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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

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.

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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.

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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]

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. In our neighborhood there was not a lot of highly successful businessmen. It was pretty much a working-class group. There were firemen, my friends’ parents were firemen and mostly teachers, which was what Long Beach State was. It was a teacher education school.

So from the very get-go I was going to be a PE major and I was going to be a coach. Perhaps because of ignorance, from not knowing what else to do or be. Both my brothers were PE majors, both started off in education and both ended up in education and both ended up coaching, one at a junior college in

Aptos, Cabrillo Junior College, and the other one was the head women’s volleyball coach at San Jose State upon retirement. So it just seemed like where we were headed and what we were going to do. I remember my parents hoping or thinking I might do something different, although I had the worst grades of the three, but when they asked me what I was going to do it was like—well, I’m going to be a coach. I’m going to be a PE major, what else?, type thing. It was almost from ignorance as much as anything else. It wasn’t really till I got to—probably Stanford, that I recognized there was a whole big world out there. There was a lot of different things that you might have been able to do. Certainly with the money that people have made in the Silicon Valley, you started to realize that wow, you might have been able to do something else. But certainly, growing up there was pretty much no question. And I think it was not by design. It was just more of the way the culture was in our household as to where you were going to go and what you were going to do.

01-00:08:15 Cummins: What about your mother in that period of time?

01-00:08:20 Montgomery: Well, pretty male-dominated household. Probably a lot of testosterone in terms of trying to be—my brothers used to fight every now and again, not really literally, but they were big, strong and the whole want to be good in football, want to be good in sports type thing. My mom was the manager/facilitator of everything. She ran the household. She made sure everything got done. She was a teacher and she went to UCLA as well. She was nine, almost ten years younger than my dad. But she managed everything and kept everything in order and was the emotional leader in the house, and probably in some ways got the short end of the stick, because we so wanted to be athletic and wanted approval from our dad that we probably didn’t give Mom enough credit for the value that she had in holding the whole house together. [laughing] Unfortunately both of my parents died way younger than they should have, very early seventies, of cancer. So a lot of the things that we should have known about them as we matured and had our own families we didn’t get an opportunity to really know. So that’s unfortunate.

01-00:09:48 Cummins: And when you, thinking back, growing up like you describe—so you had a combination, I would assume, kind of like I did. That whatever sport— whatever season it was, you were playing that sport after school, either through the school program, even in elementary school, high school. Or you just go and you play baseball at the local [park]. Is that what you—

01-00:10:18 Montgomery: Well, that was really one of the things that’s really unfortunate, I think, today. When we were kids we got up, had breakfast. Mom would have oatmeal and we hated [it], but we had oatmeal. Now I love it—but out the door we’d go. The only rule was you needed to be home for dinner. That was about the only

thing that upset my mom, was if you weren’t home for dinner. Because she did put a great meal on the table. But you’d just go. And whether it be, as you say, in elementary school going down to the local—Long Beach had a great summer program for parks and recreation, one of the best recreation programs going. You could go down all day long and spend time at the park, and they had checkers and ping pong and they had afternoon movies. But they also had a softball team, and so you played with your local school and you’d play the other schools, elementary schools, and you had different levels. It was the best. And then we had a park at the corner of—in our particular neighborhood, a grass park which might have been—gosh, I don’t know, it seemed monstrous at the time, but it might have been four acres. But tackle football, over-the-line baseball, sometimes work-up, but you never could get enough guys to play work-up. So you played over-the-line and you’d try to play tackle football. But beyond out at the park, if there wasn’t anything going on I’d go down and just hope kids would show up. I generally was knocking on doors trying to get kids to come play tackle football.

It’s funny how you remember the best athletes. There was one kid that just was better than all the rest of us. He was faster. And in retrospect, and of course everything—now that you get through it you look back and you can understand why. I think he was Portuguese, and I guess they mature more rapidly than others. He could run faster. He was stronger. He probably had more body hair than the rest of us. But he was the best. But then as we got to high school he was still the same size and everybody was starting to catch up to him. But it was—you remember these kids in Little League. You remember the biggest kid on the other team was always the pitcher, he always threw the hardest, and you were scared to death of him. So whenever you played the Douglas Globemasters in Little League, the kid was on the mound. Sure enough he was throwing that thing, and I wanted no part of it. And you talk to other people and that’s always their recollection of the same thing.

So I think things—it just was a great time to be a kid. You could get on your bike. At that time skateboards first started, and you’d take a two-by-four and you’d pound skates at the end. You’d take a skate, divide it, and pound nails and you’d ride the skateboard on the sidewalks. That’s where skateboarding started. I remember that distinctly and was surfing on a balsa wood surfboard down in Ray Bay and it was just—all those things. That’s when those things started.

01-00:13:39 Cummins: Yes. Well, and we’ll get to this later, but that’s exactly—I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but that same great childhood. You have breakfast and you go out the door, and even after dinner you want to go back and play baseball or basketball, whatever it was.

01-00:13:56 Montgomery: Oh yeah, yeah. A lot of great hoop in my backyard, so you’d just go out and you’d shoot baskets. Unfortunately, the electrical wires came in on the one side, so you couldn’t use the whole court, because we had a paddle tennis court in our backyard. But yeah, that was what you did.

01-00:14:16 Cummins: So then in high school did you play, and your brothers, on teams in high school?

01-00:14:22 Montgomery: Well, yeah. They were older. We were never together.

01-00:14:24 Cummins: Yes, right.

01-00:14:25 Montgomery: But I played football. I think all kids should play football one year, boys. I think they should try it. I think it’s a rite of passage, when you first go to high school, just going out and that whole macho thing. So I played football; I played B football. Then it was nine through twelve. I played B football as a tenth grader and I was actually—back then in Long Beach they had exponents, so you were given exponents based on your size, your weight, and your age. And if you were big and if you weighed a lot and you were older, then you got more exponents and you had to play varsity or junior varsity. But then you could play B, which was a level down, which was typically your sophomore sport. They actually had C basketball because it was easier to manage with less kids. I was an E. I was small, I didn’t weigh very much, and I was a year young. So I was out battling with the B football. So I played B football sophomore, junior—I was decent as a junior in B football and played varsity as a senior. But about midway through I said, you know, if I’m going to have any future in anything, or play it, it’s going to be in basketball. So I played C basketball, B basketball, and then varsity basketball, and then went on to Long Beach State.

01-00:15:51 Cummins: Is there anything you recall about your father being an athletic director and running the Physical Education Department? When he came home were there issues that he talked about?

01-00:16:05 Montgomery: Well, there was. That was interesting, because it seemed like Dad was preoccupied all the time. He had a lot of responsibility being both. At one point he did away with the—I think he did away with the athletic director’s job first, because there was—he hired everybody, to start with, in the PE Department and all the coaches. And then as it got bigger I think he gave up the athletic director’s job and stayed chairman of the PE Department for a while. And then really, before I went to Long Beach, I think he’d given that

up and just gone to full professorship and was teaching graduate classes and coaching the golf team.

I remember one time—and I don’t remember the exact circumstances, but all of a sudden Dad was joking around or engaging in conversation, and I said to Mom, “What happened to Dad?” And she said, “Well, he’s no longer an administrator. There’s this whole load,” and so I think that, and probably— this is, you know, you inherit things from your parents that you didn’t really realize, but he held a lot in. When he knew he had a situation that he had to deal with the next day he was—it bothered him. And so he was kind of preoccupied with a lot of the things there, and when he didn’t have to deal with that anymore he was a lot happier with life. I do remember that change specifically. When he was athletic director he had to go to the NCAA meetings, and I remember him packing and wearing a coat and tie, and off he went with the luggage and everything. He wasn’t a big traveler. They weren’t people that got in the airplane and flew around and did things. So he didn’t like that. He really didn’t like to do that very much. I can remember those things specifically, but at the time I wasn’t tuned into why, what, where. We were in our own little world.

01-00:18:15 Cummins: So then you go to Long Beach State. What was that like then? What are your recollections, both as a student and as a player?

01-00:18:27 Montgomery: Well, I had about a 2.7/2.8 in high school. A lot of my better friends were some of the better students. I just never was engaged. I just didn’t—I would come home, I’d go to the gym almost every night and play basketball. I played three-on-three at the local high schools. It just wasn’t—I did enough to get by. So getting into college was going to be a little bit of an issue, although I did get into Long Beach. I don’t know what influence my dad had, but he certainly knew people there. UCLA would have been my dream school, but I one, couldn’t play basketball there, and two, I couldn’t get in with my grade point. So when the freshman coach called and invited me to play on their team of kids coming in, all of whom were scholarships except for me, I was just delighted. It just gave me just a focal point. And so I played in the summer with those guys, got to know them, and actually played very well. I was starting to mature and actually become a decent player. So that was really important to me.

01-00:19:42 Cummins: Just before we go further on that, what about the influence of the coaches in high school? Anything stand out there vis-à-vis either the coaching itself or as a role model for you?

01-00:20:00 Montgomery: No, and again, I think I was probably too immature to really understand what was being said. My high school coach was very religious, so that part didn’t

really fit. And he—we were more young kids growing into our lack of maturity and just not looking at things. And I wasn’t raised in a very religious family. So no, he turned out to be very successful, got a small college job at a religious institution and did well with it. But no, there wasn’t much there. I probably could have gotten more out of that had I been able to figure things out, but in high school I was pretty much just fighting for my life, both socially, academically, and trying to earn playing time on the court. Now, the freshman coach, who ended up being the senior varsity coach in basketball at Long Beach was a tremendous influence, because he was very philosophically sound and we talked a lot about how things should be and attitudes in coaching and how teams are put together.

01-00:21:18 Cummins: And what was his name?

01-00:21:19 Montgomery: Randy [Charles Randall] Sandefur. He’s passed away since. He was very influential, I think, in getting me started, getting me a good opportunity when I was a senior to actually play some. Because if I hadn’t had that chance I don’t know that I would be where I am, because I don’t know that I would have been able to have something to hang my hat on in terms of a player, that I was a player and was able to play with a modicum of success. He also got me involved in playing volleyball. He was the volleyball coach, which was really his first love, and I ended up playing a little bit of volleyball at Long Beach on a club level.

And then my older brother got me involved in rugby, because after his graduation—he was a good football player—all his friends who I knew, they had a rugby team, Long Beach Rugby Club, and he said, “Why don’t you come out and play some rugby with us in the spring.” I did and I loved it. It was just—it was a little bit of what I couldn’t accomplish in football, I could do okay in rugby, because I had good hands and I had finally matured just enough to be not tiny anymore. I loved playing rugby. I had a pretty good experience.

And frankly—I joined a fraternity, which we of course thought was the best group of guys on campus, and probably had, without question, had way too much fun. [laughter] But again, socially that was important to me. I was behind the eight ball coming out of high school and finally had some fun socially, and girlfriends and things. It was just all the things you need growing up that college provided for me.

01-00:23:14 Cummins: And what about your physical education classes and things? Looking back do you see a connection, or not? Did it help you?

01-00:23:30 Montgomery: Well, Long Beach, which was a teacher education school, like most of the state schools, different than Berkeley or UC which have different goals. But it had one of the better physical education programs around and were very good at what they did and had some good coaches, and they put you in front of kids and you’re cadet teaching. They taught you a lot of different sports, put you in class situations where they taught—and I knew these guys a little bit better than most because my dad had hired a lot of them and they’d been to our house for barbecues. There were a lot of things that I probably wasn’t as attentive to as I should have been, but I enjoyed that. And again, I think it was almost just more of the cumulative experience in growing up, allowing yourself to mature, that was a part of that process. I could have gone out of there and gotten a high school physical education job and done fine. I was prepared to do lesson plans and organize a class and all those kinds of things. So that part of it was good. I think like most institutions they prepare you to learn, so that when you would have gone into that situation that’s where you would have learned and become a good teacher or not, depending on what kind of job you did. But I think most schools just prepare you to get a job perhaps, and then you need to go from there.

