Getting to Us

by Seth Davis

  It also helps that his house is in Dublin, a suburb located eighteen miles from Columbus. Meyer has a semblance of a normal life there, plus a neighbor with whom he plays golf when he can. He still works long hours, but he knows better when it’s time to go home. “I see him a lot more than I ever did at Florida,” Shelley says. “He made lots of changes, and guess what? We still win football games. Who would have known?”

  He remains carefully guarded, which is why he looks so uneasy at times sharing the intimate details of the past few years. Yet he has done so on multiple occasions, including with me in his office, telling his story in hopes that someone new who hears it will glean some meaning. “It’s not something I look forward to doing, but I also made a deal between myself and my Creator that if I got back into coaching, I would do the very best I can to help others,” he says. “So talking about it is my way of giving back, and it has been tenfold the replies that I’m getting from people.”

  During our conversation in his office, Meyer recounted a recent visit he had with his good friend Bill Belichick, the coach of the New England Patriots, who had come to Columbus to speak at Meyer’s coaching clinic. “He said to me, ‘I’m at the point in my life where I just want to coach people I like.’ I shared that comment with my team.” At one point, Meyer and Belichick were sitting alone in the bleachers huddling with their cell phones. “People probably thought we were talking about how to beat the 3-4 defense,” Meyer said. “What we were really doing was sharing pictures of our grandchildren for twenty minutes.”

  It makes for a nice tableau, two championship coaches taking a moment to step away from their shared obsession to share the joy of being granddads. Turns out Bud Meyer was wrong about one thing: Life is full of gray areas. Urban learned that the hard way, but he has finally figured out that it’s not always the best strategy to use the entire field. Sometimes a coach is better off allowing a little pressure.

  Tom Izzo

  “I LIKE SMELLING MY NEIGHBOR’S COOKOUT.”

  Guilt is his constant companion. When he’s working, he feels like he should be at home with the kids. When he’s home, he wonders if he should be back in the office, grinding. When someone he has known for a long time asks for an appearance, he knows he should decline, but that would really make him feel guilty. So he says yes. “I spoke at a Rotary Club last week. I’m still speaking at Rotary Clubs,” Tom Izzo says with a laugh. “You know why? Cause the friend that was helping me out thirty years ago when I had no money, no food, and no job asked me to do it. All those people that helped me, I’m obligated to ’em.”

  Guilt rode shotgun on that sad, soulful car ride in late December 2015, when Izzo traveled back to his hometown of Iron Mountain, Michigan, to bury his dad. Carl Izzo lived until he was ninety, but he had suffered from dementia during his final year. When Tom visited him for a few hours on Christmas morning, his dad barely knew he was there. Tom was a doting son if ever there was one. He bought his parents a home in Wisconsin. He flew them in for games and tournaments. He called them often. Yet as he went to bid his dad a final farewell, Tom was nettled by the belief that he hadn’t done enough.

  “I only saw my parents four or five times a year,” he tells me. “You justify it with the good things you were able to do. I got to buy them a house. I was able to take them to Hawaii and California for games. They came to the Big Ten tournaments. They came to Puerto Rico. They stayed at my house a lot. But I didn’t see them as much because I was working during those times. So that part of it was hard to think about.”

  Carl Izzo’s passing came in the midst of a basketball season unlike any that Tom had experienced during his two-plus decades as Michigan State’s basketball coach. Two months earlier, Izzo lost one of his best friends, Flip Saunders, the president of the Minnesota Timberwolves, who had succumbed to cancer at the age of sixty. The two were so close that on several occasions Saunders had tried to hire Izzo to be the team’s head coach. Izzo was one of the few people outside of Saunders’s family who knew how sick he really was. He knew the end was coming, but it was jarring all the same. “I had just gone to see their new practice facility. He had all these plans,” Izzo says softly. “Flip and I shared a lot of things, and then all of a sudden he was gone. It was surreal.”

  From there, Izzo watched his Spartans fight through injuries to become one of the finest teams he had ever coached—only to see them go down to defeat in the most shocking upset of his career, a 90–81 loss to 15th-seeded Middle Tennessee in the first round of the 2016 NCAA Tournament. The atmosphere in the locker room afterward was funereal, with Izzo shedding tears for one of the few times in his career. The team had seemed too good to be true. They were great players, great students, great leaders, great kids. Never gave him a moment’s trouble. He wished he could feel angry with them, but instead he was overcome with empathy. And guilt. “We’re going to have another chance at this,” he said to his assistants. “Those seniors won’t.”

  Izzo’s lowest professional moment was followed three weeks later by his highest, when he was voted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts. “I didn’t think I’d get it on the first try. I really didn’t,” he says. “I didn’t even know how you got in.” When he called his mom, Dorothy, to tell her the news, she said how proud his dad would have been. Tom knew that was true. “My dad deserves a lot of credit,” he says. “He taught me how to work.”

  Most coaches are trying to get to Us. Izzo was born there. He grew up in a big family, and at the age of twelve he started working in his grandfather’s shoe store. Everything he ever needed to know about coaching, he learned while working in that store. When he achieved a level of success and fortune that exceeded his wildest dreams, he knew full well that he did not get there alone. It was his job—his obligation—to bring his family with him, in person and in spirit.

