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Friday, January 27, 2006

KNOXVILLE – Like a fiery television evangelist, Jewish Bostonian Bruce Pearl came to Knoxville last spring to preach the Big Orange Gospel from the pinnacle of Rocky Top. The new head men’s basketball coach on The University of Tennessee campus appears to be the second coming of legendary coach Ray Mears, the winningest men’s hoops coach the program has ever known and the godfather of “Big Orange Country.”

With his energetic, enigmatic personality, Pearl strapped on Big Orange suspenders, rolled up his sleeves, and went to work relentlessly in promoting the program, recruiting the nation and turning up UT’s first Top 10 class ever, according to guru Bob Gibbons, coaching up a team that has marginal talent, and using his brilliant intellect to outsmart his opponents and outwork them, too. Along the way, he’s ruffled feathers just like Mears used to do in the 1960’s and 1970’s when Stokely Athletics Center was bursting at the seams with maniacal fans.

Pearl’s hard work has resulted in Tennessee sitting in the catbird seat in the Southeastern Conference race. The Vols are #1 in the SEC East and on a roll, with huge wins over nationally-ranked powers Texas on the road and Florida at home, a game that attracted over 24,000 fans to Thompson-Boling Arena, which threatens to set an all-time league record of 26,000 for a regular season game before this year is over.

Leading the conference in turnover margin, the style of play that Pearl has brought to the South shows that defense is truly the key to winning championships in every sport. That's one reason why Pearl never gets upset much when his players mess up on offense, as long as they make up for it on defense and hustle.

The team has reacted to Pearl’s coaching by rocketing to #3 nationally in the RPI and cracking the Top 20 in the polls. Forward Andre Patterson responded so positively to being a starter in the lop-sided road win at Mississippi State Wednesday night that he turned in his best performance of the year, and it was equally gratifying to see how Stanley Asumnu responded so positively to having to come off the bench, also turning in what might have been his best game as a Vol. Both benefited. Pearl had hinted that he would make this lineup change on the Vol Calls radio show that he hosts every Monday night during the season.

Equally good news for Tennessee fans from Wednesday night was that Florida went down again on the road, putting UT in firm control of 1st place in the SEC East. LSU is the only team in the conference that is still unbeaten in league play, but the Vols have two fewer losses than LSU does overall. Who would have ever thought that Tennessee would be in this position now?

The Big Orange can easily win its next three home games in a row, sweeping South Carolina, and then beating Vanderbilt and Ole Miss, and wind up going to Lexington to face a struggling Kentucky Wildcat team on a roll at 16-3 and on a 5-game winning streak. In fact, looking at the remainder of the Vol schedule, they might even be favored to win all the rest of their games with the exception of Florida in Gainesville. If they did that, that would be a miraculous achievement, perhaps the best job in college basketball. That’s why many national media are openly saying that Pearl should be National Coach of the Year.
Pearl knows that Tennessee has been a sleeping giant in men’s basketball for decades, with pent-up passion that was due to several botched coaching hires by former UT Athletics Director Doug Dickey, who seemed to have no clue how to run a hoops program properly. Dickey’s successor, Mike Hamilton, hit a grand slam home run in his first major hire in landing Pearl, who has endeared himself to the Vol faithful by giving bushels of credit to Mears, whose flair for promotional skills rivaled his.
Legendary Voice of the Vols Emeritus John Ward told the Big Orange Tipoff Club in Knoxville two weeks ago that he started each radio broadcast with “It's Basketball Time in Tennessee!” long before he ever broadcasted a UT football game. The term “Big Orange Country” was coined by Ray Mears, the only basketball coach in history who beat Kentucky 15 times in 15 years. Pearl told Mears in one of their first meetings that he would know he had arrived as Tennessee’s coach once Kentucky wound up hating him as much as they did Mears.
Pearl has tapped into this hysteria with his ebullient, intense personality. Mears, who along with fiery and always-animated Associate Coach Stu Aberdeen, brought national prominence to Tennessee by recruiting New Yorkers Ernie Grunfeld and Bernard King, the best duo in the history of the SEC, was forced to retire in his prime due to manic depression.
Pearl, on the other hand, seems to run on adrenalin and is driven to succeed. He is anything but politically correct and he doesn’t try to be. He’s already gotten under the skin of John Brady at LSU and John Calipari at Memphis. He’s been compared to Dale Brown and Rick Pitino, in addition to Mears, in his irrepressible style.
A near-capacity crowd is expected again tomorrow afternoon to see if Tennessee can sweep the South Carolina Gamecocks for the first time since Jerry Green did it in 2001 en route to his fourth NCAA Tournament appearance in a row. Since then, UT hasn’t been to the Big Dance in any of the last four seasons under Buzz Peterson. Pearl has never experienced this kind of big-time success himself, even though he won a national championship at Southern Indiana and had a Sweet 16 team at Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Thus, both he and his team are in uncharted waters and in a hoops stratosphere.
There has been a cacophony of media attention showered on Pearl and Tennessee this week. Stories have appeared on ESPN and CBS, in USA Today, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and Fox Sports, all featuring the Big Orange Volunteers front and center. Time will tell if this team can handle prosperity. Some projections are that Tennessee could wind up with a #3 seed in the NCAA Tournament, their highest in school history. For now, Tennessee fans are content that Pearl has their Vols in a Big Orange Whirl.

(John Mark Hancock is a freelance journalist and columnist who writes weekly opinion commentary for this website that is syndicated and distributed to other media. If you are interested in his copyrighted sports articles and human interest stories, please contact him in Knoxville directly by e-mail at jmh@icx.net ).