I think probably what did happen, was the biggest break I ever got, was kind of by accident. [laughing] That’s because in 1968, of course the Vietnam War was raging and there was just a lot of stuff. Growing up in California in the sixties I wasn’t really tuned into the protest movement, but it was certainly all around you. As I recall, George McGovern spoke on campus and there was a lot of turmoil. I think Bobby Kennedy came to campus and then he was assassinated there shortly thereafter. All that stuff subconsciously took its toll. But I had the good fortune of having signed up for the Coast Guard when I was a sophomore, because fraternity brothers of mine were coming out of the Coast Guard Reserves and said hey, that’s a pretty good deal in six months. So I went down and signed up.

And then lo and behold in ’68 I was in graduate school—my goal was to get my master’s degree and my teaching credential by the time I was twenty-two, in my fifth year. That was a little bit of a goal I thought would be pretty good. But then they quit giving graduate deferments, and so I was 1-A physical notice, and then this Coast Guard notice came. So I went into the service anyway, which most would say well, gee, how’s that a break? But long story short, I went into boot camp, went in as a medical hospital corpsman, was going to be stationed at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut, for eight weeks after Navy Corps School in San Diego, to complete my training. And then they probably would have sent me out either to a ship or I would have gone somewhere to be a corpsman.

01-00:26:56 Cummins: For the Coast Guard or the navy?

01-00:26:58 Montgomery: For the Coast Guard. But there wasn’t a corps school specifically for the Coast Guard because it was too small. So I ended up at New London, Connecticut.

Well, through a connection at Long Beach who knew the athletic director there I was able to get out of the eight-week training session after I was done and move down to the athletic department as a trainer, an athletic trainer, because I had a degree in physical education, I’d taken the classes, and now I had this corpsman [training]. So I went down and worked that summer with all the incoming cadets, fixing scrapes as a trainer. And then they hired a new basketball coach, and when he came in I just went up to him and I said, “Hey, I played basketball at Long Beach State. I want to get into coaching. I’d love to help you if there’s any way I could.” Well, I was already in the athletic department, billeted as a trainer, and so he said, “Well, let me see what we can do.”

Well, in the meantime, the two officers that were assigned—the two lieutenants who were assigned as assistant coaches both flaked out and decided they didn’t want to do that anymore. So they didn’t have anybody. So the next thing you know I’m moved out of the training room into physical education, and I’m teaching. Gosh, I taught everything. I taught tennis, I taught volleyball, I taught basketball, I taught racquetball. I filled up the scuba tanks for scuba training. I did everything—and was assistant basketball coach. It was just the two of us with the varsity, and then I got the freshman team. I was just twenty-two/twenty-three.

01-00:28:44 Cummins: And this was in the—

01-00:28:44 Montgomery: At the Coast Guard Academy.

01-00:28:47 Cummins: At the Coast Guard Academy.

01-00:28:47 Montgomery: Right. And so it’s Division III athletics. I’m just twenty-three. What they said though—you can’t live in the barracks. Amen. And you can’t wear your uniform, because we’d just as soon not have the cadets know that you’re enlisted. So I lived in the gym for two months on a bed in an old abandoned office. But I coached his JV team, which was absolutely fantastic. A group of freshman kids that were dedicated, they were disciplined. We weren’t very good, but we ended up winning ten games, losing five or six, and it was the best season they had—and I loved it. I was just—I loved it. It was fabulous. Varsity didn’t do so well, but I actually extended my stay in the Coast Guard to finish the season.

But from there the coach said, “Well, have you ever thought about being a graduate assistant somewhere?” And I said, “What’s that?” And he said,

“Well, you go to school, you get your master’s, and you work in basketball.” I said, “Boy, it sounds good to me.” So I applied, sent letters all over the country to the major conferences and ended up getting an opportunity at Colorado State University, Fort Collins. So I went back home after school, went back to graduate school, Colorado State, where there was just three of us, the head coach, assistant, and myself. The head coach was famous, Jim Williams. The assistant coach, Boyd Grant, ended up being very, very successful at Fresno State and then back at Colorado State. And there was me. So I recruited, I coached, I went to graduate school and had a lot of fun. [laughing] Had it not been for that break I would have been—who knows? So I had the year there. I was still growing up socially. I was still probably having a little too much fun, but it’s still a process. But in that process I had a pretty good basketball mind and was able to do a job, I just needed to continue to grow up socially.

01-00:31:04 Cummins: So talk about that a little bit—about a good basketball mind at that age and your first real coaching experience. What was that like?

01-00:31:18 Montgomery: Well, I had a sense of what was right and wrong, about playing hard and being part of a team, and sharing the ball and what a good teammate was—and all of those things, either from being around it, listening, watching, whatever. Basketball, to me, always just made sense. I actually am pretty good in math. All the aptitude tests that you take, ACT, Graduate Record Exam, entrance for officer training school which I took, I always did very well in math. Maybe it has to do with the logic of math, but it just—it made sense to me. And basketball, in a way, there’s a pretty high correlation to math. You’re talking about angles and triangles and spacing and things of that nature. For some reason it always made sense to me. So that was a part of it. And I don’t know, it just seemed to click for me, how things should be or what a guy should be as far as eliminating the nonsense and being a good team guy. That’s just it. I don’t know. I can’t tell you why.

01-00:32:34 Cummins: Interesting. Is there any one thing as a coach that you think is more important than anything else when you’re putting together a team? I mean even back then?

01-00:32:43 Montgomery: Well, you know, I probably at the time, when coaching that little JV team in the Coast Guard Academy, probably felt that effort and giving yourself into a winning team, doing what—I have a chance to score a basket which is a 60 percent or a 50 percent opportunity, but if I make this basket it becomes 100 percent. Well, then that’s what you do. It’s all about winning, team, things of that nature. Probably less about what you see more today, about the me, what can I get out of this. It was way more about just this whole team thing. That was pretty strongly part of what I thought sports should be. And the privilege

of playing sport, to me, way overshadowed the individual attention that you might get. It was just—you get a chance to play a game today! And it was like a big deal to me, and that has just probably shown through.

01-00:33:56 Cummins: And the mechanics are secondary? That’s just kind of a given?

01-00:34:02 Montgomery: Well, the fundamentals are a big part of what the game is. Obviously, you have to evolve over the years and you realize there is a bottom line. You have to give kids the freedom to be themselves and all those kinds of things, but you can be successful with a group of kids that give themselves into the team and each other and play as hard as they can, if you’ve got anywhere close to the talent that others might have.

01-00:34:32 Cummins: Yeah, well we can talk about that further. Because your record is an incredible record over all these years. It’s very impressive.

01-00:34:41 Montgomery: Well, we’ve been fortunate, yeah.

01-00:34:43 Cummins: Well, yeah, but I guess the question is there’s more to it than just being fortunate, because there is something about your ability to produce these winning teams on a fairly consistent basis in different settings even.

01-00:35:00 Montgomery: Well, I’ve been places where it has been a little bit easier to convince kids that that’s what you should be doing, as compared to—University of Montana, where I was first the head coach, basketball is really important there. A lot of the kids that we had come from Montana or that area, where it was really important for them to be at Montana. They weren’t doing us a favor to be there to play. They were happy to have the chance to play and try to win, so they had a really good healthy attitude. There were other schools in our league that couldn’t generate that same thing. It was a great place to go to school. For all intents and purposes it was the Ohio State of our area. Good education, great fun socially, and a good sports program that was very well supported. So we had all the things that were intact to allow us to do that.

01-00:36:02 Cummins: So you finish up at the Coast Guard Academy, then you go to Colorado State. What do you want to say about that experience there?

01-00:36:16 Montgomery: Well, that’s where I got to recruit. They sent me out on the road. I was now, I think twenty-three going on twenty-four. I was out in kids’ homes talking, trying to get them to come to school there, running home visits, campus visits. I had a lot of responsibility, because it was just the three of us. And so again, it was really a growth process for me in terms of understanding how things

work. I left after the year trying—I was finishing up my thesis, passed my exams, I was finishing my thesis and was headed back to work camp at the Citadel, where the guy from the Coast Guard took. So I loaded up all my stuff, and put it in my Volkswagen van, and I headed back there to work. I didn’t have a job, but I was in the process of finishing the thesis, would have had the master’s and then had to get a job and ended up—George hired me at the Citadel and offered me a full-time job. So that was great. And then the thesis fell through, didn’t finish that, so that’s a whole different story. So I ended up coaching at the Citadel, which was, again, a military school back in South Carolina. The other assistant was a fellow by the name of Les Robinson, who he and I became very close friends, and he ended up being the head coach there and the head coach at North Carolina State, and going on and having a great career. So in the process, that was the next step of now having a full- time job for the first time, having a little bit of money in my pocket, and going through that process.

And then [I] left there after a year to go to the University of Florida as what would be called a part-time coach, and lived in the dorm there, but now I was in the Southeast Conference and mostly recruited. They had me on the road for weeks at a time. But I would meet the team in Freedom Hall, Louisville, Madison Square Garden, or wherever the team was playing. But I’d be out on the road just making contacts. Back then recruiting was unlimited. You could—

01-00:38:37 Cummins: And why was it a part-time job?

01-00:38:41 Montgomery: Just salary-wise.

01-00:38:40 Cummins: Salary-wise.

01-00:38:42 Montgomery: Yeah. And it was—

01-00:38:43 Cummins: So were you making less money then?

01-00:38:44 Montgomery: Yes.

01-00:38:47 Cummins: But that was obviously a conscious decision.

01-00:38:50 Montgomery: Yeah, and I don’t think the military thing—it was hard for me. I recruited some good kids to the Citadel, but I just didn’t think I had my heart in the military, trying to convince a kid to live in the barracks and put a uniform on and go through that freshman hazing project—it was hard for me. I don’t think

my heart was really in it. I think the head coach knew that. And so we tried to find—the Florida thing was an opportunity for much greater exposure in terms of—we played Kentucky with Adolph [F.] Rupp and Tennessee with Ray Mears, all the big arenas. That was the top level of basketball. So the recruiting experience was really good for me.

01-00:39:32 Cummins: Give a year, just so we can—roughly what that would be.

01-00:39:33 Montgomery: Oh boy. You know, I don’t know.

01-00:39:39 Cummins: About ’72?

01-00:39:44 Montgomery: Well, I was at the Citadel probably ‘71/’72, so probably ’72-’73, somewhere in there.

01-00:39:51 Cummins: Okay. And do you even remember what you made?

01-00:39:58 Montgomery: Well, I got free room and board and they were training me. That was where I first was exposed to the big time—the dorm was in the back side of the football stadium, the athletic dorm. So I had a room with another young coach, and we ate at the training table and the meals were off the charts. I remember that. And all the athletes would come in, and the golf team had Gary Koch, Andy North, Andy Bean. I’d go to the golf course occasionally and these guys would be out hitting buckets of balls. But the meals were— Sunday afternoon they had a late brunch type thing and it was your typical Southern cooking, but they had steak at least one night, they had prime rib one night. It was really good. And that’s what—you kind of became acquainted with what was big-time athletics. I went whoa! And I’m sure we weren’t the biggest. In that league we were not anywhere toward the biggest. But it was my first exposure to what others were doing and kind of opened my eyes a little bit.

So I’m out recruiting, and the tail end of the season we’re okay. We’re not great, but we’re hanging in there. We’d beaten Kentucky I think and had some good wins. I’m driving home through Atlanta and I grab the paper and, “Florida coach fired,”—well, so that’s me! So that was the end of that. He and I got along very well and became very good friends. He loved to play racquetball, and we’d play racquetball at this park at night after practice, and he was really good. He loved to drink beer, so we’d sit after and just talk basketball and drink beer.

So then I needed a job, so then there you are. You’re twenty-five years old and you’ve been in the East for a couple years.