  The same goes for his other family, his players. So even as he reached the pinnacle of making the Hall of Fame, Izzo could not totally enjoy it because the official announcement took place at the Final Four in Houston, and he knew his team should have been there with him. Izzo’s former boss and mentor, former Michigan State head coach Jud Heathcote, who passed away in the summer of 2017, liked to say that Izzo was “the most unhappy successful person I know,” but that is not really true. Izzo is content in his soul and comfortable in his skin. He is funny and upbeat and as well liked as any man in his profession. Most every coach has his detractors, but you literally never hear a bad word about Izzo. He is a coach’s coach and a guy’s guy, and underneath all that angst he knows goddamn well he belongs in the Hall of Fame.

  The persistent guilt tortures Izzo, but it also drives him to get to Us. There is a fine line between empathy and guilt, between gratitude and humility. Izzo embraces all of those things in a downcast yet chipper sort of way. For example, every year he complains that the schedule he put together is way too difficult for his team, but in the next breath he explains that his annual slug fests in November and December lay the foundation for his teams to succeed in March. There is no pleasure without pain, and there is no winning without work.

  For Izzo, the only thing worse than losing a first-round game is knowing that he has disappointed someone who helped him, or that he failed to live up to the principles he learned in that family store. Show up. Work hard. Give back. Stay humble. He is a multimillionaire celebrity approaching the sunset of a brilliant career, and yet he will never, ever forget where he came from. That’s pretty much impossible anyway, because he never really left.

  * * *

  • • •

  When Michigan State was building a new office and practice facility for its basketball teams in 2002, Izzo had a novel idea: He wanted his office to have no door. “I thought it would set a tone,” he says. “But I couldn’t do it because of fire codes.” Maybe he had to accept the door, but he doesn’t have to close it, and even when he does, his players know they can pret
ty much walk in anytime they want. It isn’t just a nice metaphor. It is Izzo’s daily reality.

  Denzel Valentine, who played guard for Michigan State from 2012 to 2016, jokes that Izzo is like a 24/7 concierge service, albeit one that regularly called him a dumbass for four straight years. “There were multiple times after a game when I would text him at one or two in the morning. He would always text me right back,” Valentine says. “From day one, he creates a family atmosphere and makes it known that he cares about you as an individual.” Izzo offers this service because he genuinely cares about his players, but he also believes that it helps the team win. “When people ask me what I do best, everyone thinks it’s rebounding or whatever,” he says. “The answer is I spend time with my players. That’s how I get to know them and can determine which way I need to go with them.”

  This is the ethos he developed in Tony Izzo’s Shoe Hospital, and it laid the foundation for his PEAK profile at an early age. One of the first things he learned was the proper way to give customers their change. First, look ’em in the eye. Second, count the dollars and cents deliberately and out loud. Not only did this establish trust with the customer, but it also ensured that he didn’t accidentally give them too much change. Honesty was good for business.

  Tony Izzo, Tom’s grandfather, lived until he was ninety and never stopped working. Tom was one of seventeen cousins who worked at the shop after school, on weekends, and during the summers. Eventually the store expanded to be called Tony Izzo and Sons. Then it was Tony Izzo and Grandsons. “I made very little money, but I was brought up to work. It made me who I am,” Izzo says. “I don’t think I’m the best coach, but I do think I work as hard as anybody.” He didn’t just think of his coworkers as family. They were family. Same with his teams.

  Tom was not a great student in school, but he was good enough. He figured out that if he just showed up and fulfilled his obligations, he could pull in a solid B average. The pressure to do well in school came more from his mother, who had a nursing degree, than his father, who dropped out of high school to join the Army. Yet when his father learned he couldn’t run for a position on the board of education without a high school diploma, he finished up his work at Iron Mountain High School, sitting right there in the classroom alongside the pimply-faced teenyboppers. He later became president of the board.

  Izzo’s hometown was an extension of the store. Iron Mountain is a hardscrabble blue-collar community of fewer than 10,000 located on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It’s the type of town where families keep an eye on the neighbors’ kids. Those bonds sustained the citizenry through the long, harsh winters. “You grow up having a certain work ethic and feeling a certain responsibility,” says Steve Mariucci, the former NFL head coach who grew up with Izzo in Iron Mountain and remains his best friend. “If you don’t get up early and shovel your driveway, you ain’t going anywhere. It’s that simple.”

  As in many such towns, particularly in the industrial Midwest, sports filled the cultural center. Izzo and Mariucci played on four different teams together and got to be real tight. Izzo was the best player on the basketball team, and Mariucci was the quarterback of the football team. They wanted to keep playing sports in college, but they weren’t recruited by any big-time programs, plus they didn’t want to go far away from home. So they enrolled in Northern Michigan, a Division II school just eighty miles away, and hoped to keep playing as walk-ons.

