’s not necessarily the plays, he’s just very good at teaching guys to be better players. Players improve on his watch. And when they improve, so do his teams.”
And at the core is a guy who never forgot what it is to remember his players, his colleagues, his friends. At the start of the busiest week of his life, some of Beilein’s friends got a text from him: he had arranged to have a private Mass tomorrow. He had reserved a priest and a room at the Hilton, and needed a few volunteers to help as altar servers and lectors.
“How many coaches do you know who’d be spending Final Four week doing that?” MacDonald asks.
If you’re waiting for an answer, it might take a while.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com