Philadelphia lost another basketball legend, Jay Norman | Mike Jensen

Ryan Haigh, now the head basketball coach at Holy Family University, also played guard for the school, still remembers a season the team was pretty good, rising in the national rankings until its point guard got hurt. At practices, the team getting better, the guards would be going hard.

“We were getting crushed,” Haigh said this week. “Our guards coach would kill us.”

He brings it up (with affection) because of what was going on at the other end of the gym. Haigh would look down at the big men, see them with this Philadelphia basketball legend, by then in his 70s.

“He would be down there just talking to them,” Haigh remembers.

Haigh would ask what was going on. The big men would tell him Jay Norman was explaining the game.

“He taught them tricks of the trade, getting an edge over an opponent,” Haigh said. “What he did was -- he was building confidence.”

“He didn’t want any excuses,” said former Holy Family head coach Alfred Johnson. “I was smart enough to leave him alone.”

If a big man went to Johnson asking about an X-and-O thing, the head coach said, he would simply say, “What did he tell you?”

They’d tell him what Norman had said.

“That’s how you do it,” Johnson would say.

For decades, Temple big men who went on to professional careers, from John Baum to Ollie Johnson to Tim Perry, saw it the same way, all crediting this man for giving them the needed tools.

Jay Norman died last weekend, age 87. The sadness was amplified by the death of John Chaney. But Chaney’s death can’t completely overshadow this singular basketball life.

Find another person on the planet who at 6-foot-3, averaged 11.4 rebounds for his college career, 12.4 over his last two seasons, played in two Final Fours, took down 17 rebounds in one national semifinal, had 16 points and six rebounds in the other.

Maybe he knew a few things.

“He’d spin Temple stories,” said Johnson, now an assistant coach at Elizabeth City State but a Philly lifer, who loved that he got Norman on his bench for his entire time in charge at Holy Family from 2003-10. “He was proud of what he accomplished at Temple as a player and as a coach. For our guys, it was good to hear. He had been there and done that. He was telling them things that he knew worked. They took to that. He taught positioning, how to read the basketball, how to read the pass. Things often taken for granted.”

How did Johnson get Norman to join him?

“Actually through Bill Ellerbee,” Johnson said, mentioning the great Simon Gratz High coach who joined Chaney’s Temple staff years after Norman had left it. Johnson explained that he went to coach St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and always had the dream of working with Ellerbee but knew Ellerbee wasn’t going down to Maryland. However, Ellerbee mentioned that Jay Norman would go down to Baltimore to visit his daughter. A connection was made.

“He’d stop by practice,” Johnson said. “It wasn’t that bad a drive. When I got the head job at Holy Family, he was the first person I called.”

After Norman accepted, “the whole first season I couldn’t stop thanking him,” Johnson remembers. “He finally said, ‘Listen, I’m here.’ "

Norman upped the ante a couple of years later. Tim Perry, after his NBA time, was interested in getting into coaching. So for five years, Holy Family big men didn’t just have Norman every day, they had Perry.

“For real, you can get him?” Johnson remembers saying.

How did the Norman-Perry coaching pair work?

“Fantastic and funny,” Johnson said. “At that point in Jay’s career, he couldn’t demonstrate things. He had his chair. He would relay to Timmy what he wanted -- he was hands-on, but Timmy would take them through everything. It was fantastic.”

Haigh said it only dawned on him after Chaney and then Norman died how maybe he had a little spot on the John Chaney coaching tree, a still-growing branch off a sturdy Norman branch.

Norman was the first Temple player to put up 1,000 points and 1,000 rebounds, back in the days you got three seasons, and he got to those two Final Fours. (Look up a one-point heartbreak to eventual NCAA champ Kentucky in the 1958 semis.) Eventually joining Harry Litwack’s staff, continuing through Don Casey, including the 1988 Chaney season when the Owls reached No. 1, Norman also taught.

“My elementary school gym teacher,” South Carolina women’s coach and North Philly legend Dawn Staley noted this week on Twitter, adding that “Mr. Norman” was a flawless dresser and “we can not forget about him being the first person who sported a beautiful bald head.”

“Old-timers would be in our gym, they’d say, ‘Is that Jay Norman?’ " Johnson said of the Holy Family years. “Ollie Johnson called Sunday morning. He said he wouldn’t have been in the pros without him.”

“The definition of old school,” Haigh said. “Call it the way you see it.”

Texts were flying around last weekend with Jay Norman sayings.

“Don’t go out there with a flyswatter,” Haigh said, reading one of those texts on his phone. “Hit ‘em with a [expletive] hammer.”