On March 14, 1999, just after John Chaney had spoken to his team, Ron Rollerson knew. This one just felt different.
They were in Boston for their Second Round NCAA Tournament matchup against a Bob Huggins-coached Cincinnati team featuring Kenyon Martin, Pete Mickeal and Melvin Levett. The third-seeded Bearcats were an athletic group that appeared poised to end the sixth-seeded Owls’ season. After all, Cincinnati had bounced Temple from the dance in both 1995 and 1996.
But Rollerson knew immediately after the coach spoke that Cincinnati wasn’t going to make it three in a row.
“Everyone from the managers, to the coaches, to the players was ready to lace our sneakers up and go to battle for Coach,” Rollerson said.
The energized Owls played suffocating defense in their 64-54 win, with the Chaney matchup zone holding the Bearcats to just 18 first-half points.
When Chaney passed away on January 29 at the age of 89, the memories and anecdotes such as those started flooding back in Rollerson’s mind.
Rollerson, who grew up in Pennsauken, New Jersey, spent four years under Chaney’s guidance, going from a reserve as a freshman and sophomore to a starter alongside Kevin Lyde in Temple’s frontcourt as an upperclassman. The 6-foot-10 big man - blessed with a soft touch at the rim - was a fan favorite as a collegian, finishing with 334 career points, 402 rebounds and 99 blocks. A strong rim protector when he was on the floor, he ranked in the top 12 in the Atlantic 10 in blocks in his final three seasons on North Broad Street, despite never averaging more than 20 minutes a game in a single season.
Much of Chaney’s lessons and words have stuck with him in the 19 years since, even as Rollerson has faced some major medical issues in recent years.
Here are some excerpts from OwlScoop.com’s exclusive interview with Rollerson.
Rollerson on Chaney’s pregame speech before playing Cincinnati in the Second Round of the 1999 NCAA Tournament
“He could sense that maybe we weren't as confident in ourselves as we needed to be. So, I mean, not that we doubted our abilities, but Coach just always had ways of giving us speeches. I just remember him coming in there saying, he started his speech saying, ‘When the man is determined, nothing can stop him.’ He always pulled things from a book. I believe it was a book or something that he used to haul with him. What manner of man are you? It was just the way that he could. … just how his words were so prophetic at that time. When we huddled up and Coach just said, ‘I love you guys. And regardless of what happens, I love you guys.’ We could see the tears almost coming out of his face beforehand.
“Everybody wanted to be a part of bringing Coach something that he'd worked and dreamed so hard for. We knew that at the time, him being 67, that it wasn't going to be a whole lot more opportunities. So we knew that day that we weren't going to let him down, as far as getting to the next round of the Sweet 16.”
Rollerson’s funniest John Chaney story:
“My best, funny John Chaney story? I guess that's printable? There's so many.
“I remember we had a practice one day, I think it might have been my freshman year. I was shooting. I think we were shooting free throws, like in between doing certain drills. We’re shooting free throws, and Coach was just, I'm shooting and he's hearing like this flicker when I would shoot. And so he comes over to me and was just like, ‘What's on your hands?’ And at that time sometimes I would get manicures and sometimes I would let my nails grow long. He noticed that I had long nails, and he's looking at my hands and he's like, ‘What the hell is this?’
“And then he starts telling this story about how Terence Stansbury used to let his nails grow long and, ‘How the hell are you going to play basketball with nails like this?’ So then he gets into joking with me and I guess he made like a comedic session about it. And then he says something like, ‘So, for your misdoings, I have a reward for you.’ And I'm thinking it’s going to be a joke. I think he was going to give me something that was funny, that everybody is going to laugh about. He was like, ‘You get the honor of running the bleachers for the rest of practice.’ I was like, ‘Huh?’‘ ‘You get the honor of running the stairs.’
“So I'm thinking he's joking, but he's not. So I ended up having to go up to the top of McGonigle for the next half an hour or 45 minutes of practice; I'm running up and down the stairs. And sure enough, I never let my nails grow long again.”
Rollerson on when Chaney called a practice after losing to Penn State in December 2000:
“We had just lost to Penn State and it seemed like we didn't know what direction the season was going to go in. We had lost Penn State on the road, so that's the game where you don't have to fly to. You can drive, you could bus back, because of the distance. So we lose to them down the stretch, and we had already had multiple guys that already [left] the team. We were in disarray and at this point, mind you. We were getting to the point where we were so short on bodies, even early in the season, that we had managers walking to practice, just to make the 10 guys up.