01-00:41:55 Cummins: No marriage plans?

01-00:41:58 Montgomery: Oh no. I didn’t have time for all that. It would have been the worst thing to ever happen, for anybody to hook up with me. Excuse me, I’ve got a little cold working here.

So I started trying to look for jobs and apply for things and flew back out West and stayed at my parents’ house for a little bit and looked around, and ended up, through a hook-or-crook, getting the job at Boise State. And again, it was a product of whenever they would call I was out playing golf at Florida, because they had a golf course where I could play for free. I was horrible, but I didn’t have anything else to do. And so they were able to scrape together enough money for me to live, because they really didn’t have a second coaching position funded. So I got a minimum of money from coaching and they got a little bit from being the head golf coach, which they applied. That was the only way—they figured I’d coach the golf team. So I came out, assistant basketball/head golf coach, and I actually worked in the student union, again not making very much money. But at twenty-five and single, I had my van, I could sleep—I was fine. I just was perfectly happy to have a job.

01-00:43:25 Cummins: Okay, so you’re at Boise State, and that’s the deal.

01-00:43:28 Montgomery: The Big Sky Conference.

01-00:43:29 Cummins: Right, golf, basketball.

01-00:43:30 Montgomery: Way different level, but an opportunity again—there was just three of us, so I got plenty of responsibility coaching. I was full-time, just salarywise. I coached the golf team, which I knew very little about, but I could organize the group. I just figured out what I needed to do in terms of organize a schedule, make the cuts, set a line-up one through six. In fact, we were playing, and the first tryouts that I—I sent everybody out in foursomes and took the last group that had the least credentials as far as trying to make the team and went out with them. I just was horrible; I’m just rolling the ball and slicing the ball. One of the kids looked at me and he says, “How did you ever get to be golf coach?” [laughter] And I kind of laughed and said, “That’s a good question.” So it wasn’t about—

01-00:44:25 Cummins: Playing the game.

01-00:44:25 Montgomery: —helping their golf swing. It was about organizing, driving them to tournaments, getting them in tournaments, getting their gear, giving them golf balls, setting up practice times, all that kind of stuff. And I’d go out and set up their times, and then I’d rush back to the office and do basketball and go back out and collect the scores and so forth.

01-00:44:44 Cummins: It’s interesting, just as an aside, that the golf coach today, our friend [Steve] Desimone, because I’ve met some of the players that played with him quite some time ago. One of the questions I had for them was, “Would he try to affect your swing? How much would he get involved in correcting your swing?” And they said, “Not at all.” These guys, by that time, had lots of teaching vis-à-vis the—

01-00:45:22 Montgomery: Yeah, they’d let you know where they are.

01-00:45:24 Cummins: Yeah, and so one of them I remember saying that if he started developing a problem they’d probably go to the outside to get somebody to correct it.

01-00:45:34 Montgomery: Well, that’s what they all do. We had a pro there at the golf course that—we could pay him a little bit to help the kids if they wanted, or they all had their own. They all came from golf courses, and interestingly enough, what did happen is they actually taught me. As I started playing with them, after a while they’d say, “Hey Coach, why don’t you try keeping your right elbow, and turning rather than,” or, “The reason you’re doing that is because you’re lifting your head.” So over time in watching them and listening to them I got to where I could manage to get around a golf course okay. So that was good.

01-00:46:15 Cummins: So this is a real change. If you go from the SEC to the—

01-00:46:18 Montgomery: Yeah, and who’d ever been to Boise, Idaho for goodness sake. It’s a great town, it’s a great little town. The school had been a junior college not many years prior to that, so it was really in its infancy as far as a college. It was Boise State College and then turned into Boise State University. Football was big. They’d been very good in junior college, and so football was still kind of big, and basketball. But we were in the Big Sky Conference and they’d had not much success. But the head coach there was a really fun, good guy, and we had some real characters on our team to start with. We needed to weed that out. By the third year we’d recruited a pretty good group of kids, one of which was his son and a couple of kids from—one from Seattle who I’d recruited, Trent Johnson, who turned out, obviously, to be—worked for me and was the head coach at Stanford and has been a very successful coach. We won the league the third year and that was huge. It was great. So we got a little bit of

recognition from that, of taking this group of young kids and winning the league. The head coach at Montana at that time was a fellow by the name of [George Melvin] Jud Heathcote, who went on to Michigan State and win a national championship. I watched him a lot and came to be pretty good friends and admirer of his. So after that third year—and I still wasn’t making much money—Jud went to Michigan State.

Jim Brandenburg got the Montana job and asked me if I would be interested in coming up as an assistant. So now we get back to having a salary, and now I was the first assistant, and so it was all good. But so now I’m no longer in Southern California, but now I’m in Montana of all places. But Montana is a great place. Missoula, Montana—I met my wife, had my kids, ten years, couldn’t have been better. Had fun—fun’s okay up there. My wife’s nine years younger. She was a coed, but she was a senior though, but she was a coed. And so it was great. So two years, we had good teams at Montana. The head coach was sick some, so I ended up doing everything a lot. So when he then took the Wyoming job, at thirty—just turned thirty-one, I was appointed head coach at Montana.

01-00:49:04 Cummins: And you were now about that same age?

01-00:49:06 Montgomery: I was thirty-one. I had just turned thirty-one. And so the interesting thing was I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I was just—I don’t whether the word cocky enough or naïve, or whatever it was, I just—hey, this is great! But I made a great hire in hiring, who had been assistant at Gonzaga, a guy by the name of Stew Morrill, one of my best friends now, coaching. He was a young guy and the two of us, with some young graduate assistant type third guys. And so we took over the program and off we went. And it was—that first year I think we were 15-13 and we thought we had just done marvelous. The town didn’t quite think that, but we thought we did, and we didn’t know any better.

But we got better each year and were able to establish a good recruiting base. I had Micheal Ray Richardson, who you may or may not know who he is, but he’s one of the all-time—well, he’s a really, really, he was a very good NBA player and he was the fourth player picked at Montana, first round, which was unheard of. I was assistant when he was there, but we had lots of dealings with, and that was a great learning experience in terms of dealing with that kind of a player and some of the issues that he had. Really nice kid, but one of the few black kids in Missoula, and probably had some different issues there as a result, so that was a great learning experience. So off we went at Montana and got better and better and were always in the hunt.

The league was really good then because we had Idaho, we had Weber State, Reno was in the league, Boise was in the league, and all had good coaches. Don Monson was at Idaho and went on to Oregon, and Neil McCarthy was at

Weber State and went on to New Mexico State. And so we had some really good battles and we were always in the hunt. We were always in position for first place and it was great.

01-00:51:24 Cummins: And how much time were you putting in as the coach?

01-00:51:27 Montgomery: [laughing] It was just a full-time deal. You’d get out in the spring and play golf a little bit. Your recruiting was different, but it was just different then. We tried to stick to the mountain states, because we’d try to recruit kids that had something in common with being a Montana kid. We didn’t recruit junior college hardly at all, which the other teams in the league did. We tried to stay with incoming freshmen and loved the Montana kid, because to him that was his Kentucky. That was where he wanted to be. So it turned out we had a kid from Colorado named Derrick Pope that was MVP of the league, and then I got Larry Krystkowiak, who was MVP of the league for four years, that went on to the NBA for ten years. When he graduated I graduated to Stanford. We shook hands and I said, “Larry, thanks.” And he said, “Coach, you helped me get to the NBA, and maybe I had a little something to do with you getting the Stanford job,” which was true, because we were pretty successful.

01-00:52:30 Cummins: So this was a big step up then.

01-00:52:30 Montgomery: Stanford?

01-00:52:31 Cummins: No, Montana. Do you view it that way? Becoming the head coach?

01-00:52:37 Montgomery: Well, every young coach tries to be a head coach. I had applied for some jobs, and I applied trying to get a head coaching position and didn’t get—I didn’t get the head coaching job at Walla Walla Junior College. I was going to be interviewed at Portland State, but what you’re really—at that point is you want a chance to be a head coach. And even though I was young we’d had some success. So like all young coaches you’re ambitious.

Even though it was a great job, it was starting to close in a little bit. There’s a lot of people that feel there’s a shelf life to how long you can stay someplace, just because for every decision you make, every game you lose, you’re going to make an enemy or two, and Missoula’s a highly charged emotional place. And so as you didn’t win as much as they want you to win, or when you got to a championship game and you didn’t win it they were all disappointed. Well, nobody likes to feel bad. So when you’re—that’s one of the things about coaching, is when you’re in a place that really supports you and gets very emotional, when you don’t keep that feel-good, it’s going to come back at you a little bit. The more that happens the more you start to—so a lot of people

feel you’ve got to move every six to eight to ten years, just to stay one step ahead of that whole thing.

01-00:54:18 Cummins: Right. And so what was your relationship like with the AD?

01-00:54:24 Montgomery: Great.

01-00:54:24 Cummins: And how many other sports did they have roughly?

01-00:54:30 Montgomery: I want to say they probably had eight or nine—maybe nine men’s/eight women’s. I don’t think Title IX had come full-fledged then. But track, they didn’t have baseball, football obviously, volleyball (women’s), wrestling—not a lot of sports.

01-00:54:53 Cummins: And did the AD pretty much just leave you alone to coach?

01-00:55:01 Montgomery: Yeah, he was a young guy that—a relatively young guy, and we had a good relationship and we’d done well. Every once in a while he would—we’d have conversations. The one thing about Montana that was always an interesting thing is that you were always on a one-year contract. So you became a little vulnerable. I can remember going in after having done particularly well for two or three years in a row, winning twenty-three/twenty-four games and saying, “It’s kind of precarious here. We need to have a three-year contract.” And it was really a state law. They hid behind a state law and said you couldn’t do that.

01-00:55:41 Cummins: Hmm. Strange.

01-00:55:43 Montgomery: He said, “Mike, you’re doing great. But if that’s a real big problem for you then you just need to take another job.” Which was—duh. Okay, so out you go, down the hall and tell your coaches.

01-00:55:56 Cummins: And do you have much interaction with the coaches on the other teams at that point in time?

01-00:56:01 Montgomery: You mean at that school?

01-00:56:02 Cummins: At Montana.

01-00:56:03 Montgomery: Oh absolutely. [cell phone ring tone] Absolutely. You go out after games with them, you have a lot of booster functions where the coaches go to Butte, Montana to raise money. You have these booster functions and the coaches would go. Yeah, you did. Montana’s a different—it’s just a different deal. And it’s great. There was a bar called Stockman’s Bar and Grill, for example, and if anybody that goes to Missoula, Montana, for any length of time, you’re going to go to Stockman’s Bar and Grill. You just are. The doctors, the lawyers, the judges—they all go after work, stop by Stock’s, have a beer. Then they’ll start to filter out, seven/eight o’clock or whatever, and then the students all come in. They probably have a few too many drinks in Montana every now and again, but it’s part of the deal.

01-00:57:07 Montgomery: It’s just part of the culture, and it’s okay. So yeah. Everybody knows everybody, type thing. It’s that kind of an environment.

01-00:57:18 Cummins: And were you—was this the first time? Because you referenced this, the boosters and fundraising, was that the first time you got actively involved in it, or not?

01-00:57:30 Montgomery: Well, it was just a requirement of the job there. You were the head basketball coach. Football was struggling. Now football’s the king there, because they built a new stadium and football has been very successful. Basketball’s still very important, but it doesn’t carry the load. But then it carried the load. So you were out and you were expected to be there, and the boosters knew who you were. And so that was part of your responsibility. You had weekly luncheons where you spoke about your team. You had breakfasts, and you had a Roundball Club where people joined to raise money, and all those kinds of things. And that was just part of what you needed to do.

01-00:58:06 Cummins: As well as press, I would imagine. A lot more press attention?

