GREENVILLE, S.C. – This was a typical day in Bobby Cremins’ semi-retired life:
A morning walk along an Atlantic Ocean beach with his lab, Murphy, followed by a jump in the pool and a round of golf or a tennis match, topped off by lunch and maybe a drink and a good argument with buddies at Reilley’s North End Pub in Hilton Head, S.C.
Sucks, doesn’t it?
“I got tired,” Cremins sighed, “of looking at the water.”
While other men fast-approaching 60 were daydreaming of the life Cremins was living, the former Georgia Tech coach was considering new fastbreak patterns to run, new pitches for recruits. There was one problem: He had no players to direct, no parents to win over.
For the past six years, Cremins and that fresh snowfall on top of his head were on the game’s periphery as a broadcaster. He is fast-recalling that life as a coach – this time at College of Charleston – is no day at the beach.
“It’s been hard,” Cremins said during a gathering of Southern Conference coaches. “But this is what I asked for, and this is what I got. I have my moments where I think, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to be laying on the beach?’ or being with my buddies, playing golf. I have my moments.
“But I’ve made up my mind that I’m going to give it everything I’ve got. I’m consumed by this.”
Cremins’ return to coaching began with a funeral. Bob Cunningham had become a new best friend since Cremins’ coaching days had ended at Tech and he had settled into this semi-retired life at Hilton Head Island, in the community of Sea Pines along Calibogue Sound. Cunningham and Cremins shared so many commonalities, they became fast friends. They were guards who had followed Frank McGuire’s pipeline from New York City to the Carolinas. Cunningham was a defensive stopper on North Carolina’s 1957 NCAA championship team. Cremins was a defensive stopper on a South Carolina team that opened the 1969-70 season ranked No. 1 and won all 14 ACC regular-season games by an average of more than 18 ppg. Their parents are even buried in the same cemetery.
When bone cancer took Cunningham’s life on June 13, Cremins’ restlessness stirred even further. At the funeral, Cremins ran into Corkey Carnavale, his roommate at South Carolina. Tom Herrion had just been let go as the head coach at College of Charleston. Carnavale wondered if his friend might be interested in the job. His friend might, Cremins replied. Calls were made on his behalf. Eventually, Carnevale called to relay that while there was interest, Charleston had found its man in Winthrop coach Gregg Marshall. Great choice, Cremins thought.
As for himself, Indiana Pacers CEO and president Donnie Walsh had recruited Cremins to play at South Carolina. George Felton, a Pacers scout, had been a Cremins assistant. Maybe there was a place for Cremins in the NBA. Or he could always continue in broadcasting.
Carnevale called again the next day, while Cremins was working his Boys & Girls Club basketball camp. Marshall had pulled out of the Charleston job.
Before hanging up, Cremins informed his buddy that he was full of it. Or something to that effect. Those jokes about Cremins’ decision to take the South Carolina job back in 1993 – only to turn around and return to Georgia Tech two days later – apparently never fail to amuse.
Carnevale immediately called back. He repeated that Marshall had returned to Winthrop, and damned if he didn’t sound sincere. Cremins ran to his car and listened for an ESPN Radio news update. And then he heard it:
Gregg Marshall had indeed pulled a Bobby Cremins.
Cremins was brought in for an interview and offered a job during the 60-mile drive back to Hilton Head Island. He looked at the sky and asked the Lord what he was doing to him. Then he accepted the job. Cremins, born and married on the Fourth of July, was introduced as the Charleston coach one day before turning 59.
“I am still young enough that I needed a challenge,” Cremins said. “My body needed it. My mind needed it. I needed to do something that was hard.
“It’s been hard for me. I lost purpose. I lost a sense of mission.”
Cremins is as charming as Charleston itself, yet, for all of the energy and unpretentiousness that has made him so successful and well-liked, the man seems to have a restless obsession with the times that things didn’t work out. He associates his senior season with the most storied team in South Carolina history with a double-overtime loss to NC State in the ACC tournament, the wildly successful program that he built at Georgia Tech with failing to reach the NCAA Tournament in six of his last seven seasons, his seemingly idyllic semi-retirement with boredom.
