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Oral History Center University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California Michael Montgomery Michael Montgomery: Oral Histories on the Management of Intercollegiate Athletics at UC Berkeley: 1960 - 2014 Interviews conducted by John Cummins in 2013 Copyright © 2017 by The Regents of the University of California ii Since 1954 the Oral History Center of the Bancroft Library, formerly the Regional Oral History Office, has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral History is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound with photographs and illustrative materials and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ********************************* All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and Mike Montgomery dated March 8, 2015. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Excerpts up to 1000 words from this interview may be quoted for publication without seeking permission as long as the use is non-commercial and properly cited. Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to The Bancroft Library, Head of Public Services, Mail Code 6000, University of California, Berkeley, 94720-6000, and should follow instructions available online at http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/collections/cite.html It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Mike Montgomery “Michael Montgomery: Oral Histories on the Management of Intercollegiate Athletics at UC Berkeley: 1960 – 2014” conducted by John Cummins in 2013 Oral History Center of the Bancroft Library, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2017. iii Table of Contents—Michael Montgomery Interview 1: July 16, 2013 Audio File 1 1 Childhood in Long Beach — Family of athletes — UCLA games and Henry “Red” Sanders — Playing high school football and basketball — Attending Cal State Long Beach as a student-athlete — Deciding on career as a coach — Socializing and fraternity life — Obtaining teaching credential — Joining the Coast Guard Academy and coaching Division III athletes — Graduate Assistant at Colorado State University — “Producing winning teams” — Coaching at the Citadel, a military college in South Carolina — Les Robinson — Part-time coach at University of Florida — Working at Boise State and moving to Missoula — Head coach at the University of Montana — Derrick Pope and Larry Krystkowiak — Fundraising and press responsibilities as head coach — Meeting wife, Sarah — Balancing work and family life — Coaching philosophy — Memories of Coach John Wooden — Head coach of Stanford — Working alongside athletic director, Andy Geiger Interview 2: July 22, 2013 Audio File 2 28 Replacing Tom Davis — End of .500 seasons and changing the perception Stanford basketball — Emphasis on academically qualified student-athletes — Differences between coaching experiences at Montana and Stanford — Addressing “zero NCAA violations” at Stanford — “People try to compare [Stanford], and you just can’t” — Retiring from Stanford — Coaching the Golden State Warriors at the NBA — Difference between NBA and college basketball — Jason Collins — Becoming head coach at Cal — Winning Cal’s fist conference championship in 50 years — Future of big-time intercollegiate athletics — Effects of Title IX — Privatization of public institutions — “Well-run athletic department is a tremendous asset to a university” [End of Interview] 1 Interview 1: July 16, 2013 Audio File 1 01-00:00:00 Cummins: Okay, this is July 16, 2013. This is the first interview with Coach Mike Montgomery, head basketball coach at Cal, on the Intercollegiate Athletics Project. Is it okay if I just call you Mike during the [interview]? 01-00:00:19 Montgomery: Sure. 01-00:00:20 Cummins: Let’s just begin with the role that sports played in your life growing up, and we’ll go from there. 01-00:00:32 Montgomery: All right—so when I was born, the third of three boys, two older brothers, my dad was at UCLA. He was assistant football and assistant basketball coach at the time. And of course I didn’t know that, but— 01-00:00:52 Cummins: And that was ’47? 01-00:00:53 Montgomery: Nineteen forty-seven. And then about that time I think coach John Wooden came to UCLA, and then they had a football coaching change and I think that Henry “Red” Sanders came. And so then my dad was no longer an assistant coach, but he’d finished his PhD and taught at UCLA when I was real young. And then he took the athletic director’s job and the chairman of the Physical Education Department job at Long Beach State in 1951. Of course Long Beach State, which was called the 49ers—of course that’s appropriate being in California, but it was also when the school was founded. So he was the first athletic director and chairman of the PE Department to a campus that was bungalows and just very, very small. So we moved to Long Beach. I guess the thing is in our household—athletics was really kind of all you knew. We all played. My dad, it turned out, was a four-year letterman in football, four-year letterman in basketball, and a three-year letterman in rugby at UCLA. Whereas he didn’t talk about that, that was the kind of background. So my dad would—we’d go out when there was a track meet and it had rained, and he’d have a flamethrower out there and he’d be drying the track. I was the ball boy in football. Probably when I was about nine years old I’d pedal my bike out to campus and be there for the two-a-day workouts in the fall, and tote the balls out and catch balls for the coaches and give them to them, and run down tackling dummies and all those kinds of things. So it was sort of all I knew, and you love the energy, you love being around the athletes. An interesting rule in our house was that you couldn’t have television on before five o’clock unless it was sports. So if there was a game on that— 2 obviously my dad would want to watch it, we could have television on prior to five o’clock. So that set the tone, I think, for what was important in our household. I can remember Saturday morning football, ten a.m. waking up and Lindsey Nelson was doing the Notre Dame Big Ten football games. That just became something that was part of the household. You remember those things to this day. My brothers were both very good athletes, and one was six years, one was four years older, and obviously, like most younger brothers, you looked up to them. One of the ways it seemed like in our household that if—and this was probably more perception than reality—was that if you wanted to gain recognition you needed to excel or do well in athletics. So you were constantly striving to try to be good at something. My dad was fairly stoic when it came to that. He wasn’t real impressed with basics. So when you’d rush home with some stories of grandeur he would look and be fairly non- impressed with those kinds of things. So it was hard to get him to say, “Hey, great job,” or that type of thing. He wasn’t a gushing parent. So that kind of set the tone for everything. The neighborhood that I grew up in was very middle class. Long Beach was very middle class. All of the African American athletes were in the Long Beach Poly district, and they dominated in the city of Long Beach and really in Southern California. The Lakewood, Millikan, Wilson, and down—we were all very, very middle class, primarily white schools that were just okay in sports. At any rate, I always struggled to try to be good. It was important; I wanted to succeed. I was a year young for my class and I was small and immature, so I never quite got to where you’d like to get. But I always looked up to and admired the best athletes. We used to go up to UCLA games every now and again, football games primarily, and go to the Coliseum, and the grandeur of the whole thing. I can remember UCLA running out in the serpentine huddle with Henry “Red” Sanders. I can name all kinds of guys, both football and basketball, that I watched and all those kinds of things. So it just was part of the whole culture. In some ways, both the family—my brothers and I—look back and wonder, because my brothers were very good in school. I wasn’t so good, perhaps because of motivation. But what would have been different, had the inclination been toward the arts or business or something else? But it just wasn’t.

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