What John Chaney meant to me and the Black community in America | Marcus Hayes

I came to Philadelphia in 1995, just a farm boy with a fancy diploma. Within a year of my arrival, I met both Michael Jordan and John Chaney.

Jordan was raging through his second act, earning his 10th All-Star spot, his eighth scoring title, and his fourth NBA title. He’d also won an NCAA championship with North Carolina, the official basketball team of my gigantic extended family. I owned two versions of Jordan’s eponymous shoes.

Chaney? He was coaching an unremarkable Temple team whose leading scorer, Marc Jackson, averaged slightly less than 16 points, with no other scorer hitting 10. That team won just 20 games, earned a modest No. 7 seed, and advanced to the second round of the NCAA Tournament.

On paper, the coach was far less impressive than the player.

In person, it wasn’t even close.

Jordan was a brand. Chaney was an institution.

But Chaney wasn’t just an institution. Along with a handful of other Black coaches, Chaney helped change an institution -- the insular, powerful world of college basketball coaching. It was a world dominated by Bobby Knights and Dean Smiths; the stately legend of John Wooden; the hoary ghost of Adolph Rupp. It was a world made accessible to people like me by the late John Thompson at Georgetown; by Nolan Richardson at Tulsa and Arkansas; and, in gritty North Philadelphia, by John Chaney, who died Friday. He was 89.

You’ve heard this before, but for Coach Chaney this is true: Like Thompson and Richardson, Chaney will live forever through the lives he so deeply touched; and through lives he never knew he touched.

“They were passionate educators,” said Phil Martelli, the former St. Joseph’s coach and Philadelphia hoop icon. “Basketball was just their vehicle. They wanted to pass on an education about life. They had moved up, and they were going to turn around and lift the next young person up, so that young person could go back and change his family.

“In a way, they were basketball preachers.”

» READ MORE: John Chaney throughout the years: See how the legendary Temple coach built a legacy in Philly

This sort of figure was incredibly important to the Black community in America. John Chaney was a success story, with his nose clean, his dignity intact, his character unassailable. There weren’t many like him; at least, not many so visible. Ever. Jackie Robinson. Bill Russell. Julius Erving. Maybe Magic Johnson. Others, surely, whom I’m forgetting. There are more now, because of men like Chaney, whose life was led in a spotlight and a time for which he was uniquely suited.

The exploding industry of men’s college basketball featured only a handful of Black coaches, and even fewer successful Black coaches, and even fewer Black coaches who got exposure. It is indescribable, the impact to young Black players and aspiring coaches, to see Chaney, lank and bowed and disheveled, tromping the same sidelines at Temple with the same unbridled fire as lank, bowed, disheveled Jim Boeheim. It was one of the few industries in which the glass ceiling had been shattered.

And Chaney was on TV. On ESPN. Part of March Madness. An annual fixture on Comcast SportsNet on Christmas Eve, the high point of the year’s episodes of Daily News Live. He was right there, showing three generations of people who looked like him that they could do what he had done.

Chaney, by the mid-1990s, had endured a lifetime of endless, senseless discrimination, just like my mother; they were born the same year, and both in the South, he in Jacksonville, Fla., she in rural North Carolina. The Ku Klux Klan once burned a cross in his family’s yard. My mother -- she won’t even tell me all that she’s been through. Somehow, she remains with us. They were made from the same mold.

He was born two years after my father, who, like Chaney, got his start at a historically Black college. My dad is gone, but one of his proudest accomplishments was that he attended North Carolina A&T. Chaney played at Bethune-Cookman in Daytona Beach, Fla., then coached at Cheyney State, on the border of Chester County, where his family moved when he was in eighth grade.

This was the climate of college basketball back then: Chaney left Bethune-Cookman in 1955, six years before Loyola of Chicago shattered the longstanding quota system and played more than three Black players at once. That was 1961. The first Black head coach of a major college team wouldn’t be hired until 1967 -- John McLendon, at Cleveland State. It took three more years before Illinois State hired the second, Will Robinson.

This was the world in which Chaney always lived. Chaney made it his life’s work to create opportunities for young Black men. This was the root of his scorn for Proposition 48, an academic watermark whose biased, draconian nature were modified thanks partly to Chaney’s outrage and protests. But make no mistake: He wanted his players to achieve.

He insisted that his players prioritize discipline, and selflessness, and teamwork. He never made it to a Final Four, but he was a stone-cold winner.

Current Temple coach Aaron McKie says Chaney “changed my life” in a tweet sent Jan. 21, Chaney’s final birthday.

South Carolina women’s coach and Dobbins Tech graduate Dawn Staley tweeted: “Giver to the voiceless, the underprivileged, (and) the game ... "

Kentucky coach John Calipari, perhaps Chaney’s most bitter foe on the court, grew to adore the coach. Chaney famously interrupted Calipari’s postgame press conference after a 1994 game against the University of Massachusetts, where Calipari coached then, and threatened to kill Calipari, among other things. Calipari tweeted Friday:

“Coach Chaney and I fought every game we competed -- as everyone knows, sometimes literally -- but in the end he was my friend.”

To be in John Chaney’s presence, especially at the height of his outrage and passion, was to be in the presence of animate authenticity. To experience John Chaney talking about citizenship, and accountability, and teamwork, was to hear an oracle’s sermon. To watch John Chaney work on a sideline was to watch a master at an easel; a conductor on his rostrum.

I’ve been lucky enough to cover Jordan and Tiger and Nicklaus; Belichick and Bonds and Tom bleepin’ Brady. John Chaney is the only one who intimidated me.

And he’s the only sports figure that I’ve ever called “Coach.”