01-00:58:08 Montgomery: Not as much, but a little bit. But it was pretty—there were some people that— there was one guy and to this day still writes in, that doesn’t like their preseason schedule because you don’t play Kentucky and Louisville and thinks you should. That stuff goes on, and they can be pretty scathing, because they follow their sports pretty closely. And they’ve had issues up there, social issues, just from the standpoint of student athletes and coeds and things that come up, that have come up, and it has been a little more of a problem. But yeah, you dealt with the press. You had your post-conference deal and you had your press responsibilities and your weekly radio shows and things of that nature and a television show.

01-00:58:54 Cummins: And so from that point of view that was different than previously. In other words, you didn’t have to do that in your previous jobs.

01-00:59:04 Montgomery: No, no. And that was something that really—you only had so much time, and so the television show became a little bit of an extra thing, that you didn’t necessarily want to drive Tuesday to the studio and do this television show, but you needed to do it. And so those things were just a part of your job. And then of course your recruiting calls and your recruiting trips and all of that type of thing. That was just all part of it.

01-00:59:38 Cummins: The reason I asked about the amount of time involved was you mentioned you get married there, you start having kids there—and your time, in terms of your job, has to be increasing, right?, as a result of all these other responsibilities.

01-00:59:53 Montgomery: Yes.

01-00:59:53 Cummins: So do you want to say anything about that?

01-00:59:58 Montgomery: My wife was an absolute trooper.

01-00:59:58 Cummins: Oh, you have to say who she is.

01-01:00:02 Montgomery: Well, Sarah was—we had some friends that we ran around with a little bit, a married couple that was a part of this group of guys that we’d hang out with and socialize with a little bit. They told me about this gal that they thought I’d really like. She came from a family that really liked sports, and Dad, and so forth. And so I met her—ironically, at Stock’s. It was set up, she’d come down, and so forth. So we ended up getting married.

01-01:00:33 Cummins: The year, roughly.

01-01:00:38 Montgomery: Geez, it was probably two years after we met. We didn’t have kids, though, till I was thirty-six, so I’d been a head coach there for a while. And so socially it wasn’t a whole lot different, just after games you’d go out and have a few beers and you could do it. But then when we had John, who works here, then it was pretty much—you got it, the time thing. It just seemed like I’ve always been all-consumed with it in terms of making sure that I did what I thought I needed to do with the basketball team. I felt I had a responsibility to the kids, the alums, the people that hired me—and Sarah was fabulous. She took John—then we had Annie about a year and a half later. She always jokes that

when we came down here everybody has nannies, and how she had two kids in diapers, toting them to the grocery store and doing everything herself. And that’s just the way it was. But she was great with it. Coming home to those two little kids was just the best. So at that point I changed, really, the way I looked at things. Then home time became way more valuable, in terms of—I don’t think I ever went after practice and stopped by and had a beer. I would go home and see those little guys. So that’s when I changed—the routine changed pretty much to being not really a person that got out much. I was really happy to go home, and I didn’t let much infringe on that. So where I’d look at videotape at home or do stuff like that, but I’d never been a guy that stayed late at night at the office just to watch tape or force coaches to do that. If you can’t get it done during the day, then the heck with it.

01-01:02:37 Cummins: Interesting. And that’s still your philosophy?

01-01:02:40 Montgomery: Oh, no question. You have to do your job, you have to—and if you need more time you’ve got to put more time in, but there is a point of diminishing returns. And so obviously, as you get along, it’s just—some guys—football coaches are the worst. They work until two o’clock, and I just don’t see how that is productive.

01-01:03:12 Montgomery: At some point—although their season might be shorter and they’ve got fewer games, and each game might have more meaning. But I don’t know that I’ve—I can’t say as I’ve ever lost a game because I wasn’t prepared, necessarily. Probably has, but I don’t know that that’s the case. If you do your job in your practice sessions and you do your job overall, and each of your coaches is able to do their job, you should be prepared to go in and play.

01-01:03:41 Cummins: And so what would be—now that you’ve got your kids, and your priorities change in that regard, so what would your schedule look like, as a coach, then? The reason I’m asking that is—we’ll get to this, on a comparative basis, once you go to Stanford and then come here.

01-01:04:03 Montgomery: Well, you’re—basically I’m a morning person, so I get most of my work done in the morning. For example, in Montana I wouldn’t talk to anybody till I had my practice plan done in the morning. It was just the holy grail.

01-01:04:19 Cummins: Now talk about what that is, because I don’t think people understand what that is. One of the things I’ve learned in doing these interviews over the last three years is that one of the themes that comes out is that it’s important for coaches to have a structure. John Kasser mentions that, for example, whom you know I’m sure. It comes up with other various coaches. Or if you don’t have a

structure it becomes a concern about wasting the players’ time, particularly in football, standing around, this kind of thing. So when you say you put together a plan, what does that mean?

01-01:05:05 Montgomery: Well, I used to practice a lot longer at Montana. They had unlimited—so we were going to stay out there till we got it. Kids know when you’re not prepared. At least I think they do. I think they can sense that you hadn’t done a good job. So I thought it was really important to come to practice with things in order, progression, take them from thing to thing, know what you want to get done. Now, you might stay on a drill longer because they don’t get it—till they get it.

But your time—as time has gone on they’ve put in time constraints, and so you have twenty hours a week for everything, which is still plenty of time. In truth, as far as on-the-court time, it probably isn’t twenty hours. You might take two hours-plus at a time, because you have the attention span of kids, and when they start to tune out—and then the physical demands on kids too, how much you can go. But you want that time to be productive. You want to go from thing to thing to thing, and you have to think out the progression of if we’re going to run block and rolls and then go to this, and go to this, go to this. All your practices, how much time you have, what you have to have in at any given time—two weeks later, three weeks later, forays where I’ve got to be. You put all these master plans together so you don’t forget something. Nothing could be worse than going into a game, and the other team is a team that zone presses and you’ve never worked on zone press. That’s on you. So you have everything, cover all the eventualities.

I probably overdid it. I’d look at a practice plan, write it again, write it again—just because I wanted to have it right and I don’t like to take things for granted. I don’t like to go to a speaking engagement and not have notes. Once I get up there I probably don’t even look down, but they’re there, I know they’re there, and I’ve prepared. So I’ve put it into my brain what I’m going to say, and that’s important to me. It’s my insecurity, if you will.

01-01:07:17 Cummins: Or just the importance of being prepared.

01-01:07:18 Montgomery: Well, it’s trying to do a good job. And so you, when you’re younger you kind of operate that first impressions are lasting impressions. You never know when something might come back at you and you’ve made an impression on somebody favorably and all those kinds of things.

So practice plans first, and I’ll start here pretty soon. It has gotten probably a little bit more difficult over the years to get back to focusing on what my job is. Generally speaking I want to have a master plan, I want to have a daily plan. I want to have that each individual practice is done well before we start

the season, what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it. And so it seemingly has gotten a little bit more difficult as time has gone on, for me to get back started in doing that. I used to sit in my chair in Montana, for example, on Saturdays and Sundays and just—of course, it may be cold outside and I’d sit by the fireplace and I’d just x and o all day long while the kids ran their little fire trucks on the chairs. [laughing] It was great. But that’s important. That’s a big part of what you do is being organized, and you’re right. You’ve only got so much time and you want it to be productive time, you want the kids to go from thing to thing to thing. You want them to be efficient. Well, you can’t ask them to be efficient unless you’re efficient, so you try very hard to do that.

01-01:08:53 Cummins: And then of course you’re dealing with all these individual personalities—the players I mean.

01-01:08:59 Montgomery: Yeah, but what you would generally try to—the old thing is, “Look, there’s one of me and there’s fifteen of you, so you’re going to need to adjust to me. I can’t adjust to all fifteen of you,” within limits. Certainly you know, certain people deal better with certain things. “But I can’t yell at you and coddle you and—because I just can’t. I’m not capable of doing that. So if I’m going to get after you a little bit you need to adjust to that. Figure out why I’m doing it, what’s the purpose. If I’m unfair that’s one thing. But if I’m fair, and I think I will be, then just deal with it, because ultimately what we’re trying to do is be a good team here, and that’s my job to try to get us on the same page.”

So you know, it seems to me that we’ve evolved a little bit to where there’s less coaching, more management/recruiting of big-time athletes, let them go play. And people are able to win that way. It’s just not the way I’ve been able to do it. I think John Wooden’s success stemmed from the fact that he had better athletes. He recruited great athletes and he made them do it the right way, and that formula is a formula for success.

01-01:10:16 Cummins: Yeah, interesting. Okay, so then let’s just go back to that typical day in Montana, where you go through—you structure the practice, et cetera. And then—

01-01:10:30 Montgomery: Well, you had your press time in. What I tried to do is to say look, I finally settled in on the fact that okay, I’ll take press calls from eleven thirty to twelve thirty. Then you got lunch and then whatever business—you have to meet with your coaches and you have to pre[pare]. But that morning time was pretty much in preparing your practice plan and getting ready for that day’s practice and looking at film and whatever you need to do. But I wouldn’t allow anybody to interrupt. It was almost—no, no. I’m not talking to them right now. So then you set aside your time when if somebody wanted to call

and talk that you would talk to them and you’d try to make that. Otherwise you’re constantly interrupted with calls from people who want to talk about stuff, and that’s just not going to happen.

01-01:11:24 Cummins: Right, okay. And then you have practice in the afternoon.

01-01:11:25 Montgomery: Yeah, you practice over, you—that’s it. But for me a lot of mental energy goes into that, so when I go home I’m tired. And sometimes you go home, and with ESPN there’s always games on. They start at five or four and you can go and turn on the TV and just watch other people play. It used to be you could learn from other people by watching. Not so much anymore. And you watch games and off you go to bed and you’re up the next—but like I said, I’m a morning person. I get most of my work done early. That’s when I drink my coffee and I get ready to go. Others aren’t that way, but that’s the way I am.

01-01:12:05 Cummins: And then the amount of time you’re spending recruiting. You said you recruited pretty much locally, so you weren’t doing a whole lot of—

01-01:12:13 Montgomery: Well, not locally when I was in Montana. But we tried to stay Washington, Oregon, Colorado, maybe get in the Dakotas if there’s anybody there, Montana. But you wouldn’t go—and we had started to go down to California a little bit more, but you had to be careful there because a lot of times the California kids thought they were doing you a favor and that was the worst thing for you. They just didn’t produce for you.

01-01:12:36 Cummins: And your annual regimen, just say a word about that, so that you’re— obviously you’ve got the season and then you’ve got recruiting. Does that come later?

01-01:12:54 Montgomery: Well, recruiting is an ongoing deal. But what you try to do is you have to have good staff. You have to have coaches that really can take away a lot of the responsibilities. I’ve always been fortunate enough to have really good people around me that can do the lion’s share of certain aspects of the job. So we have a responsibility sheet that we try to give out that’s monstrous in terms of—assistant coach, assistant coach, office manager, recruiting coordinator, video coordinator, operations, and all the things that need to get done, and we just divide it all up. Now, as I’ve gotten older here and toward the tail end of this thing I’m trying to, frankly, give these guys more responsibility to prepare them so that they’re ready to do this. I don’t want to do everything. I don’t want to be responsible. I want them to be able—but I’ve always operated that way. I’ve said look, here’s what your job is, do it. I don’t want to have to manage you. You’re an adult. I’ve been very fortunate to have people that can do that.

01-01:14:10 Cummins: And that kind of thing has accrued. In other words, more assistant coaches over the period of time up to the present.

01-01:14:17 Montgomery: Yeah, yeah. You have three full-time assistants now. You have a video coordinator, you have an operations director that does all your travel stuff, and you have an office manager. And in other schools, the bigger schools, where people that spend more money have umpteen number of people around doing who knows what.

01-01:14:40 Cummins: Right. Let me just go back—did you ever, in your progression through your career call your dad and say, “I’ve got this issue. I’ve got this problem.”

