The Whittler

He hates complication, hates fancy, hates confusion. Pound cake! THAT'S what I want! No ICIN' on your ass! Hated it that time Cosby took him to Le Bee Fin for steak a la BUBAB and chicken au FWABWAH. He would far rather haul a bushel of crabs or a couple of pounds of pig's feet up to his hotel room, strip naked, cover the bed with towels and eat till it all runs out his ears. Can't trust those people cooking in restaurants, can't trust that world out there. Far rather spend half a day alone at the Italian market, picking and peering at six or seven of everything for each one he buys, cackling and fussing with the vendors, then taking it all home and cooking a soup or a stew, eating a bowl of it and pouring the rest into plastic containers to give away. "Just goin' back to where my mama took me," he says. "Just goin' where I'm from." He would far rather park in front of a tiny North Philly barbecue joint with bars on the windows, pick his own personal slab of ribs—no sauce, nothing to cover the essence, just meat and bone—and demolish it sitting in the car, with a German beer whose name he loves to mangle, Fassahassawassabassa, plucked from the cooler in his trunk. Then sleep on a full belly and spend the next day telling you how good his rib place is and how pathetic yours is, just itching for another argument in which he's never wrong.

That's what he wants from his players, too—meat and bone. He'll rinse every sauce off them, stick them back out there, naked as babies, and say, Here's how you make a bounce pass. Here's how you dribble. Here's where you put your left foot and here's where you put your right and this is where you turn your head and don't try anything unexpected or God have mercy on your 18-year-old fatherless soul. Because John's the man who refused to come home and join his friends the only time Jeanne tried to throw him a birthday party. John's the only one allowed to be unpredictable. He's the one who will stay up half the night whittling one jumbo perplexity into two dozen tiny certainties. "Little things are man's work," he says. "Nothin' we can do about big things, about God's work. But little things infuriate me, because there's no excuse not to manage them."

He doesn't want his point guard penetrating, because that might leave him exposed upcourt and give his opponents an easy bucket. He prefers a three-guard offense—that's three men closer to his own basket, three men better at guarding the ball. Protecting, John is, always protecting. "Turnovers are an evil," he seethes, "a wasted life." Emotion can lead to hurry. Hurry can lead to turnovers. No emotions. No hurry. "I want a Chief," he scribbles in his little black book of aphorisms and Mama-isms. "I want all my players to be like Robert Parish. One face."

He almost never plays his subs, even with a fat lead. Too scary. Never lets his players leave their areas of strength—everybody in his room! Never gives them four places to pass against a press, or three choices of defense—no, not the whittler. Gives them one. Practices and shrieks that one thing over and over until the players get it perfect, until the price of a mistake is so gruesome that it's simply not worth it. A poor boy's lesson, another Mama-ism: You GOT to make it work when you only got one.

And once he has them down to meat and bone, he holds them to the tire. No timeouts when the opponents are kicking the Owls' brains in. like that 18-0 run by West Virginia last year. Let them regain their own composure. Let them burn. No breathers in December or March. Let them play the toughest schedule in the land. No sympathy when they're standing on the foul line. You a CHICKEN! You gonna MISS it! You gonna THROW the game! That's what he yelled once at his star player as he walked to the free throw line with :00 showing on the clock, trailing by one. Better the kid hear the voice he had heard snarling all year, the father's voice, than the voices of 3,000 outsiders. The kid hit both shots. "We might get beaten athletically," says sophomore forward Derrick Battie, "but nobody's going to beat us mentally. Nobody." And when the season's final game is over, win or lose, John goes from player to player in the locker room, hugging and sobbing uncontrollably.

"He equips you more for manhood than for the NBA," says Michael Harden, an Owl from 1988 to '91. "On most NBA teams it's all free-flow. Temple players aren't used to that. They're used to structure. It becomes a habit to do what you've been told rather than to improvise. But out in society every one of them is making a positive impact. I love the man. I still find myself speaking his language. When you play for him, you have your own world, and you don't trust anybody on the outside. And after a while the worst thing's not when he yells at you—it's when he doesn't. We knew he loved us."

It might not work at Duke or Stanford, with sons of the middle class at his feet, with rolling lawns and fluted granite right outside the window. But his are the children of America's blight, and right outside the window are row houses with shattered windows and boarded doorways, crack houses, abandoned houses. stripped cars, gutted buses; crazy is right outside the window.

His are the children, often, who have never known a true father, a man like Chancy, who, day and night, is there. Who's not running off to do commercials or TV shows or radio shows or speaking engagements or clinics, like other successful Division I coaches, a man who freezes up at anything that might complicate his life, who keeps shoving away society's gravy. "I don't want any other demands on my conscience." he says. "I don't want anything on my schedule—it makes me crazy. I want the freedom to do nothing. If I speak to a group, it's going to be for poor people, and I'm going to pay for my own flight."

At Temple, a school that has attracted only one consensus All-America. Mark Macon, in Chaney's 12 years there, John's way works. Stray dogs like Tim Perry and Duane Causwell become first-round NBA draft picks, and the Owls, year after year, suck far more talented teams into the quicksand of their half-court game. "You gotta survive on the barest of things!" he roars at his players. "You gotta remember how you were born!"

A mallet. That's bare. He drew it back behind his ear that day in wood-shop class, all the confusion of his life screaming in his ears, all the world turning red—honest-to-god red, just like people say—and he was sending the mallet to a proper burial inside the brain of the bully. Dante...when the teacher grabbed his arm. John got five days" suspension, but guess what? Dante evaporated. Dante never bothered him again. Crazy was John's enemy. Crazy was John's friend.