  Tom wanted to buy an old automobile for school, but his dad talked him into saving up a little more money to buy a sleek new Monte Carlo. “That was a cool thing. All my buddies had clunker cars, and I had a nice car,” he says. “Of course, all my other buddies were out riding in their cars while I was working all the time. So I had a nice car that sat in the parking lot.”

  It wasn’t long before Izzo and Mariucci moved up to the varsity. As a guard, Izzo was short on talent—he was short, period—but he was indefatigable, eventually setting a school record his senior year for minutes played in a season. He was voted third team Division II All-American. Mariucci, meanwhile, was named a Division II football All-American three times. They got good grades, too.

  Once college was over, Izzo and Mariucci remained in school as graduate assistant coaches in their respective sports. Izzo also took a job that season coaching basketball at a local high school. As if that wasn’t enough work, the two of them still found time to try their hands at business, buying a trailer with their meager scholarship money, fixing it up, and then renting it out. They made enough dough to buy a couple of ramshackle houses in town, which they also renovated themselves. “We bought a house that was the biggest piece of shit you ever saw. My mother and his mother came in, they almost started crying,” Izzo says. “We were both GAs [graduate assistants], so we were making about $3,500 each. We had to go to grad school four nights a week and teach during the day. So we’d go to this house, work until three, four in the morning, and we’d fall asleep. We had these sleeping bags on the living room floor. No beds. We’d wake up in the morning with all this sawdust in our noses and our hair. I swear to God, I think back on that, and I laugh so hard.”

  They were later hired as full-time assistants, but after a year Mariucci left to become the quarterbacks coach at Cal State Fullerton, putting him on a path that kept him on the West Coast for most of his coaching career. Izzo stayed home. For him, Northern Michigan was as comfortable as an old shoe—or an old shoe hospital. The coaches from the various sports at the school shared the same office building, ate at the same restaurants (there weren’t many), went to each other’s games, and drank beers together late at night. “They were just a really good group of people,” Izzo says. “It’s not like at the bigger schools where basketball is mad because football gets more, or the women’s program is mad because the men get more. There was no fighting, because nobody had anything.”

  Still, Izzo had his ambitions, so when an opportunity opened in 1983 to work part-time for Michigan State basketball coach Jud Heathcote, he jumped at the chance. He was one of six coaches who came to Michigan State from Northern. The others were four football coaches and a hockey coach. When another football coach lost his wife to leukemia, Izzo moved in with him and helped take care of his young son. Later he moved in with a student manager for the basketball team named Mark Hollis. They lived together for two years. Today, Hollis is Izzo’s athletic director, charged with running the family store, only this time on a $127 million budget.

  * * *

  • • •

  By the time Izzo joined Heathcote’s staff at Michigan State, his PEAK profile was well established. He had learned from an early age the importance of persistence, which was as simple as being where you were obligated to be, on time, every day, ready to work. He was taught that empathizing with the people around him—literally, his family—was more important than whatever goals he had for himself. He carried a deep and abiding sense of who he was and where he came from, which strengthened his authenticity. And he gained a lot of knowledge about how to work, how to run a business, and how to deal with people.

  There was, however, one area in which he did not have much knowledge. Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is cleaved from the rest of the state by a stretch of water that encompasses parts of three Great Lakes (Superior, Michigan, Huron) as well as the St. Mary’s River. It is not technically an island (the UP, as it is often called, shares a land border with Wisconsin), but culturally it might as well be on its own planet. For all the games Izzo played growing up, he recalls just a single instance in which he went up against an African American. This did not exactly give him a veneer of worldly sophistication.

  In many respects, Izzo’s naïveté worked to his advantage. He was taught to connect with people on the simplest of terms. They were either honest or they weren’t. They either worked hard or they didn’t. So while he didn’t have much interaction with people of different races, he also didn’t grow up in a place where it mattered.

 
; One of the first really close friends Izzo made at Northern Michigan was Mike Garland, an African American basketball player from Ypsilanti, Michigan. When Garland first learned that Izzo was from the UP, he assumed correctly Izzo had not spent much time around black people, but he never picked up on any awkwardness. “I realized it was because he didn’t have any preconceived notions,” Garland says. “Nobody ever told him, ‘Stay away from those guys.’ There were no ‘guys.’”

  Garland was a year ahead of Izzo on the basketball team, and after Izzo joined the varsity, they found themselves battling for minutes at the same position. This should have been a source of tension, but if anything, it fortified their friendship. They both loved to compete, and they ended up starting alongside each other. Izzo already had designs on a career in coaching. He promised that if he ever got a head job, Garland would be his first hire.

  “I can’t work for you,” Garland chided.

  “Fine,” Izzo said. “You get a job, and I’ll come work for you.”

  After he got to Michigan State, Izzo was introduced to a young lady named Lupe Marinez, whose sister-in-law worked in the basketball office. He didn’t know any Hispanics while growing up in Iron Mountain either, yet he quickly discovered they had a lot of shared experiences. Lupe grew up working for her family’s water treatment company. She was an East Lansing native, a Michigan State grad, and a daughter of Mexican immigrants. She also had eleven brothers and sisters. It was not a complicated courtship. Tom and Lupe worked during the days, spent a few hours together in the evenings, and got married after only nine months.