01-01:14:51 Montgomery: No. I was—he came to one of my games when I was at Montana. We played Portland State over there, and they were retired in Oregon, and my mom and dad came over to that game and watched me. But I hadn’t been a head coach at Montana for very long when he passed away. In fact he was sick probably prior to me getting that job. And so—and we didn’t play very well, and I was particularly demonstrative, as I was more so when I was younger. I was a little embarrassed that—but I was a head coach at the Division-I level and that was a pretty neat deal. One of my great regrets was that he didn’t live long enough to see me get the Stanford job. Because he was at UCLA, and I used to go down, we’d play UCLA, and I had people come up and say, “Is your dad Jack Montgomery?” And I’d say yeah. They’d say, “Oh boy, I really liked him,” or, “I had him for this class.” That was pleasing, but he wasn’t alive at that time. And then of course at Stanford we had a great deal of success and that would have been fun for him to experience that, I think. And of course Coach Wooden claims to have held me in his arms when I was a baby, which is entirely possible. I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s entirely possible. He claims that he held me as a baby, and that became a deal as he and I got to be closer friends over the years.

01-01:16:35 Cummins: How about Pete Newell? Obviously Pete Newell and John Wooden had their issues.

01-01:16:43 Montgomery: Yeah, like most competitors. I got to know Pete reasonably well, not extremely well. We crossed paths, but by the time I was at Stanford he was living in San Diego. I knew his sons a little bit. I had occasion to see Pete a little bit, but not all that much. An awful lot of people that I knew just had a great deal of respect for Coach Newell and who he was, but I never really had—the people that I knew, we never really had much with basketball.

01-01:17:22 Cummins: So anything more about Montana then, that just is on your mind?

01-01:17:30 Montgomery: [laughing] No. It was just—wherever I am there’s no way I’m there without it. The opportunity to learn and grow, still a little immature socially—probably having more fun than you need to, but it’s okay there. You can get away with that. Great friends. But no, it provided me an opportunity that I never could imagine getting. And a lot of coaches have come out of there and done very, very well. It has been a great cradle of coaches, really. Blaine Taylor and Larry Krystkowiak, and now Wayne Tinkle is there, so it has been a good deal.

01-01:18:13 Cummins: And do you have any idea what you made, what your salary was going back?

01-01:18:21 Montgomery: You know, I’m thinking that—I think I made low thirties when I started there, but then we had camp and a few other things and it went up from there. But I really don’t recall. I’ve tried to think back as to what that was. But we bought a nice little house. It had two acres, up the Rattlesnake Creek, which you’d kill for now. [laughing]

01-01:18:50 Cummins: Definitely. So okay, so then take us from Montana then, transitioning out and how that happened.

01-01:18:53 Montgomery: Well, I’d applied for the job when—after four years, when they hired Tom Davis at Stanford I applied for that job. I applied at Washington. I applied at Colorado and applied at Oregon and thought I should have had a couple of those—didn’t get them. But the Stanford job came open, and the first time they hired Tom Davis, who had been at Boston College and had a lot of success. And then when it opened the second time four years later I’d had a lot more success. I say this, and I don’t know if anyone would affirm it or not, but I really think Stanford didn’t think they could win in men’s basketball, because they just had a fairly lengthy history of struggle. They’d actually committed a fair amount of money to Tom Davis to try to make the thing go, and he’d had four pretty much .500 seasons and not had a lot of success. I just think they’d figured that they weren’t going to be—and so they were able to hire this unknown from Montana, clean record, graduates his kids, liked academics—I really think that was what they did.

But I inherited a great group of kids that really fit down—it was right down my alley as far as how they wanted to play and what they could be successful with. So we had immediate success with Todd Lichti and Eric Reveno and Howard Wright and that group of kids. We had immediate success.

01-01:20:34 Cummins: So talk about what it’s like leaving a place like Montana, where you’ve been there now a long time. You had all these friends—

01-01:20:45 Montgomery: Well, I don’t think you ever look back. In basketball you’re—the coaching profession is pretty much trying to—

01-01:20:52 Cummins: Move forward, right.

01-01:20:53 Montgomery: Move forward. There were no regrets whatsoever. I probably was a little over my head when I first got to Stanford. I had no secretary, I had no assistants. I didn’t know anything. And it’s one of the foremost institutions in the world, and here I am having no idea—I knew it was a great academic school, but I had no idea what that meant. And so it was a little bit intimidating initially.

01-01:21:30 Cummins: And the AD was Andy Geiger?

01-01:21:30 Montgomery: Andy Geiger, yeah.

01-01:21:35 Cummins: And was the recruiting—I’m just, again, looking for comparisons. As you come to Cal, it’s different in every situation, I’m sure.

01-01:21:43 Montgomery: Yeah, well, you’re opening—the conversation.

01-01:21:51 Cummins: Okay. So it’s quarter to right now, and we could either keep going or we could stop here and then start again.

01-01:22:03 Montgomery: Let’s do that, because there’s a lot of information at this point. The majority of my career was really—the success was at Stanford. Then the retiring and taking the Golden State [Warriors] job and coming here. There’s a lot more stuff that’s potentially interesting, I don’t know. Probably delicate in a lot of ways, so let’s stop here and kick it back.

01-01:22:28 Cummins: Okay, all right. This I think would be a good place to do that and then we’ll go forward from here. So thank you again, very much, for doing this.

01-01:22:38 Montgomery: You bet.

Interview 2: July 22, 2013 Begin Audio File 2

02-00:00:00 Cummins: Okay, this is July 22, 2013. This is the second interview with Coach Mike Montgomery. So we were talking the last time right about your arrival at Stanford, and you said, “Wow, there’s a lot to talk about Stanford. We could talk hours about that.” [laughter] So just talk about getting the job, the transition to it, et cetera.

02-00:00:33 Montgomery: Well, we’d been successful at Montana in terms of twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four-win seasons, and had beaten some Pac-10 schools, so the reputation was a little bit better.

I think that Tom Davis had been at Stanford for four years, and he was a guy that was supposed to get that turned around and pretty much had four .500 seasons or below and didn’t really make much of a dent. They’d committed a fair amount of money, I think, to basketball for maybe the first time, in terms of trying to make it better and keep up with everybody. He then basically just said, “I can’t get it done here. I can’t get the kind of player that I need,” so he ended up taking the Iowa job. Thus the job was open, and I went down and interviewed, whatever, with Andy Geiger. We just seemed to click, in what I thought and what they wanted. The next thing you know I was offered the job. It was just a heck of an opportunity.

So I end up going down, taking the job, walking into the office, no assistants. A secretary comes in and says, “I was very close to Tom and I’m going to go back across campus where I was.” So I didn’t have anybody. I was just sitting in my office and of course got all the telephone messages from everybody looking for jobs. The first thing I had to do was hire assistants, and that was critical just to get moving. I had some guys in mind and ended up hiring Barry Collier as my first assistant, who is now the athletic director at Butler. He went on to have a nice basketball career before he took the job at Butler. Good friend and really was good. But it was just a way bigger deal than I probably had imagined. Academically it was different. I knew it was a really, really good school, but I didn’t know to what extent and how tough it was to find kids and get them admitted and all of the other things that make Stanford what it is. So I was, I would say, actually intimidated for the first two or three years there just trying to make my way.

But I did inherit a great group of kids that were certainly capable of winning and really fit my style of play: Eric Reveno, Todd Lichti, Howard Wright, et cetera. They were good players and weren’t willing to accept the fact that they couldn’t win, and so we did. We had a real good year that first year and gosh, I don’t remember the exact sequence of our post-season run, but we did get into the tournament for the first time in what I think was forty-seven years. So

it was just—we got off to a great start there and kind of changed the perception of Stanford basketball a little bit, and we went from there.

02-00:04:00 Cummins: When you came in did Geiger talk to you about the kind of athletes you had to recruit? Because you said the previous coach said he couldn’t recruit the kind of kids he needed.

02-00:04:11 Montgomery: No, I don’t think they have a limitation as to the kind of kids, there’s just obviously an academic requirement that a lot of kids just don’t meet, particularly in men’s basketball. Once I went over and met with the dean of admissions, Jean Fetter, a time or two, I had a little bit better idea of what I was up against. [laughing] There just was not a lot of compromise there. They were very strong as to what they were going to do. It wasn’t any specific kind of person necessarily. I would say probably it wasn’t set up to do inner-city recruiting as much, in that you had to be aware of where kids were and what kinds of things that they were looking for at Stanford, including whether a school might be a feeder school, which made it more difficult, and all kinds of things like that. But that was just gaining experience about what it took to be successful there.

He [Geiger] did say that the one thing you need to understand is you’ll never be a big deal here because there are too many people at Stanford that in the realm of things are big deals—Pulitzer Prize, Nobel Prize, very successful people, so it’s unlikely that as a sport coach that you would ever [have] the kind of notoriety that you might have at some other school if you win.

02-00:05:45 Cummins: Which turned out not to be the case.

02-00:05:45 Montgomery: Well, it’s still all relative. The trip to the Final Four I think was—an awful lot of people then started to recognize, but I always remarked I could walk around campus or walk downtown Palo Alto and most people wouldn’t know who I was or really care that much, which is fine, but that’s pretty much true.

02-00:06:10 Cummins: And so when the director of admissions talked to you did he talk about a grade point average and test scores, or more of what the quality of the kid, the character of the player?

02-00:06:25 Montgomery: Well, it was a she, and Jean was—there’s not—people always want numbers there, and there just aren’t numbers. It’s not as cut and dried as that. It would be very difficult to capsulize what the requirements are or what the admissions process is. It’s a combination of a fairly lengthy application process, board scores, grades, competitive curriculum, type of school, and on and on, and including an essay that they write that goes a long way in catching the

attention of certain people as to whether you’re capable. Their feeling is you have to earn the right to go to Stanford. So there are no specific numbers. There are no specific grade points that would be automatically admitted, and at the same point maybe not that would be automatically eliminated from consideration.

02-00:07:36 Cummins: And what kind of academic support did the team have down there?

02-00:07:40 Montgomery: Well, it evolved. Certainly there was reluctance I think initially to—there was still some reluctance about athletics relative to academics. There were still people on campus that didn’t feel that athletics were important to the overall fabric of the university, but that eventually changed over time. I think they came to the conclusion that if we’re going to be good—if we’re going to have athletics and we are supposed to be based on excellence, let’s do it in athletics as well. So there was a constant—what do we need to do? How can we support these kids? And again, wanting the kids to be responsible for their own progress, at the same time understanding that time constraints might be a little bit different, so we need to provide support for these kids, and have done that in terms of people that could help the kids when they needed help.

02-00:08:46 Cummins: Tutoring and that kind of thing?

02-00:08:49 Montgomery: Yeah. They wanted the kids to reach out. They didn’t want to make it—if you needed help then you needed to go and ask and seek out within the department, more so than within the Athletic Department, more so in the department that you were struggling with. I think the one thing that was about Stanford is they were fairly confident that you had to earn your way in school, so as a result of that they felt—they knew you were capable, so they felt a responsibility to help you succeed.

02-00:09:23 Cummins: And did you—just to contrast it, say, with Montana, because we will talk about Cal too in that regard—was this a big change for you in terms of your recruiting then and how you went about it?

02-00:09:35 Montgomery: Oh, yeah, there was no point wasting your time on kids that—you would basically try to find the absolute best student athletes in the country that you could find. The old saying—if you found a kid that had all As, then you needed to go look. If you had kids with real good grade-point averages to start with, not knowing anything else, then you needed to probably take a look just to see if he was a good-enough player, knowing that your pool was very small. So yeah, it was a totally different thing.

The other thing too—Stanford is a national—you can talk about Northwestern or Vanderbilt or Rice or other real good private institutions that have real good academics, but they’re basically regional, at least in our opinion. We felt like they were regional schools, not national schools. And so Stanford was a national school—that we could go anywhere in the country and at least have a chance to recruit a great student.

