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SPORTS The Shu Fits

John Shumate teaches-and cares. But can he win with SMU’s standards?
By Eric Celeste |

Why is John Shumate smiling? Given the Catch-22 demands of his job-finding great players who are good students, even though most good students aren’t great players-it’s appropriate to wonder if coach is all there. Maybe the job’s finally driven him loco. Muy, muy loco.

Hey, coach. Need you be reminded of your job description? You’re supposed to recruit oxymorons (student-athletes) who, by SMU’s demanding standards, are the brightest in the country. But your school’s Pye-in-the-sky standards mean you can’t use some kids who would be admitted to Notre Dame. Notre Dame! Then, you have to fill the seats during home games. This at SMU, where “school spirit” is thought to be a phantom that haunts keg parties. Oh, yeah, you also need to win lots of games. And then there’s your SMU record: 41-58, as of press time, over almost four full seasons.

Shumate is smiling, though, and he hasn’t succumbed to “March Madness,” that month of the NCAA playoff tournament. No, it’s because he’s not discussing the aforementioned problems. He’s talking about his 7-year-old son, John Anthony.

“He’s real sensitive, real perceptive,” Shumate says, beaming. He glances at a wall where crayon drawings from his two children hang, one depicting a scene of imagined basketball glory: SMU 100, Arkansas 10. “The other day, he was watching the Michael Jordan [highlight] tape, and he turned to me and said, ’Dad, what NBA team do you want me to be on?’” The question’s innocence hits John Shumate-“Mr. Cool,” as the 6-foot-9. former NBA journeyman was dubbed due to his usual brooding, stoic style-and his booming, baritone laugh echoes through the Moody Coliseum hallways.

Shumate’s joy in telling parental anecdotes says as much about his coaching as it does about his family. “John is guided by the belief that what he wants for his son or daughter, he wants for the student-athletes he comes into contact with,” says Shumate’s father-in-law, Dr. Morrison Warren. So to see where SMU is going, and whether its myriad problems can be solved, it’s necessary to understand John Shumate. He’s not your typical coach- he’s got his priorities straight. He’s competitive and wants to win, but he doesn’t coach so he can win games and be famous. He has a coaching philosophy centered around the student, not his personal achievement, and that’s why he embraces the rigorous (some say impossible) demands of SMU.



Plato, who advised his followers to balance pursuits of the mind with those of the body, may have been the first advocate of the student-athlete. But John Shumate’s own coaching philosophy-his belief that he is a teacher charged with developing each player’s athletic and academic potential-was derived not from Plato, but from his own life experiences.

In each phase of his life, Shumate had at least one mentor to help him develop goals and overcome obstacles. At first it was his family. He was born in 1952 in Greenville, S.C., but he grew up in the projects of Newark and Elizabeth. N.J., where food supplies and life expectancy were low. His father, a Pentecostal minister, and his mother provided a stable family environment, a ghetto oasis. “Even though I came from the hard-core projects, infested with robbers, murderers, killers, drug dealers, dope users and glue sniffers, I always had positive role models in my family,’” Shumate says.

In his freshman year of high school, Shumate was cut from his basketball team and ran home crying. He improved his game, made the team his sophomore year and eventually became a high-school Ail-American.

That ability allowed him to enroll at Notre Dame in 1970, when coach Digger Phelps entered his life. Digger and “Shu” became fast friends. Phelps preached education, compassion and togetherness to his team. He showed that he cared about each player’s school life. Those things stuck with Shumate.

Then, in his sophomore year, Shumate almost died. A blood clot developed in one of his lungs and forced him to the hospital, where it took round-the-clock care to save his life. “I overheard the doctor say to my father, ’It could go either way,’ ” Shumate recalls. It was in the hospital, he says, with electrodes hooked to his chest, that he “learned what life was all about. You have only today to get done what you need to get done, because tomorrow isn’t promised to you.”

He recovered physically, going on to be-come an Ail-American. He took his education more seriously, graduating with a degree in sociology. He became more determined, more introspective. He also began his quest for a personal philosophy, an understanding of what he was doing that would give his life meaning.

Realizing that playing basketball wasn’t his sole purpose in life helped Shumate deal with an unhappy career in professional ball. He played from 1974 through 1980 for four teams, hampered by the blood clots that developed in his legs. He lost a lot of money because of poor investment advice from agents-a fraudulent tax shelter was his biggest money-sapper. But he did meet his wife, who led him to her father, his current mentor, Dr. Morrison “Dit” Warren.

Warren, 68, was the epitome of the student-athlete. Warren decided early on that the best way to fight racism was through education, and his ticket to education was football. Warren loved to read, and. after a stint in WWII, did well at Arizona State University and was also captain of the football team. He then began his 40-plus-year career as an educator and civic leader, including time spent as a school principal, the first black Phoenix city councilman (1966) and a professor at ASU in the ’70s.

