PITTSBURGH — He still talks to her.
He touches his reddened eyes, smiles softly, shakes his head, of course he still talks to her.
Late at night, driving home from the gym, traveling from recruit to recruit, the coach of the nation’s top-ranked college basketball team still talks to his younger sister.
She was also a basketball coach, remember? She once took a team to the NCAA tournament in the same year he did, remember?
There’s a lot they can still share. There’s a lot he can still learn.
Almost three years after the unexpected death of Army women’s coach Maggie Dixon, in the quiet of his thoughts, Pittsburgh men’s coach Jamie Dixon still talks to her.
“I always thought she’d be the first one to win a national championship,” he said. “Maybe now we can win one together.”
So it is that this week’s flashy bit of sports news — Pitt reaching the No. 1 basketball ranking for the first time in its 101-year history — is really about something much simpler.
It is the story of a Southern California kid who, having spent his life searching the world for basketball fulfillment, is finally reaching it with strength from home.
Home is where parents Jim and Marge — whom he still phones every day — gave him the work ethic to lead Pitt to the top after a career spent bouncing around the bottom, playing professionally in four minor leagues in four countries, serving as an assistant coach for five teams.
Not counting the time he taught basketball to 10-year-old girls in New Zealand.
“You know how you always think of your children as kids?” said father Jim, a screenwriter. “Not my son. He’s a real man.”
Home is where one sister, Julie Dixon Silva, legal advisor to Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley, would be there with support as he endured a ruptured pancreas in Holland, a freezing winter with no car in La Crosse, Wis., and decrepit apartments everywhere.
“We’ve always been there for each other,” Julie said. “We’re always there to put away the chairs and mop up under the basket.”
Home is where his other sister, Maggie, the baby of the family, a dozen years younger than Jamie, grew into not only a close friend, but a valued colleague as coach of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
“They were really close; she idolized Jamie. They talked all the time. They relied on each other,” said Ben Howland, the UCLA coach and longtime Dixon friend.
In the spring of 2006, with the family in the stands for both conference tournaments, Jamie and Maggie became the first sibling coaches to lead their teams to the NCAA tournament in the same season.
About a month later, Maggie, 28, collapsed and died.
She had suffered an arrhythmic episode to a heart that was later determined to be enlarged.
The college basketball world lost one of its shining new stars. The family guy lost a bit of his soul.
“Jamie lost one of his best friends in the world,” Howland said.
One moment she was being carried off the court after leading the Cadets to their first women’s tournament appearance.
The next moment she was being buried in the West Point cemetery by workers who loved her like her players.
“For whatever reason, somehow, she was very good friends with the person who runs the cemetery,” said Dixon, shaking his head, his eyes filling again. “This guy takes perfect care of her spot.”
That spot remains in his heart, where, now and forever, he is coaching for two.
“We didn’t talk x’s and o’s, we talked people and relationships, bigger picture stuff,” Dixon said. “She made me appreciate things.”
His team is 14-0, the Panthers have three senior starters who could lead them deep into March, and Dixon has won a startling 79 percent of his games since being named head coach six years ago.
But what makes Dixon unique is that he has done it through that bigger picture stuff.
At the start of Saturday’s interview for this story, in a dining area underneath Peterson Events Center, he cut his two young children’s waffles and retrieved their bagels.
In the middle of the interview, upstairs in his office, his 6-year-old son, Jack, plopped down next to me and began playing a video game.
Later, Jack and his 4-year-old sister, Shannon, asked another reporter to join them in a search for an arena ice cream vendor.
“When it comes to family, this guy is the real deal,” Howland said. “This guy is a rock.”
At the end of the interview, Dixon politely requested that I remind everyone back in Los Angeles of sister Julie’s job title.
“He told me he was going to do that because he thought it had not been in the newspaper yet, and he wanted everyone to know,” Julie said. “Now who thinks of things like that?”
Immediately after the interview, I phoned Howland, who is like another part of the family, having coached with Dixon at three schools. When Howland left Pitt for UCLA in 2003, Dixon was his top assistant, and he held a job at UCLA open for him.
“No way I’d be sitting here today without Jamie Dixon,” Howland said. “He was the key to everything we did.”
In a move typical of Dixon’s career, Panthers officials interviewed other candidates before finally promoting the guy they should have hired in the first place.
Since then, the men talk at least twice a week, Howland’s daughter Meredith even temporarily living with the Dixon family while attending Pitt.
When asked about differences between himself and Howland, Dixon paused and grinned.
“I’m, um, probably a little more laid back than he would be,” he said.
Howland seemed to agree.
“Remember, the guy was a child TV star!” Howland said.
Oh yeah, that. While growing up, Dixon appeared in several commercials. In his early 20s, his acting career culminated in a Bud Lite ad that finally featured him standing on a basketball court.
While a woman dunked over him.
Not exactly the Hollywood type, Dixon would prefer talking about something a bit more old-fashioned, like a rocking chair.
He bought it a couple of years ago from a roadside stand in Connecticut. He bought it while driving from a recruit’s house to the big, new, bare home of his sister.
Yeah, he bought it for Maggie.
It was more than a piece of furniture, it symbolized their relationship, the big brother taking care of the little sister, making her feel at home, filling up the empty spaces.
“She told our whole family that story, she thought it was the greatest thing,” Dixon said. “She made it like I furnished her whole house.”
Today, the chair furnishes his house, his heart, rocking back and forth in a silent memorial to the inspiration behind basketball’s hottest coach.
Sometimes he even sits on it. There is always room for two.
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