02-00:10:43 Cummins: Interesting. And the president at that time was—

02-00:10:47 Montgomery: When I first started it was Don Kennedy, very pro-athletics, real good guy that you could maybe have talk to a recruit if you needed to and very positive about athletics.

02-00:11:03 Cummins: Yeah, exactly. And he made that same point that you did, and Ted Leland too, about the kind of student that comes in as kind of this—what Ted said was if anything made the difference vis-à-vis the way that athletics was viewed on the campus, and the success really of the program, it was the quality of the students they admitted.

02-00:11:29 Montgomery: Well, there’s never a, I don’t think—once they came to the conclusion that they were not fudging the admissions to take kids, and so that there was a suspicion that well, wait a minute, is he supposed to be there? Once they were confident that there was a structure in place, and it was, then it was much easier for everybody to help and get along. If it broke down I think that would be really—would really not work there then. If there was ever a suspicion— he shouldn’t be here, he or she shouldn’t be here—but once they were of the opinion that these kids earned their way in, then it worked.

02-00:12:14 Cummins: You had a really good year right off the bat.

02-00:12:18 Montgomery: We did. I don’t recall exactly, but Lichti was a great player. We had good players, and so we were able to win. I don’t know if it was the NIT the first year and the NCAA the second—that might have been what happened. But there were 20-win seasons, and some good wins and some good competitive basketball.

02-00:12:40 Cummins: Can you say a word about that? You came in, you replaced a coach that you said had roughly a .500 season, or three or four .500 seasons—and then, because you’re relying mostly on the players he recruited in that first year, right?

02-00:12:56 Montgomery: Yeah, but Howard Wright I think might have—well, they were freshmen, so they maybe didn’t have a chance to develop maturity-wise into the players that they—but they were very good players. I think for Tom, he got impatient and I think probably Iowa was a more visible job that was going to pay a higher salary and had a lot of the perks that exist in college sports that Stanford had never done or it just wasn’t a part of the way they did their business. And so for Tom it was a better opportunity for him.

02-00:13:42 Cummins: Now, from a contract point of view, going from Montana to Stanford, was that a big step up?

02-00:13:47 Montgomery: Yeah, it was quite a bit more money. Of course what you didn’t factor in, because you didn’t know, was the cost of living, which was just a shock! I sold my car, sold my house, took my retirement, and had half of my down payment on my house, so there was a sticker shock for sure. But yeah, the salary was better. It was a job you’re going to take regardless, and a lot of those things you didn’t even really look at, because moving from the Big Sky was not easy. To get a job like Stanford was fabulous, so you didn’t look at— well, I can’t do this or this isn’t enough. It was a substantial raise.

02-00:14:40 Cummins: Because there has always been, at least around here, this view that Stanford, through the trustees—I don’t really know that, I’ve got to nail that down—but it was pretty clear that they weren’t going to pay these astronomical salaries for coaches.

02-00:14:59 Montgomery: They didn’t. They have changed. Admittedly now they—I think when Bob Bowlsby got in there he convinced them that if they’re going to keep the Jim Harbaughs of the world that they need to compete. It’ll probably cost them more not to do that than it would to just pay a significant salary. So they’re starting to do that a little bit, particularly in football. But yeah, it wasn’t something—that wasn’t a place you went to get rich necessarily, but the quality of life was pretty good.

02-00:15:45 Cummins: And what about the donor involvement down there, vis-à-vis you as the basketball coach? Say, again, in contrast to Montana. Anything stand out as different? You talked about the recruiting, but—

02-00:16:02 Montgomery: Well, no. You had booster responsibility, but again, not like some places. The one thing that was obvious is there was a lot more—there’s a lot of wealth in the mid-peninsula area, and a lot of the people that had gone to Stanford had gone on to make a lot of money and had a lot of money. And so their fundraising over there is a machine. It’s as good as it gets, and so they had a

great fundraising mechanism in place, and athletics was probably behind the university. But they have—private school people are used to donating. Public school people have not been brought up that way.

02-00:16:53 Cummins: Right. So no dramatic change vis-à-vis your role, vis-à-vis fundraising as far as what you did?

02-00:17:01 Montgomery: No. We had a booster club that—we changed the way they did their business a little bit. We ended up being pretty successful with our little basketball fundraising group by having some events—an auction and some other things that gave us a little bit more money to do some extra things that the Athletic Department might not fund. But it was just normal build a program, have a booster club, try to raise some funds. Normal circumstance deal.

02-00:17:31 Cummins: And is there, in terms of the management of athletics, through the AD there, a lot of involvement with other coaches, or not? In other words, how would an Andy Geiger manage or a Ted Leland manage? Does he pretty much leave you alone and say, “Here’s what you’ve got to do?” You know that, et cetera?

02-00:17:58 Montgomery: Yeah, pretty much. It’s a given there that breaking rules is a job-ender. Messing with academics in terms of not—if you don’t understand Stanford you’re not going to succeed there. You have to understand what they’re doing and how they’re doing it and be comfortable with working with the way they do their business or you probably won’t succeed. And you know they’re not, were not immune from having financial issues any more than anyone else is, so there was always that wrestling with budgets and so forth. But they have a lot of really good coaches over there, and if they fund the program correctly, typically they’ll win. They’re successful there in all their sports. I would say football would be the one that’s probably had the more difficult time over time, in and out, basketball probably as well. But the other sports, your swimming and tennis and golf and lacrosse, things like that, they do very well in.

02-00:19:09 Cummins: Exactly, exactly. Okay, so it’s pretty much—and they communicated their basic philosophy and their expectations, they were pretty clear about that coming in? Because when you look at just the NCAA violations, when the NCAA starts keeping track of them in 1953, Cal ends up with seven over that period of time. UCLA has seven, interestingly, so we’re in this group of—we rank third. And then Arizona State, Auburn, SMU, that kind of thing, they’re higher. Stanford—zero, which is amazing.

02-00:19:55 Montgomery: Well, it’s just not acceptable there. You know as a coach there that that’s just not something—I don’t think that even the violations, and I don’t know for a

fact that anybody intentionally—sometimes it just becomes inadvertent and you get—

02-00:21:54 Montgomery: Yeah. It’s not—it’s no mystery. But the types of people that you deal with there, typically—again, it goes back to mostly two-parent home, overachieving kids that have done very well, so it’s easier to manage that. You don’t have—it’s not typically lower socioeconomic kids that need help or where you could get into trouble. It’s pretty obvious there that a deal-breaker, even for the whole Athletic Department as it exists within the university, would be some major issue/scandal type things. And they’re like anybody else. Their kids do kid’s things, but they’re more of a mischief type of a thing. They manage those things and keep those things at a minimum. But that’s just not something—and I don’t think it’s acceptable anyplace, although in different parts of the country I think it’s more of a way of life than it is other places.

02-00:23:06 Cummins: Okay, so—what else about Stanford, your experience there. Because you were there for several years. It was an incredible—

02-00:23:19 Montgomery: You’re dealing with a certain, just a different—a very small segment of student athletes or society, if you will. It’s pretty unique. People want to try to compare, and you can’t. You can’t compare. You can’t say we should be like that, or why aren’t we like that? It’s a very unique situation that deals with a very, very small segment of the best student athletes in the country. It’s an Ivy League school with big-time athletics is what it is, and they’ve done a great job. They’ve got tremendous alumni support, they’ve been able to generate a lot of donation dollars, and so their physical structures are outstanding. The campus is—they’ve got eighty-eight hundred acres of ground that they can build on and develop their campus, so it’s a very unique situation. It has developed, over a lot of years, from being a very good small private school to being an international/national treasure. People try to compare, and you just can’t. It’s different. It has got its own niche, and that’s that.

02-00:24:45 Cummins: So if you look at Cal, for example, and imagine that Cal tried to set those standards—in a way that’s what Cal does. They say, at least the rhetoric is, we want to have really good student athletes, we want to make sure they succeed, we don’t want there to be any—no cheating, this kind of thing. So one of the reasons—what’s the difference? In other words, now that you’re at Cal, coming in here, what was different in terms of your recruiting? Did you have to spend more time recruiting, for example, here? Could you—did you recruit nationally here, or not? In other words—do you know what I’m saying?

02-00:25:48 Montgomery: That’s the question that everybody tries to get to the answer, and again, it’s just not—you can’t compare the two. You can’t say, “Okay, why aren’t you Stanford?” Because it’s not. It’s a public university, it has a different mission statement, it has a different way, by necessity, that it does its business. So it’s—despite the fact that it’s the number one public institution in the country, whether rightly or wrongly, I don’t believe it has the national cachet that Stanford does. It’s not viewed the same way that Stanford is. And so you’re dealing with a different segment of student athlete in the recruiting process. It’s a large public institution that has a different way in teaching and how it goes about its business.

Years ago UCLA, for example, recruited a lot of its football and basketball players based on what was the 2-percent exception to the admissions rule, which the State of California put in to allow for very unique-type kids to get in that didn’t maybe meet the admissions requirement. And they put that 2- percent rule in, and UCLA utilized it to recruit all of its football and basketball players. And Cal didn’t. They didn’t view that that’s what it was for. UCLA used to pretty much just beat the dog out of Cal for years, and it was because they did not approach the use of that particular exception for athletics, and UCLA did. So Cal has always just had a different view as to where athletics fits, what its purpose is, and not without some controversy, in my estimation.

So again, to try to compare Cal to Stanford I don’t think is fair. Maybe to compare it to Michigan or Colorado or UCLA or Wisconsin or Virginia—the other very good public institutions—might be a better way of doing that. But it’s—again, the mission statement at Cal is different, and so you just have to work with a different sort of a framework.

02-00:28:43 Cummins: So you, as the coach, you don’t think you can compete against Stanford—is that fair to say?

02-00:28:50 Montgomery: We can beat them.

02-00:28:55 Cummins: Pardon?

02-00:28:56 Montgomery: We can beat them on the court.

02-00:28:57 Cummins: I’m not saying on the court—I mean recruit, I’m sorry. In the recruiting process it’s more difficult.

02-00:29:08 Montgomery: Well, if you asked any coach here, when they go head to head for a student athlete that qualifies for Stanford what their ratio of getting those kids is, I think you’d find that it’s not very high. But again, you’re dealing with a kid that has a specific way of viewing, that’s why they are able to go there. The way they’ve viewed who they are and what they’ve done to prepare to go to a school is different. So there are certainly a percentage of kids that would choose Cal over Stanford for a different sort of a reason. But percentagewise I don’t know that—I know that when I was at Stanford most of the other coaches after the fact, after I left, would say when you guys got on a kid we just got off, because we weren’t going to win, and we knew that, so they were wasting their time. But that’s only for those kids that actually have those credentials that can go there, and that’s a very small percentage.

02-00:30:12 Cummins: Okay. And that 2-percent rule, that came in when the master plan was passed in 1960, which set higher entrance requirements. That’s exactly what it was, 2 percent at that time. It’s now 6 percent. That’s an interesting point you make about UCLA recruiting. Was that just common knowledge at that point in time for you having—

02-00:30:46 Montgomery: Well, I was in college in the sixties and I was not tuned into all this stuff.

02-00:30:51 Cummins: Your father maybe?

02-00:30:53 Montgomery: No, I just remember—I think Chancellor Heyman was, if that’s the right one—

02-00:30:58 Cummins: He was here from ’80 to ’90.

02-00:31:00 Montgomery: Was it that late? I thought it was—

02-00:31:01 Cummins: Yes. He was during the same period of time as Don Kennedy. Kennedy was president from ’80 to ’92.