While Shumate was playing in the NBA and not having much fun (unless you count his role as a basketball player going against Julius Erving’s team in the 1979 movie The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh), it was Warren who helped him put those dismal years into perspective. Shumate respected Warren’s accomplishments and his advice, and Warren nurtured his son-in-law’s desire to make a difference by showing him the rewards of teaching.

Still, the end of his pro career in 1980 wasn’t easy. He hadn’t planned to be a coach. “I thought I’d always be playing basketball,” Shumate says. “I thought that up until the last day I played basketball.” In 1981, just after his daughter was born, he went back to Notre Dame as a volunteer assistant to Phelps, where he worked without pay for two years. Then from ’83 to ’86, he went to Grand Canyon College in Phoenix. There his son was born, and Shumate’s coaching style began to emerge.

“I had to get rid of some key players, because they didn’t go to class,” he says. He won 58, lost 33, and his team’s GPA went from 1.3 to 2.5. Dr. Warren was proud. “I try to help him [Shumate] see the court as a place to teach,” he says. “Another person’s teaching area may be in the lab; John’s is on the court.”

He headed back once more to Notre Dame from 1986 to 1988 as an assistant coach. In 1988, SMU basketball coach Dave Bliss left for New Mexico, driven away by new SMU President A. Kenneth Pye and his strict admissions standards. Because of those same standards, Shumate came to SMU. It was the ideal place to test his coaching philosophy. The place to see just how tough it is to hold that philosophy and win ball games.



I WAS TALKING TO A COUPLE OF BIG-TIME coaches who were laughing at me,” Shumate says. “They said, ’John, you find guys who are good students, then you ask them, Oh, yeah, can you play? We take good ballplayers and say, ’Oh, yeah, by the way, can you read?’” He shakes his head. “It’s used against us in recruiting. Kids say, ’I don’t know if I can make it at SMU.’ I tell them that the hardest part of college is getting accepted.”

He’s right. At SMU, an athlete must score better than 900 on the SAT and have a 2.7 (C) grade point average in 13 core, or non-elective, high-school courses-or be classified as “marginal.” Marginal students’ applications are decided upon by admissions officers on a case-by-case basis; but SMU accepts no athlete who scores below 700 on the SAT.

Just which kids do get accepted causes the most tension at SMU. In one of the more hotly debated cases of fall 1988, high-school star Bart Beasley, a kid with potential and a good attitude, was rejected by SMU. So he went to Notre Dame. “That was a mistake,” Shumate says. Good kids will excel-as he did- if given encouragement, he says.

But applicants whose scores hover just above 700 on the SAT. no matter how talented as players, will have trouble getting into SMU. Because even though President Pye says. “I would prefer if they [the team] win more frequently,” he also leaves coaches out of the final decision-making process. “You would expect any coach who wants to win to bring kids in on the [academic] margins [for admittance],” Pye says. “Coaches have much less faith in SATs than admissions officers do. But. usually, the percentages work. The same coaches that work the percentages in their sport. . .don’t in admissions.”

So Shumate has been forced to recruit “project” players. Players who are capable students and who need guidance to develop into basketball players talented enough to win consistently-to become what sports-caster Dick Vitale calls PTPs: Prime Time Players. That’s where Shumate steps in, at least for the basketball part. But if players have trouble in academics once they’re in, how much should a coach get involved? Coach your basketball, but stay the hell away from the classroom, goes one school of thought on the Hilltop. One professor, though, marveled at Shumate’s strict classroom attendance requirements and told him he was too tough on the players-they don’t skip class like normal students, he joked. So Shumate does what he can: preaching, advising, cajoling. He seeks the mean between the extremes. He’d like to be more involved, but understands why restrictions are there.

Shumate’s graduate assistant, Eric Lon-gino, says Shumate does much more than most coaches. Longino played his senior year under Shumate in 1988, led the team in scoring and left without a degree to play in the Continental Basketball Association, the NBA’s minor league, where he quickly became unhappy. Shumate told him to come back and finish his degree, which he did, and then Shumate offered him the graduate assistant slot when it opened up. “A lot of coaches say they’ll help, but he really meant it,” Longino says. “He’s very good with young men, teaching them the game of life. That’s what he’s about.”

“But,” Longino adds, “he’s not easy.” Shumate admits that. He says he was tough the first few years because he inherited problems, kids that didn’t belong, and he had some housecleaning to do. That’s what made the early seasons a time “I wouldn’t wish on anybody.” During that period and even now, he turns inward when looking for solutions, which hasn’t helped soften the perception of him as aloof, unemotional, stoic.

Well, maybe stoic, but certainly not a Stoic. Stoics believed that a person’s primary duty is to conform to destiny. Shumate’s philosophy is that he’s shaping destinies. “If I can give someone a little bit of information to make their life a little better, then I won’t die in vain. Too many people just exist. I want to grow, get better, achieve.”

Again, he looks at the drawings on his wall. “There wasn’t a lot of happiness growing up. But when I look at my son, my daughter, my kids-they bring joy to me, and I smile.”

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