Cougs’ miracle worker isn’t finished just yet

Published 9:00 pm Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Tuesday’s announcement that Dick Bennett would step down after the conclusion of the Washington State Cougars’ season was just that – an announcement.

Similarly, the announcement that his son and top assistant, Tony Bennett, will take over the program was a simple public notice of a plan designed for next season.

No sooner.

Make no mistake; for the last two games of the regular season and however long the Cougars will last in the Pac-10 Tournament, Dick Bennett is the boss.

Tony knows this. He also knows his place. He has no delusions that Dad will give him the keys to the car before he’s done driving it. Tony will have no training period as the head guy at Arizona and Arizona State this week.

Not while the Old Man’s around.

“I’ve got my hands full trying to keep him away from the officials,” Tony said. “That’s about as big a role as I can handle. This is his team and this is his time.”

The elder Bennett, 62, is nearing the end of 38 glorious years of coaching college basketball. Despite leading Wisconsin to the Final Four in 2000 and turning a 4-24 Wisconsin-Green Bay team in 1986 to an NCAA Tournament team in 1991, it was at Washington State where Bennett may have pulled off his greatest achievement.

That is, he made the Cougars competitive. Under Bennett’s style of basketball – getting five guys to kill themselves playing defense and frustrate opponents by playing a deliberate offense – the Cougars became a team everyone dreaded playing.

Where would 14th-ranked Washington be had it not found itself on the business end of a two-game Coug sweep, in which WSU outscored the Huskies by a combined 20 points? The Huskies beat every other Pac-10 team at least once. Take away the Cougars and Washington is one game ahead of conference-leader UCLA at 13-3 and 24-3 overall.

In his long career, Bennett earned a level of respect few do. Oregon State coach Jay John is one of Bennett’s many admirers, admirers who all used the word “integrity” in describing him.

“There’s happiness because everything that is good about college basketball is espoused in Dick Bennett,” John said Tuesday, upon hearing of Bennett’s retirement. “It’s also a sad day because of the same thing.”

As anyone who remembers Washington State under Paul Graham and Kevin Eastman, not to mention the annual Cougar occupancy at or near the conference basement since an NIT bid in 1996 will attest, getting the Cougars competitive was college basketball’s equivalent of the development of penicillin.

Remember seven victories in 50 Pac-10 games before Bennett’s arrival? Remember the 27 straight defeats on the road? Remember the 22 straight Pac-10 road losses? Remember the 47 straight losses at UCLA? Remember the 17-game slide to Stanford?

Remember the Cougars’ 70-63 upset win at No. 11 Arizona, which broke a 38-game losing streak to the Wildcats and a 48-game skid to ranked opponents?

Bennett’s record at WSU is 36-46, which, considering the Cougars were 13-33 in Graham’s final two seasons, is stunning. It could have been even better, too, because this season alone, WSU has lost five games by two points apiece.

To those who follow the Pac-10 in general and WSU in particular, those numbers alone are reasons to proclaim Bennett as a miracle worker, to anoint him as one of the greatest coaches of all time in any sport, at any level.

Not Bennett.

“I was never aware of those streaks,” he said. “As I’ve said before, coaches and writers are kindred spirits. We’ve got to make sense out of what happened and go on. I don’t read newspapers. That’s what I learned from Bart Starr when I was coaching high school ball. He said it doesn’t do any good. It gets you too high or too low. I’ve pretty much for at least 30 years have not read the papers, other than stuff about others.

“So I was really unaware of those streaks. They didn’t mean as much to me because I wasn’t a part of it. That was maybe the little bit of success that we had on the floor, from a bottom-line standpoint. We erased some of them. We started a few others, I think, though.”

Then he laughed.

Bennett laughed because he can. These are good times for him, and not just because he’s days away from playing golf.

Bennett said he knows well what being a “Coug” is about and the pride associated with it. Bennett has coached more than 800 college games and won nearly 500.

Yet, the past 82 games, he said, have come during some of the most enjoyable times in his career.

“Every school I coached at prior to WSU, liked what I had done after I did it, after we had success,” Bennett said. “WSU just liked the fact that I came here and seemed to appreciate everything along the way, even though we never won. That’s different.”

Maybe someday, Dick Bennett will understand why. Maybe he’ll even read a few past newspaper stories about himself. Maybe he’ll let himself smile when he thinks of his career.

For now, though, he has to prepare for Arizona.

After all, he’s still the boss.