Long Beach State’s coach got fired. Then he stayed for the NCAA tournament.
SALT LAKE CITY - Is reality humorless enough that it would go ahead and extinguish the story of the coach who got fired March 11 but then coached his team into the NCAA men’s basketball tournament March 16, arrived at March Madness here and likened his plight to the “Seinfeld” episode in which George tries to get fired but can’t?
Yeah.
Barely had the Mountain time zone gotten into Thursday afternoon when reality went ahead and tapped 62-year-old Dan Monson on the shoulder. It had come in the waves of Arizona talent that lipped through Long Beach State until it tore over it, 17-2 to start the second half and 85-65 to wrap it up. For an Arizona team more capable of the picturesque, lobs for jams went from Caleb Love to Keshad Johnson and from Kylan Boswell to Oumar Ballo.
Then the seconds drained and Monson hugged an Arizona coach who is the same man he once sort of hired at Gonzaga in the late 1990s, and Monson slowly walked off the corner of the Delta Center court to applause from Long Beach State’s smallish gathering of fans. He blew kisses - one with the right hand, one with the left, one with the right. He called himself “the luckiest guy in this tournament and the world to do what I got to do today with these guys [players].”
It ended five days after it had gotten all spicy when the Beach won the Big West tournament near Las Vegas with Monson allowed to finish out his 17th season and one day after Monson had taken that interview dais to practice the dying art of coaching humor. He sat down and said, “I don’t have to answer anything I don’t want to because I’m working for free today,” and the listeners giggled. He told of showing game film to his sad players the day of the firing, pointing out poor plays and saying, “These are the kinds of plays that get a coach fired,” whereupon those listeners guffawed. And he told of one of the more admirably told turns of wit out there.
On Tuesday night, the Monsons and the Gonzaga Fews and the Arizona Lloyds, all bonded since the men were Gonzaga coaches, met for pizza here.
The Monsons ran late.
Tommy Lloyd feigned protest.
“I said, ‘Tommy, we’ve been putting in that Princeton offense for three days,’” Monson said.
Given Arizona’s 59-55 loss to Princeton to start last year’s Madness, that was some cold, cold language.
By Thursday, of course, love reigned, and so, “I told Tommy at the end there, if it’s got to be my last game, at least it’s with family.”
As the gushers of March love go, Long Beach State guard Jadon Jones already had wrung a mighty string. “If you saw the locker room,” he said, “you would see a family,” and while that’s a common March chorus, here came the rest: “We love each other. We love this game. We love Coach. We love the media team. We love the janitors. We love the staff. We love the families, Mama Darci [Monson’s wife], Maddox [one of Monson’s players], MicGuire [one of Monson’s graduate assistants], Mollie [Monson’s daughter], McKenna [Monson’s daughter]. We love everyone. All the wives, everyone who has been on this ride with us, they have been absolutely complementary to what we’ve been able to achieve.”
All that had a chance to deluge the gauche words of new athletic director Bobby Smitheran, hired in August, after he told the Associated Press: “My belief and hope is that by doing what I did and the timing of it, they would play inspired, and that’s what they did. I’m not trying to pat myself on the back, but it worked.”
If that’s the case, a rehiring next week would achieve creativity.
Monson, of course, has been around the game since last century. Back when Gonzaga had days as an enchanting national stranger, he steered it to the 1999 Elite Eight and a real scrap there with eventual champion Connecticut. Then he left for Minnesota because that achieved logic at that time. He stayed there eight years before a November 2007 exit that left him glum, and he went to Long Beach State and took on one of those jobs the masses don’t notice. He became the school’s most winning coach, reached the 2012 NCAA tournament, won four Big West regular season titles and won four coach of the year awards. Then he and his family lost five straight games to close the regular season and slip to 18-14 and 10-10 in the league, and then they hobbled into the conference tournament as a No. 4 seed with a fired coach.
Then they beat No. 5 UC Riverside, 86-67.
Then they beat No. 1 UC Irvine, 83-79.
Then they beat No. 2 UC Davis, 74-70.
That got them to here and to the ticklish situation that enabled Monson to say: “It was a great ride. I knew the car was leased. I mean, they wanted the keys back. I’m not insured this week, but I still get to drive it.”
Then Monson came out to coach one last time that might not end up as one last time, and the teams lined up for the national anthem and then approached each other to hug, and Monson greeted Lloyd while the PA played Aloe Blacc singing, “So wake me up when it’s all over.”
Then the game churned, and Monson slammed his hand on the scorer’s table thrice after a poor shot choice. The Beach went ahead 22-17, but the three-point shots started tilting until Arizona wound up on 13 for 35 (37.1 percent) and Long Beach State on 3 for 17 (17.6). Arizona made its run, and the thing distilled to filler - except that Monson kept instructing players.
Then the coach who got fired but couldn’t get fired left, filing out past a Dayton team eager to join the churn for the next game, and Lloyd spoke warmly of Monson while saying he had wanted to kick his rear end. Jones said: “But it’s not truly a goodbye. Like I said, we’re a family. That’s never going to go away because love is unconditional. Doesn’t matter how far he goes, I go, the other 13 guys in the locker room go. It’s not goodbye, it’s just more of a ‘I’ll see you when I see you.’ ‘To be continued,’ as he said in the locker room.”
Monson’s family stood on the side listening, and then he wound up concluding: “Not quite in a joking mood. Yesterday was more fun.”
There’s that damned old reality, and soon everyone - players in black sweats with yellow lettering “The Beach,” coaches, managers, family - walked out of the locker room down the hall, and a security guard gave kind words to Monson, and the coach and Darci headed out of yet another arena to three buses and boarded the one marked “LB#1,” after 17 years to one giddy week and one last bus.
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