02-00:31:08 Montgomery: All right. Well, I remember, whoever the guy was way back when, in his mind he thought Cal should be an Ivy League school, that athletics shouldn’t be as prominent a deal, which of course is a different approach. Again, the 2- percent thing I remember. And then as time has gone on—and the stories that you hear about Chancellor Young at UCLA, and all that kind of stuff. How they would crow over Cal because they were always winning, and all that kind of stuff. Those are just stories.

02-00:31:54 Cummins: Okay. It is interesting though because—UCLA of course did very well in the fifties in the Pacific Coast Conference, which you know ended in ’58 I think it was. There was an editorial in the [San Francisco] Chronicle. One of the reasons why the Pacific Coast Conference dissolved was that the president here, [Robert Gordon] Sproul, was concerned that UCLA was going to secede from the UC system, because the donors down there and the chancellor, Raymond Allen was the name at that time, believed that they were always second-class citizens vis-à-vis Berkeley academically and every other way— kind of the sister institution. It really galled them, and they wanted to be on a par with Berkeley.

And so some of the regents from UCLA, and the chancellor and the donors, really pushed back against the investigation that the Pacific Coast Conference was doing as a result of paying people to play, basically, there. And so Sproul was worried and he came up with, he and the regents, with the five-point plan to increase the GPA of admitted students to 2.5. He knew that if he did that Oregon State, Washington State, et cetera, would not be able to compete at that level. And so that’s how they kept the system together, but that led to the dissolution of the Pacific Coast Conference.

UCLA said, during this investigation, that [Victor O.] Schmidt, the commissioner of the PCC, should investigate all schools, because Stanford and every place else was cheating. Wally Sterling, who was president [of Stanford] at that point, was furious about this, said it was absolutely not true, refused to join this, what became the Pac-8 eventually, until he and Clark Kerr worked out an arrangement to get him to come into this new conference. But it was—the politics were really something. But there’s this huge difference between UCLA and Berkeley in terms of the culture.

So to get back to the editorial which was written by Scott Newhall, who was the editor of the Chronicle—this was on August 11, 1958, it’s called “Obituary Note on the Dying PC.” He refers to “Los Angelism" as a disease that infected Southern California. It began with USC, spread to UCLA, and has now moved north and has infected the academic saint, Berkeley. This is the tone of the—so it makes your point, but I had never heard about that 2 percent. Two percent is the correct figure, but how UCLA used it is—

02-00:35:24 Montgomery: You could use it any way you wanted, but I think they chose to use it for their athletes.

02-00:35:27 Cummins: And they were more receptive, it appears, to recruiting black athletes to play at that point in time too.

02-00:35:36 Montgomery: Well, yeah, that I don’t know.

02-00:35:38 Cummins: Interesting. So what else about the Stanford experience? You spent a lot of time there.

02-00:35:49 Montgomery: Well, it was great. It established whatever legacy I had because we had done very well. The idea that you could do well there made it a little more special. I had a lot of opportunities to move, but we liked living there. We liked the Bay Area and that was our home, so we decided that we wanted to make and have the Bay Area be our home.

Toward the end there—we had five different admissions directors, and each one had its own way of doing its business. They had quite a bit of autonomy as to—it’s the holy grail. You don’t tell admissions who is supposed to get in—they’re supposed to have the ability to make that decision within the admissions office so that nobody comes in and taints it. Sometimes you had people that were really easy to work with and you could communicate, and other times not so much. But toward the end we ended up having a gal that really wouldn’t admit anybody in athletics. And so we weren’t, under the current circumstance we weren’t going to win, which was okay. If that’s what they wanted. But then she was let go shortly after I left and they’re back on an even par as far as to what they’re doing. But those things always affect your ability to win.

But I’m retired from there essentially—my age and years of service, and the rule of seventy-five. I ended up basically retiring from Stanford, and then took a little run at the NBA.

02-00:38:02 Cummins: And what was that like then?

02-00:38:06 Montgomery: Well, that’s just a whole different animal. It’s something that I don’t regret trying. I always will have had that experience, and it’s one of those things— there’s only thirty jobs, and to have the opportunity was pretty special. But they have had eleven coaches at that point, in thirteen years, so that you probably should have known that the job security wasn’t great. We didn’t do great, and I wasn’t as prepared as I needed to be. So that’s rear-view mirror.

02-00:38:42 Cummins: But just a dramatic change vis-à-vis the role of the coach.

02-00:38:48 Montgomery: Well, yeah. I probably could have been at a whole bunch of other different schools and have had the experience with working with NBA-type mentality athletes, but I didn’t have that at Stanford. We had a lot of kids go into the NBA, but that wasn’t the typical type of NBA person.

02-00:39:06 Cummins: The prima donna kind of—

02-00:39:08 Montgomery: Well, just a lot of different things. I probably didn’t have much of a skill set from the standpoint of dealing with that culture as much as I should have or would have liked. But it was—it’s a great job if you have people that you can win with in that league. It’s a great job. It’s a lot of fun and it’s a great lifestyle, but two years and I was out. So then it was back to the drawing board.

Cummins: Being at Stanford then, for the number of years you were there, did you see— because you just referenced it—the attitude of the student athlete change? Or did, because of the kind of students they were able to recruit, you didn’t see any of that?

Montgomery: Not very much. We didn’t have anybody that considered going into the draft, or maybe we didn’t have good-enough players. But toward the end I had three kids that left after three years to put their name in the draft, but that was more a product of the way things had changed in terms of the landscape in the NBA draft. And so the first kid that left with eligibility was actually Jason Collins, and he was so concerned about what people would think of him there that he didn’t tell anybody that he was going to do it, because he didn’t want people to think poorly of him. But he had been there four years and he did earn his degree, but he did have another year of eligibility as a result of injury. But no, I didn’t see much of the change in culture there because of the types of kids we were recruiting. It was pretty consistent across the board. 02-00:41:05 Cummins: Anything else you want to talk about vis-à-vis Stanford? One thing that came up, for example, in the Montana interview was how you really enjoyed it. You loved being there and it was—

02-00:41:21 Montgomery: Well, I was young and it was more accepting of my lifestyle at that point, in terms of being able to go downtown, have a beer, and everybody—you knew who you were and it was all okay. Stanford was a little different socially. I had two young children and so we were not in that sort of a lifestyle mode at that point in time. Very affluent community, Atherton/Menlo Park/Palo Alto, the surrounding areas and so forth. It was an adjustment to that for sure. Mostly private school—it’s a private school and a lot of the kids are from private schools, and it’s just a different mentality. But if you’re—I was very, very fortunate to be given that opportunity, and we were able to take and make something out of that opportunity. It has really shaped, again, who I am and whatever reputation or legacy that I’ve developed.

02-00:42:30 Cummins: It’s interesting, because in hearing you describe it, it wasn’t—you certainly knew something about Stanford. You knew about the reputation, it was a step

up from Montana, et cetera. But in terms of the kind of culture, whatever you want to call it, a very different kind of culture coming in. You said it took you about three years just to adjust.

02-00:42:55 Montgomery: Well, yeah, I just didn’t—to me it was a Pac-10 school, and it was—I had a friend that in high school was a very good student that didn’t get in, and I knew some others that did that were kids from that day, but I just didn’t realize the magnitude of what it was and was evolving into. It wasn’t always, like I say, a national—it was a very, very good small, private school but West Coast. And then just because of—probably as much as anything else the affluence of the Silicon Valley and then the resources that became available, [that’s] how it was able to develop into what it is now.

02-00:43:37 Cummins: Interesting point, and a very large program with thirty-five sports. Okay, so then this opportunity at Cal comes along. Talk about that.

02-00:43:56 Montgomery: Well, I had been doing television, and so my first year what I did in television was I did the USC games that weren’t on national or the big stations, and then the second year I actually did the Cal games, of those games that weren’t on Fox or ESPN. It was more of a Comcast deal. So I was over and did six or seven or eight games, so I got a little bit more familiar with the Cal kids and was on campus a little bit more than I’d been.

But after that second year out of coaching, I felt like well, I probably ought to get back in one more time. If I wait much longer the opportunity might pass me by. So I made the decision to see what might be available on that particular year, whereas a lot of the smaller schools, very good schools I could have gone to, I didn’t think that that’s what I wanted to do. So I tried to see if there was something out there more on a national basis, and there was two or three that I was interested in, with Cal being one of them, and had an interview and then was offered the job. So again, not really knowing as much about it as you might think—everything’s different than what it appears necessarily.

Obviously I had competed against Ben [Braun] for many, many years, so you hated to see somebody lose a job. But anyway, so we took this. [laughing] And came over—of course we lived just across the bay and the thought was oh, you could live in the same house for three different jobs, but that wasn’t going to be feasible. So we moved across over to here and here we are.

02-00:46:04 Cummins: Talk about the differences when you—

02-00:46:09 Montgomery: Well, obviously—Ben probably wouldn’t have been let go if everything was just perfect. There’s a difference between taking a job when Tom Davis leaves

for a better job, in his mind, versus taking a job when a person is fired, when something is not right in somebody’s mind. So you know there’s got to be some issues. Coming over here there certainly were some issues in terms of some of the kids in the program. Some of the—where they were academically. Some kids had one foot out in terms of maybe were going to transfer. Ryan Anderson ended up putting his name in the draft. And so a lot of what you saw when you looked at it did not turn out to be the case. Ryan Anderson left, a couple of other kids were looking to leave. I got them convinced to stay, but we did have academic issues and some of the kids were not as stable as you might like. So we had to deal with all that stuff.

02-00:47:14 Cummins: So that was a big change, right? In terms of—

02-00:47:16 Montgomery: Well, certainly from Stanford, yeah. A lot of the other things that you typically wouldn’t deal with—which I think this is more like other places than not. As I say, you don’t put Stanford in that same boat. This was more like an Arizona State or a Washington or an Oregon where there’s just constant stuff.

02-00:47:38 Cummins: Right, to deal with. And what about recruiting? You had to hire your own people then? You came in and—

02-00:47:48 Montgomery: Yeah, I kept one that had just been here one year, in Gregg [Gottlieb], and we ended up—you needed to hire a secretary. The office manager, a gal that had been with Ben, she was not happy that Ben had been let go, so she wasn’t going to be a real asset for me. She was very capable, but she didn’t want to deal with me. So we had to try to make over the office and that was, again, a process that you have to deal with, and then try to figure out what recruiting was going to be and who we could get in and how the academic part worked. They have their own systems in place. So that was—we were always trying to figure out, well, can we get this kid in? What do we need to do here? What are the requirements? What do they have to have? It took a little bit of time. There was a little bit of a learning curve. But again, did have a good nucleus of kids that were in the program, certainly good talent. We had some work to do in terms of getting them all on the same page and getting them to play together, but we did that. I think the second year we were able to win a championship which was—it was good. It was a first—again, it was a first for Cal, in fifty years, won a conference championship, and that generated a little bit of excitement and helped our credibility.

02-00:49:19 Cummins: Again, it’s just fascinating to me how much difference a coach makes coming in. You can never predict how Ben Braun would have done if he’d stayed for two more years or whatever, but to turn a team around like that.

02-00:49:38 Montgomery: Well, yeah, I had some credibility based on the fact that one, I’d been in the NBA, so that got their attention, because everybody thinks that well, he’s been in the NBA, so he knows what it takes, and so forth. And you do learn that. We’d also had a lot of success at Stanford, so it was hard for anybody to not at least acknowledge the fact that well, this guy knows how to win. You find that most kids, when something’s presented to them properly and fairly that they’ll respond. Some won’t, and that’s where you run into problems. But if you’re fair with them and know what you’re doing relative to the game they’ll respond to you. This group was certainly no exception.

02-00:50:24 Cummins: And how would you describe the differences between the students here playing for you and at Stanford.

02-00:50:34 Montgomery: Well, I’m tiring of the Stanford comparisons, just because—it just doesn’t work.

02-00:50:37 Cummins: All right.