“So we lose Penn State, and we're on our way back and he has [director of basketball operations] John Disangro call whoever oversees the Liacouras Center, that has the keys to open it up. So he calls and he issues a practice at one in the morning when we get back. We're thinking that we're going to have practice the next day. So we actually had to go straight to practice and lace ‘em up. It wasn't really an intense practice, but we had to actually go practice in the middle of the night after we had just lost, when we got back from a two-and-a-half hour, three-hour bus ride.
“And I just remember, we hated it, we didn't want to have to do it. But it was little things like that that he did that would keep us in line. Like, every year he would make sure that we would practice, if only for shooting and walking through stuff. We always had to practice on New Year’s. Because he didn't want anybody out here celebrating, getting into riff raff on New Year’s Eve. So we would always have practices on New Year’s Eve going into midnight. Everybody else was someone toasting, counting during the countdown, and we're walking through plays at midnight.”
Rollerson on how Chaney’s impact helped him get through major medical issues in recent years, including an aortic aneurysm and a resulting leg amputation:
“I guess his impact on me was just never giving up. The race is never complete. It's never over until you're gone. He was a visionary. So, he made sure that I always kept my eyes on the future and always would be ready for tomorrow. He didn't really like surprises. So what I took from him, in my life, as I left Temple, was to always be prepared, because preparation was big for him. I think that was one of the biggest things I learned from him. That, and Coach was big on time, always being on time. He was rough on you if you was ever late to practice or to a film session or something like that. That's what he would drill you about. Being on time and just being prepared. Preparation, mentally, as well as physically. That's one thing that I always took with him.
“He would always remind me that ‘You are part of the sixth-winningest program.’ And even when I went through my medical troubles a couple years ago, he reached out to me in the hospital. He always reminded me of, ‘You’re part of something special, being at Temple. And everybody can't play here, everybody can't make it through this. So, you got to just remember that you were built different, being a part of this.’ So it was just little stuff like that that I carried with me through life.”
Rollerson when Chaney repeatedly tried to reach him when he was in the hospital in 2016:
“Well, even though Coach was older, he didn't change. When I was in the hospital bed and he had called me, I had missed about three of his calls, because I was in and out of sleep or whatever. I just missed his calls. So when I finally was able to catch his call, first thing he did was instantly start grilling me up about my answering machine being off. He would always go into redirecting me. Like, ‘Ron, I'm trying to reach you. Your phone was off. You have to have your answering machine on.’ He'd just start going into a rant. And then he transitioned over to how I was doing, and let me know that him and his wife were having some health issues, but they're still plugging away here, still feeling pretty good, even though he was having some medical issues. His legs were getting a little bit weaker and he couldn’t walk as much, and things of that nature. But he had reached out to me pretty early on when he heard about what happened.
“Because as hard as he was on us, he took things to heart when things happened to his players. When I saw him at Mik Kilgore’s funeral, he took that very, very hard. That was tough for him, at his age. So, you had to be around him to know, to understand him completely. He was a very kind-hearted and giving person.”
Rollerson on Chaney’s legacy:
“Coach would often say that he just wanted to be remembered as somebody who cared, and more than anything, that's what he'll be remembered for -- somebody who cared. [Putting things] into perspective, he came up in time during the Jim Crow Era, where as a black man, he was told things he couldn't do. So for him, having the ability to take kids from the inner city and giving them a free education was an opportunity to do better for themselves and their families. It meant so much more to him than it did for us, because we were not denied some of the things that he was denied. So he took a lot of pride in knowing that he was giving people the opportunity to get a free education, something that so many people from his time, probably in the South, were not exposed to. So I think his legacy will be remembered as someone who cared, who cared about his players, but he was definitely a whole lot more to that.
“You have to take into perspective what his eyes witnessed. He was born in January of 1932, he moved up here at 14. So what he saw coming up, he had more than every reason to let race dictate who he was. But if you talked to him, the most influential people in his life, were a lot of people that did not resemble him - his high school coach [Sam Browne], Harry Litwack, [Peter] Liacouras, Jim Maloney. Four people who probably had some of the most influence in his life resembled people that wanted to kill him at one time.
“The average person doesn't forget that, nor do they forgive. So for him in his 89 years to have that kind of humility, is something that's rare. Because like I said, those individuals I've named, he often always glorified, even going back to his Hall of Fame enshrinement speech. Those were people that meant so much and inspired him. He took pride in knowing what Harry Litwack stood for, who started everything, basically. And then Mr. Liacouras took a chance on him and as his high school coach was so influential and everybody knows in the Temple community that Jim Maloney was his shadow, till he passed away. So these were people that meant so much to him, and he had every reason to never want to give his heart to other races, based on what he saw and experienced growing up. And it probably wasn't much better in South Philadelphia [where Chaney moved to as a teenager in 1946] in 1950, either.
Front page photo courtesy of Temple Athletics
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