Ex-NBA star designs winning formula as art-college basketball coach
By Erik Brady
USA Today
SAVANNAH, Ga. — Marcus Ross is almost certainly the only college basketball player in the country producing a documentary about his coach.
Ross has two advantages in this regard. He attends Savannah College of Art and Design, where he majors in video/film. And his coach is Cazzie Russell.
"When I tell people back home where I play, nobody has ever heard of it," said Ross, laughing. "But when I tell them who my coach is, they can't believe it. 'Everybody' has heard of him."
Well, if not everybody, at least every hoops fan of a certain age. Russell, 57, was the first pick in the NBA draft 35 years ago. He led Michigan to two Final Fours in the mid-1960s and played a dozen pro seasons for four NBA teams, most notably the New York Knicks.
It is a long way from New York to the old South, from the Final Four to Division III, from the bright lights of Broadway to the cobblestone streets of Savannah. But it is not such a long way from athletics to the arts, ostensibly disparate disciplines that have much more in common than you might suppose.
Russell will say he did not see the connection when he played. But now he lives it every day. At Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), artists are athletes, basketball is ballet and Cazzie is the choreographer.
Russell rejects the ancient libel that aesthetes can't be athletes. He makes this point professorially — gracefully easing his 6-foot-5 form into a classroom desk made for someone smaller — by pointing to two placards posted on a blackboard. One lists Elements of Design: line, space, texture, movement, space and form. The other lists Principles of Design: variety, rhythm, repetition, balance and compositional unity.
"All of these things apply to basketball every bit as much as design," Russell said. "Practice is all about repetition. Shooting is all about balance. Teamwork is all about compositional unity."
Russell smiles serenely as he speaks, as if he has happened upon the game's inner meaning by chance. "Basketball is all about rhythm and movement, space and form," he said. "It's all there. Just watch the game. It's all there to see."
His team is a collection of illustrators, designers and videophiles; last season's point guard, since graduated, designs women's evening wear. But can they play? The Bees were 8-3 on Dec. 17. They earned invitations to the Division III NCAA tournament in the past two seasons.
"A lot of folks want to play us because we're an art and design college, and they figure, you know, how good can we really be?" said Russell, in his sixth season at the college. "But you know what? We're pretty good sometimes."
Coaching still an odyssey
Savannah College of Art and Design opened with one building and 71 students in 1979, a year after Russell retired from the NBA. Today the college has about 5,400 students and more than 40 buildings, most in Savannah's historic district, where the college is a leader in restoring old buildings, many for its own use.
But the Bees have no hive — neither a gym nor a conference to call home. They practice at the Salvation Army and play most games on the road. This season they will play 22 away games and three "at home" at Savannah Civic Center, which is largely booked with other things in December, the month when potential opponents play many nonconference games.
"We want a home and a conference," Russell said. "We're working for those things. But for now we have to win on the road, and that's OK, too. The NCAA (tournament selection committee) gives us credit for winning so many road games."
Russell said he hoped to coach in the big time, just as he had played in it. He was an assistant for two years in the NBA under Mike Fratello in Atlanta. He was a head coach for nine years in the Continental Basketball Association, since defunct but then a proving ground for NBA coaches.
Russell never got the call. He was coaching a high school team in Columbus, Ohio, six years ago when a different call came. Richard Rowan, then SCAD president, had seen a where-are-they-now feature of Russell on CNN. How would the old pro like to coach an art school in Savannah?
Rowan had designs on the big time himself. "He used to say he was going to make SCAD the UCLA of the East," Russell recalled. Rowan also hired Luis Tiant, the former Boston Red Sox pitcher, to coach the Bees' baseball team.
But Rowan left the school two years ago. He had been one of its founders with his wife, Paula, and her parents. She became president; now, remarried, she is Paula Wallace. Jud Damon, the athletic director she hired, fired Tiant. Campus rumors had it that Wallace would dismantle her former husband's sports program.
"I don't know where that came from," Wallace said. She said students tell her they want sports, and she wants to give them what they want. Now she attends many of the athletic department's events.
"Cazzie is an athletic director's dream," Damon said. "He has a concern for his players' academic needs, and that is paramount here."
Living up to his name
Ross, a 6-foot-4 senior forward, will do that documentary on his coach as his project for next semester. "I'm just getting started," Ross said. "It will be nice to get him talking on the old days. He doesn't say much about it to us."
That's because Russell looks forward, not back. He wears the NBA championship ring he won in 1970 with the Knicks, but there are no other reminders of a glorious past in his office. That's what's nice about working with college kids: every day is about the future.
Cazzie Lee Russell Jr. grew up in Chicago, and played in the NBA for the Knicks, Golden State Warriors, Los Angeles Lakers and Chicago Bulls. The man could shoot the lights out.
"I tell the team all the time," he said, "if they're shooting bad, it reflects on me."
And so he gets out on the floor and shows them how it's done. Keep your eye on the basket. Release at the apex of your jump. Keep your left hand solid. Give the ball rotation with your right hand. Follow through. Do it again. And again. Always the same way.
Mysteries still unfolding
It is not so easy getting on the floor anymore. Russell had knee replacement surgery a few months ago, on top of hip replacement surgery a few years ago.
He met Myrna, his wife of 15 years, in the 1980s. She laughed at his jokes. They hadn't known each other in their New York days, when he played for the Knicks and she danced on Broadway in such shows as "West Side Story" and "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum."
Crowds numbered in the thousands when he played. Now they number in the tens. He's at peace with that. Russell has the ethos of an artist now. It is not the masterpiece that matters. It is the work.