But Cremins’ return to coaching accompanies a return to the Southern Conference, where his run at Appalachian State from 1975-81 ended with a job at Georgia Tech. He brings with him a certain level of anxiety, for Cremins understands that it takes more than just a reputation to win in the SoCon, yet there also is a comfort level here.
This is where, at 27, he became the nation’s youngest Division I coach, following Press Maravich’s final 3-23 season, where he “froze his ass off” in the Carolina mountains, where he bought his first house, where son Bobby III was born.
“Bobby Cremins then wasn’t the same as Bobby Cremins now,” said Les Robinson, the Citadel athletic director who was the military institute’s coach when the unheralded Cremins arrived in the SoCon. “But it was a Frank McGuire disciple coming in, and the underground railroad beginning from New York City. He made his presence immediately known in Boone, N.C.”
That Brooklyn-to-Boone Express helped Cremins win 13 games in his first season and 23 wins and the school’s first NCAA Tournament appearance in his fourth.
“We used to pick them up from the airport in Charlotte or Raleigh, and they’d go asleep during the during the drive,” Cremins said. “The drive was longer than the flight.
“The players used to think I was kidnapping them.”
Cremins smiles at the thought.
“Everybody thinks of Bobby Cremins, they immediately think of Georgia Tech,” said Appalachian coach Houston Fancher. “When he thinks of himself, I think Bobby immediately associates himself with Appalachian State.”
Maybe. You can bring up the fact that Georgia Tech was in a nearly identical state of sad, 4-23 disrepair when he arrived in Atlanta in 1981, and that the Yellow Jackets won 27 games in his fourth season, began his fifth as the nation’s No. 1 team and reached the Final Four with “Legal Weapon 3” in 1990, the sixth of nine straight NCAA Tournament appearances. You can bring up his eight ACC rookies of the year – Dennis Scott, Kenny Anderson and Stephon Marbury were all considered the nation’s top high school players before attending Tech – his three ACC coach-of-the-year honors or the two ACC tournament titles.
You can bring up all those things, yet Cremins is bound to start beating himself up over the last seven less-successful seasons before they can be brought up.
“We lost our swagger,” he said. “We lost our edge. It was time for me to leave, and I knew that. The handwriting was on the wall.”
Cremins resigned before he could be fired in the February of his 19th season, releasing that tension that comes when monstrous seasons turn into untamed monsters. Mike Krzyzewski, a huge admirer, wore Cremins’ trademark blue blazer, yellow tie, khakis and loafers for a game, and 17 sports writers did the same for the North Carolina-Georgia Tech game.
“He’s a legend,” Fancher said. “You see that cotton-top, you think Georgia Tech, you think Bobby Cremins. You know immediately who he is. There aren’t too many people you see and immediately associate with success.
“He built that program. There’s no way around it, he built that program. It is what it is because of him, and he was unceremoniously bounced out of there. But he handled it as well as anyone could. His name is on the gym floor down there. There aren’t too many people who can go out with their dignity intact, and he completely did.”
Six years in semi-retirement have left Cremins with too much time to consider why things went downhill at Tech.
Scott left for the NBA after his junior season, Anderson following his sophomore year and Marbury was one-and-done before such moves were commonplace. Marbury’s successor had transferred to Georgia State. All-America candidate Dion Glover was lost before Cremins’ next-to-last season with a knee injury on the first day of practice, then entered the NBA draft before Cremins’ final year. Al Harrington had narrowed Tech down to his final two but entered the draft without attending college. Cremins, committed to McGuire’s “Iron Five” mentality, wasn’t prepared to replace so many players.
“I lacked foresight,” he said. “I didn’t have enough depth, but I really lacked foresight.”
Cremins’ playing days at South Carolina bring back similarly painful memories, though he was part of the school’s most successful run. Cremins proved to be a great rebuilder and recruiter even back then, helping to lure future All-America guard John Roche and Tommy Owens, who led the ACC all three seasons in rebounding, from New York to Columbia, S.C. The program that went 11-13 in the season before Cremins’ arrival was ranked No. 1 going into his senior season in 1969-70 and swept through the ACC regular season without a loss.
