Jim Harrick one man with two tales

There were sins, followed by shame. Harrick is thought of only as a leper in many parts of the state because he resigned following revelations of major NCAA violations within the basketball program in 2003. It has taken seven years for the program to look whole again after the sanctions and disgrace.

Jim Harrick seems like one man with two tales. How does he remedy his legacy as a college coach, as the Georgia coach?

“I had a marvelous, marvelous run,” Harrick said in a telephone interview from his home in southern California. “We won a national championship at UCLA, and we won the league five of the first seven years I was at Pepperdine. We came within an inch of going to the Final Four when I coached Rhode Island.

“I’m not frustrated. I’ve got great peace of mind.”

Although one person still draws his ire: UGA president Michael Adams.

“They can say what they want, but I have a letter from the NCAA that says I had nothing to do with the violations at Georgia,” Harrick said. “The thing I am bitter about is how the president of the University of Georgia treated my son. I’ll never get over that. He’ll go to hell for how he treated him.”

Harrick, 71, left UGA in 2003 and scouted briefly for the Denver Nuggets of the NBA. He coached the Bakersfield Jam of the NBA Development League, but gave up the Jam job when his wife, Sally, became ill. She died last November.

Harrick may have become the greatest coach in the history of Georgia basketball if not for the calamity that struck in 2003. A former player, Tony Cole, produced a Western Union receipt for $300 with the signature of Harrick’s son, Jim Harrick Jr., an assistant coach on his father’s staff. Giving a player money was a clear NCAA violation.

There also was the charge of academic fraud for a physical-education class taught by Harrick Jr., which Cole said he never attended and still received an ‘A’. The final exam included the infamous question, “How many points does a three-point field goal account for in a basketball game? That brain teaser made UGA the butt of jokes nationwide.

Harrick went down in flames. Adams pulled the Bulldogs out of the SEC tournament and said the school would not accept an NCAA tournament bid. He fired Jim Harrick Jr., and Harrick resigned under pressure.

“The school overreacted in a huge way,” said Dodd Rentz, an Athens business owner and Harrick supporter. “It was mostly his son, but whether it was just Junior or not, we got a life sentence for a busted taillight. It was a P.E. class and $300. You are going to yank those kids out of the tournament for that? How many easy P.E. classes are there around in the country in college athletics? Plenty.

“People made this sound like he set up that P.E. course so his guys could get an easy ‘A’. It wasn’t true. They begged Junior to teach that class. He didn’t want to teach it.”

Adams would not comment for this article. The athletics director when Harrick was hired, Vince Dooley, said that in hindsight, the school did the right thing in firing Harrick's son and pulling the team from the SEC and NCAA tournaments. Harrick was suspended and resigned, and Dooley thought that was appropriate as the school did more investigating.

“I will say this, I don’t think we ever had a better basketball coach or a better coach’s wife than Sally,” Dooley said. “It was unfortunate what happened, a real tragedy.”

But ...

What has been obscured by his humiliation is that Harrick could coach from the sidelines with the best in college basketball. His high-post offense could get an open 15-footer against a defense specifically geared to stop that 15-foot jump shot.

Harrick dissected opponents on film, and his practices were thoughtful and organized, just like Wooden’s. He was so polished with his pitch as a recruiter that he swears former South Gwinnett High star Louis Williams was going to come to Athens for a year, instead of skipping immediately to the NBA, which he did.

How good was Harrick? Georgia was 10-20 in Harrick’s first season, a transition from the failed experiment of Ron Jirsa, the successor to Tubby Smith. The Bulldogs were 16-15 in Harrick’s second season, then 22-10 and 19-8 (67-53 overall, 33-31 in the SEC). Turnarounds like that are not accidental. He won with in-state Georgia kids, not a cavalcade of high school All-Americans.

“We might be playing Kentucky in Rupp [Arena] or Florida down in Gainesville and everything is going haywire, fans are shaking the floor, and we come back to the bench for a timeout wondering what we’re going to do, and Coach Harrick would pull us in close and have this dinner-table voice,” said Jonas Hayes, a forward.

“He would say calmly, ‘Guys, you gotta have poise. Listen to me and I’ll get you through this; we’re going to win this game.’ He got us through it. We won those games.

“He was a remarkable coach. I’ll have a relationship with him forever.”

Harrick won a national championship at UCLA in 1995 and took four different programs to the NCAA tournament (Pepperdine, UCLA, Rhode Island, Georgia). Rhode Island, shockingly, came within two points of going to the Final Four in 1998.

Wooden made Harrick the director of his basketball camp when Harrick was a high school basketball coach in Los Angeles. Wooden’s pet phrase when his players erred was, “Goodness gracious, sakes alive.” The same words echoed through Stegeman Coliseum during UGA practices under Harrick.

But ...

There is a legion of people who still believe that before there was John Calipari, who has been involved in controversy at three schools (Massachusetts, Memphis and now Kentucky), there was Harrick, who was involved in controversy at three schools. In addition to the trouble at Georgia, Harrick was forced to resign at UCLA for allegedly lying about expense reports. There was the cloud of an investigation at Rhode Island when he coached there.

“He never should have resigned at the University of Georgia. They had nothing on him. He could have sued them if they fired him,” said Dr. Allan Hixon, an athletics department dentist for 30 years and a friend of Harrick's. “It was a shame. The year this happened would have been the third year in a row we would have gone to the NCAA tournament, the first time in history that happened. He was, overall, the best basketball coach ever at the University of Georgia.”

There was money given to Cole, but there also was money given to support staff at Stegeman Coliseum. When Harrick’s summer basketball camp for youth was over and bills had been paid, Harrick handed out bonuses, thousands of dollars, to UGA staff.

“Everybody got a little bit of something, that’s true,” Harrick said. “I never kept any of the money for myself. We had that thing going with 1,000 to 1,400 campers. You wanted to do something for the people who helped you throughout the year.”

Wooden would send Harrick autographed copies of Wooden’s highly acclaimed “The Pyramid of Success” so the Georgia coach could give them out to staff who worked on the scorer’s table at UGA games.

Money flowed in all directions. Scalping was unheard of at Georgia basketball games until 2003, when tickets went for $50 more than face value for late-season games against Kentucky and Florida.

“He was embedded in the state. He had it rolling, and many people in Athens loved Jim Harrick,” said Brian Fortson, a marketing representative who lives in Athens and is a friend of Harrick's. “I used to go to his practices and watch how he taught his guys. There were players who said they hated practice, but they loved Coach Harrick’s practice.

“Coach was not a shady character. Some of the problems were more his son, I think.”

It all came tumbling down when Cole went to ESPN with his Western Union receipt. Harrick Jr. essentially was banned from college coaching for seven years.

Harrick Jr. lives in southern California and is in the publishing business with his wife.

The elder Harrick misses coaching. He did not want to leave college coaching, but he had to, and when his wife became ill, he had to leave professional coaching, too.

“You can beat cocaine addiction and you can beat alcoholism, but you can’t beat coaching. It’s in your blood, and you would like to do it until you die,” Harrick said. “Yes, I miss it. Absolutely. It’s what I did for 45-50 years.”