02-00:50:38 Montgomery: You can’t—it’s a different deal. It was a new experience for me certainly. Really good kids, some were not tuned in academically, some had—their goal was the NBA, which is fairly typical of everybody that’s playing the game of basketball. We had a lot more kids with potential learning disabilities than— things that were not major disabilities, but attention-deficit disorder, for example, things that were a little bit, again, unique to me in dealing with those kinds of things. We had some kids with some difficult home backgrounds. Yet overall we had a good group of kids that just wanted to have a good basketball experience, which I find would be fairly standard. We were able to get them as much on the same page as we could and they all turned out—worked out pretty well. Now, we did have some things academically that we had to shore up, and we’ve constantly worked on that to where we now have got a good academic support system in place and are working harder to get them further along and move them through the process, because they’re all going to start thinking NBA draft at some point, and you have to try to get them as close as you can to that degree.

02-00:52:13 Cummins: What do you think the hardest thing about coaching is?

02-00:52:22 Montgomery: Coaching.

02-00:52:22 Cummins: Coaching in general, and then maybe here.

02-00:52:25 Montgomery: Oh, I think communication is probably the thing that—getting kids to understand and communicate in a clear manner so they understand what is expected of them and getting them to do that. Different people have different ways. I think some people try to coach by intimidation—yelling, screaming, cussing, this type of thing. I’ve never wanted to do that. But you’ve got to give them a clear path as to what you expect of them and try to be demanding of them, at the same time have them have an enjoyable experience. And that’s the hard part, is getting them to understand what their jobs are, what they need to do, what they need to do collectively so that we’re all on the same page. And you’re dealing with a lot of different kids from a lot of different backgrounds, some smarter than others, some more disciplined than others, some more talented than others, and you have to blend them all together to get an end product.

02-00:53:25 Cummins: Are you—in general, and we can take this off the tape if you don’t want to talk about it—satisfied with the resources that are available to you as a coach here?

02-00:53:46 Montgomery: Well, I think that we came into a situation here, one, at a time when the economy was plunging, and California as a state has had—so as the University of California is part of the system and part of the state of California, finances—and now maybe this has been the case forever. It probably has been.

02-00:54:13 Cummins: Not this bad though.

02-00:54:14 Montgomery: Yeah, well finances are a major consideration in everything. So instead of being in a position to go onward and upward: What do you need? What can we do? How do we make this better? We’ve been in a little bit of a—boy, we’ve got to figure out a way to make ends meet and we’re all going to have to make a little sacrifice, and so forth, to make it work. In a perfect world you’d rather have, “What do you need? What can we do? How can we help?” As compared to, “Well, we’re going to have to cut a little bit here. We can’t do that. We can’t do that.” So it has been—but I don’t think that’s unique to us. I think everybody’s in that same spot.

So again, there’s an arms race in college sports that has existed for a long time. I’ve never really agreed with it, but it’s a fact of life. And in recruiting kids they look at what have you done lately? What’s new? What’s big? What’s bright? We’ve just not been able to stay up with that. So it doesn’t change the quality of the institution, but it does affect you in other ways, sometimes the perception of what people think you are.

We tried to drop sports—probably rightly so from the standpoint of we’re trying to support twenty-nine sports. UCLA supports nineteen sports. But [it] wasn’t handled great and turned out to be a pretty big negative for us until we got it worked back out. But I think that’s probably been the nature of Cal over the years, the history. You look back and they’ve had racial issues—there’s just always been something that they’ve—it has been a little bit controversial or that they’ve had to deal with.

There are other schools, perhaps, that have—not that they haven’t had problems. SC has had problems with some of their—but they embrace athletics. It’s a big part of who they are/what they want to be. I don’t think that’s been the case at the University of California. I think there has always been a little bit of a—where did athletics fit? What is its place? So it has probably not been as smooth as it might be. But I think that’s the nature of the institution.

I think there’s always been discussion, there’s always been a little bit of a controversy, and it’s generally not quiet. It’s generally out in front for everybody to see. What it is is a great institution with a great physical layout and location, with a lot of great people that just always have something going on. [laughing]

02-00:57:34 Cummins: Yeah, and in a way it takes a particular kind of person to understand that and function with it.

02-00:57:43 Montgomery: Well, I think for kids that go to school here there’s some people that really thrive and/or relish that. There are others that would prefer not to deal with that, that would like a little smoother environment. So you have to be careful with your recruiting and make sure that you’re trying to recruit kids that can take advantage of the environment that exists here.

02-00:58:07 Cummins: It’s also trying for administrators and coaches I think as well. You’ve got to have that understanding.

02-00:58:18 Montgomery: Well, it helps. You’re still, at the end of the day my job is just to recruit basketball players that can thrive here, both athletically and [academically], and then try to put a product on the floor that people are proud of, and that we can win games. So I don’t need to get as involved with some of the other problems. I think it’s probably pretty well known that it is difficult to get things done here in a timely fashion. I think anybody that needs decisions made quickly and things to move quickly would probably be frustrated at some point.

02-00:58:58 Cummins: And that would show up for you vis-à-vis admissions issues, for example?

02-00:59:04 Montgomery: No, no. We’ve got some great people working up front that really understand the system and are able to help us with that. It’s just—you just don’t ask for something or you just don’t go to get a decision and have it made very quickly. It’s a lot of committees, a lot of people to make a decision, that have to be checked with, so it just takes time.

02-00:59:36 Cummins: Okay. What do you think about where all this is headed? Obviously intercollegiate athletics and the big time in particular.

02-00:59:48 Montgomery: Well, the thing that’s pretty obvious is that what athletics was conceived to be when it started out has changed, and the train’s pretty far down the track. I don’t think there’s any bringing it back. There’s an awful lot of money in big- time athletics, and wherever there’s that kind of money there’s going to be problems and decisions to be made. This bowl series, the football playoff series that’s coming up, is just astronomical in terms of its financial implications for everybody. There are lawsuits pending where student athletes think they should be paid, and they’re probably right, but it just opens up a whole new can of worms to deal with. Title IX has affected athletics. But it’s going to be interesting to see whether the NCAA, as it was conceived, will continue to stay together in its current form.

There’s just so much money involved. Coaches make too much money, the bowl system, TV packages are astronomical. And those—you really can’t afford to stay on the sideline if you want to stay and compete. There’s a tremendous arms war going on, with athletic facilities and those kinds of things. We’ve been a little bit a product of that with our football stadium and the high performance center, and we’re paying a little bit of a price for that. But it was necessary and had to be done. So I don’t know what—it’ll be interesting to see. I do think though that athletics as originally conceived, an opportunity just to compete and play and on a level playing field—it’ll be harder and harder to maintain that, that’s for sure.

Where the University of California fits in this whole thing? There are some people in our league that are investing tremendous amounts of money to have successful sports teams. They have embraced their sports program and it’s going to be—we’re going to have to work real hard to keep up, I think. We have great coaches here, and in some of the sports we’re able to get the very best student athletes, because academics is extremely important to them. Others—it’s going to be difficult. But Cal has always found a way to survive. [laughing] I think that sometimes the university system, and the university and the state of California are their own worst enemies, because they just can’t operate smoothly and stay out of each other’s way. So we’re probably going to see the privatization of a public institution here. It might be the only way we can survive.

02-01:03:01 Cummins: Yeah, there’s certainly a movement in that direction. There’s no question about that.

02-01:03:05 Montgomery: By necessity, compared to getting what—80 percent from the state to function and now we’re at 12 [percent] or something? It’s going to have to come from someplace.

02-01:03:15 Cummins: So you think there is a real possibility that we could end up with super conferences, move out of the NCAA, set up their own set of rules.

02-01:03:24 Montgomery: I do. I don’t know how soon or—but I do think that, because as these TV contracts and the bowl series—everybody can’t have the same vote, because one size doesn’t fit all. At some point it’s going to take a pretty courageous move by somebody that’s going to say look, we’re out. We’re going to take our group and we’re going over here, because we’re going to play for a football championship and we can’t afford to not do these things. So it’ll certainly be—the thing that’s going to take most of people’s attention here in the near future is the football playoff series. That’s going to—we’re at four, we’ll be at eight, and we may even go to sixteen, because there’s just too much money.

02-01:04:19 Cummins: Right. Geez, that’s astounding. It used to be people were upset increasing the number of games.

02-01:04:27 Montgomery: Sure. Well, it was when the opportunity to go to class and be a student was first and foremost.

02-01:04:31 Cummins: Yeah, and it’s not now.

02-01:04:32 Montgomery: Well, it is for some, but they’re being outvoted by—well, this bowl is worth $40 million and we need the money. And so we’re going to do that. Well, what about the two more weeks of missed class? Well, you’re just going to have to accommodate that.

02-01:04:51 Cummins: Exactly. That’s very well put I think. Because in the history you see this, where you have these attempted reform efforts. But it always comes down to the money in some respects.

02-01:05:11 Montgomery: Well, it’s just like the NCAA. We sell our basketball—the NCAA tournament for $16 billion dollars. And then the television [stations] turn around and say

we want five time-outs in a half and the time-outs are going to be two minutes and forty-five seconds. And then we as coaches, protecting our game say, “Well, we can’t do that. We can’t have more time-outs.” And they say, “Well, fine. Then let’s do that for $8 billion then. If you want to tell us how to sell our ads, let’s do it for—.” Well, no. So the next thing you know television is telling you you’re going to play on Thursday night and you’re going to play at eight, or you’re going to play at six and that’s what you’re going to do. And you don’t hear many people squawking, because we’ve taken the money, so they have the right to tell us what we’re going to do. A six o’clock game on a Thursday in Los Angeles? People are not going to go, because they can’t get across Los Angeles to get into the arena unless they take the day off. And it’s on television anyway—that’s why they moved it to six. So you’re going to say well, I’m just going to open a bottle of nice wine and sit and watch the game on television. So those are the kinds of things. Philosophically you don’t like it, but you also understand why, and you’d best just live with it.

02-01:06:40 Cummins: I think that also is where you really see the divide between a certain number of faculty who are always going to have their basic fundamental philosophical issues contrary to that whole—what you just laid out. And then you’ve got the administrators who—essentially it’s a very good way to look at it.

02-01:07:04 Montgomery: Well, I think the thing overriding is a good, solid, successful, well-run athletic department is a tremendous asset to a university. It should be a part of what a university is, but the tail shouldn’t wag the dog. It should be just a part and it should be done correctly. The donation levels from alums goes up when you’re successful. When there’s a feel-good from your athletic department— when our football team beats UCLA in football people feel good. It has nothing to do with the quality of your chemistry program. It has to do with the fact that my university just beat your university and I feel good about it. There’s just—everything is more positive now. But with that comes the risk of—what’s the word—problems. It can get out of control, the tail can wag the dog a little bit and it can bring some negative cloud.

02-01:08:28 Cummins: It’s interesting though, because the negatives never outweigh the positives. If you look at the history again, nationally, of intercollegiate athletics, with all the scandals, with all the controversy, all those problems—it just keeps growing. It’s the only institution I can think of that thrives on scandal and problems and gets better and better.

02-01:08:56 Montgomery: Well, I think ultimately, at the end of the day, I don’t think people really care. They want to see—it’s like the steroid thing. Okay—I want to see him hit sixty home runs. I don’t really care how he got the muscles or what performance enhancing—at the end of the day, we can take a very philosophical view, but at the end of the day I think the majority of the people

don’t want to care. They don’t want to listen to why. Just show me the—and so, even in athletics you know, somebody cheated and got an athlete and so forth. Eh, you know, nobody likes it, they’d prefer—but at the end of the day they’re not going to get too concerned about it. It’s just—I might say well, they’re cheating. And they’ll look—yeah, yeah, okay. So what’s new?

02-01:09:54 Cummins: Yeah, exactly. So what’s new.

02-01:09:57 Montgomery: All right, John.

02-01:09:58 Cummins: Thank you.

02-01:09:58 Montgomery: You’re welcome.

[End of Interview]