Cremins was so popular on campus during the volatile days of the Vietnam War, he spoke at a rally that included Jane Fonda and was credited for keeping the protest peaceful.
“I had the beads around my neck – those were funny times,” he said, burying head in hands. “Everything was cool until I went into a meeting and they wanted to make bombs. And then my ass was out of there.”
But his final game at South Carolina – a “defining moment” in his life – will always haunt him. The Gamecocks met NC State in the ACC tournament championship game. They had beaten them twice before, by 16 just seven days before, but Roche had injured his ankle in the semifinals and coach Norm Sloan ordered the Wolfpack to stall to force the Gamecocks out of a 2-1-2 zone, forcing one overtime period and then another.
With time running out in the second overtime, Cremins and NC State’s Ed Leftwich collided as Cremins received a pass from Roche at midcourt. Leftwich stole the ball and scored the decisive basket, preventing the nation’s No. 3-ranked team from playing in the NCAA Tournament. Fans in South Carolina still insist that Cremins was fouled, a claim he won’t dispute.
“There was contact,” he said.
Stories passed down that Cremins’ wrist was sprained on the play aren’t quite true, though a finger was dislocated.
“I have a tape of that game, and I just can’t watch it,” Cremins said. “One time, Tommy Owens and I tried to watch it. As it got toward the game, I could see that Tommy was getting nauseated. And I was getting nauseated. I’ve never been able to watch that game or that play. I just can’t.”
For Cremins, perhaps, there always will be unfinished business.
The College of Charleston job is different from all the others he has taken. This isn’t the rebuilding project like those 23-loss teams that he took over at Appalachian and Tech. Rather, this is a program that in just 15 Division I seasons had become so accustomed to 20-win seasons under another popular New Yorker, John Kresse (including an 1993 upset over a Georgia Tech team that had just upset No. 1 Duke), the school fired Herrion after its win total dipped into the teens and his relationship with boosters reportedly grew chillier. College of Charleston also recently made a commitment to building a $36 million, 5,000-seat arena by the 2008-09 season.
Cremins is different, too. He’s no longer the unknown who took the SoCon and ACC by storm. He likes to say that Charlestonians treat him like he’s “Johnny Wooden.”
Some of his recruiting contacts are gone, and he noticed that his body was more tired than it used to be following the summer recruiting period. And, certainly, recruiting to College of Charleston isn’t as easy as Georgia Tech. Cremins made the mistake of moaning to fellow Southern Conference coaches that he had lost recruits to both Georgia and South Carolina. Halston Lane was headed to Appalachian before Cremins and Georgia Tech got involved, Fancher reminded him. Davidson was in on Matt Harping, Bob McKillop pointed out, before Cremins swooped in and Harpring became an All-American at Tech.
“It came right back at me,” Cremins said with a sheepish smile. “It was a quick reality check.”
Cremins is also a head coach for the first time in South Carolina, which has its points both good and bad. Some fans there still recall his playing days as a Gamecock, but Cremins concedes, “They definitely remember me for having coached there for 46 hours.”
Cremins has been back to his old school twice since famously reversing course on March 26, 1993. He was there for the final game at the Carolina Coliseum, and he was booed on another occasion when Eddie Fogler, the beneficiary of Cremins’ change of heart, had him introduced to the crowd. Cremins will return again this month, Dec. 5, when the Cougars play at the Colonial Center. Cremins and Gamecock coach Dave Odom considered for a couple of days whether to go through with the previously scheduled game, then decided to face that fire once again in an even more intense way.
“Who cares?” Cremins shrugged, unconvincingly.
Bobby Cremins cares more than his easygoing manner lets on. He cares enough about the game to come back again to a school where they will travel to games by bus rather than by charter plane, where he has no director of operations or even his own secretary to pick up the telephone. He cares enough to give up golf for all but one round over the past four months. He cares enough to put up again with 20-year-olds who test him and that nagging feeling that he’s behind all those other programs whose halfcourt offenses were put in place long before his.
Bobby Cremins cares enough to return to the game, happy in the knowledge that he’s giving up his days at the beach.
