Marshall University Athletics
BOGACZYK: Nov. 14 Debut an Eerie `Good Omen' for D'Antoni
11/12/2014 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
By JACK BOGACZYK
HERDZONE.COM COLUMNIST
HUNTINGTON, W.Va. – Dan D’Antoni makes his debut as a college head basketball coach Friday night against Jacksonville State at the Cam Henderson Center.
It’s no doubt a significant day in the hoops-filled life of the Marshall alumnus and coach … as was a previous Nov. 14.
And the 67-year-old D’Antoni wonders if the coincidence really is just that.
See, back in the late ‘60s when D’Antoni was finishing a Marshall career as a point guard and morphing into his first coaching gig as a Herd assistant and freshman coach, he kept hearing the same words from one of his mentors and closest friends, Dr. Ray Hagley.
"He always said, ‘Danny, you’re going to be the head coach of the Herd one day,’" D’Antoni said.
Hagley was right. It just took fortysomething years to happen.
Back on the night of Nov. 14, 1970, Dr. Hagley’s life ended, with that of his wife, Shirley, and 73 others when the Marshall football team plane crashed into a Wayne County hillside short of a Tri-State Airport runway.
It remains the deadliest sports tragedy in American history. It also remains a pivoting point in D’Antoni’s life.
And here it is – another Nov. 14 night, albeit it 44 years later – and D’Antoni is ready to "Bring on the Herd," as Hagley had forecast.
"Nov. 14, it is kind of eerie," D’Antoni said earlier this week when asked about the circumstances. "To have the first game … At the time Doc Hagley told me, ‘If you stay here, you’ll be the head coach here.’ And the date that I debut as head coach is the day he perished.
"Eerie, yes, but it’s a good omen for me, regardless of what transpires. Hopefully we can make my wish that he’d been here very successful."
To say that the loss of life in the Marshall plane crash has affected D’Antoni would be a gross understatement. In December 2006, when the "We Are Marshall" film was released, D’Antoni had moved on from a hall of fame high school coaching career in Myrtle Beach, S.C., to work as an NBA assistant to his younger brother, Mike, on the Phoenix Suns’ staff.
D’Antoni was asked about living through that dark period in Huntington. He didn’t handle that – or those interviews – well. And to this day, he never has seen that movie about the crash aftermath and the resilience of his alma mater and its football program.
He can’t.
"When the plane crashed, we were babysitting the Hagley children," D’Antoni said, recounting history in his Henderson Center office one morning this week. "My wife, Alice (D’Antoni later divorced and remarried) and I were watching their six kids. The oldest child, ‘Neesy’ (Denise) was about 12 or 13, I guess.
"Alice and I had been married less than a year. After my senior year when I started coaching (1969-70), I lived in a bathhouse by the pool at Doc Hagley’s house. After we got married, he made an apartment above his practice for us.
"He helped me get my first car – a Buick Skylark convertible -- helped me go down and get the loan. He was mentoring me when I played here, but we started to become friends after that. It’s funny, as a player, I saw him as the older generation, but once I graduated, it was more of ‘Oh, we’re in the same boat together.’
"When I was in school, it was first like he was like a surrogate dad with me away from home. As I came out of school, it was more like having an older brother. We started moving toward brotherhood, hadn’t made total a leap yet, but it was getting there."
D’Antoni said "it was close" when asked if there were indications that the young couple might become legal guardians for the orphaned Hagley children, until the children moved to Lewisburg to live with an uncle and aunt.
D’Antoni was the one who went to the morgue to identify the Hagleys bodies through jewelry. He was a pallbearer at funeral after funeral in the next couple of weeks. And D’Antoni lost many more connections in the crash than Hagley.
The Herd’s star quarterback, Ted Shoebridge, was one of the point guard’s best buddies. Marshall Coach Rick Tolley had lived across the street from the D’Antoni family in Mullens and had coached Dan in baseball. Kicker Marcelo Lajterman was dating D’Antoni’s wife’s sister.
"Everything changed," D’Antoni said. "In the aftermath, everything had changed here. It changed the basketball program, it changed the way they were going, what they were doing, and I just didn’t feel comfortable with everything that was happening here, so being young and maybe stupid … no one knew how to handle something like that then. And I was 23 and just couldn’t handle it.
"Now, I think they handle things (tragedies) better, bring people in to talk, counsel people. Handle it much better now. Back then, it was like everybody in town -- everybody I was around -- said we’ve got to go forward, don’t think back at all. And you bury it, just kind of bury it.
"You see it’s gone, and I assumed it was gone, and I didn’t know how it had changed me until the movie came out and I had to do a lot of interviews in Phoenix … and I couldn’t get through the early interviews. I still struggle at times.
"Sometimes I can talk about this, but sometimes it overwhelms me. But when that movie came out, I couldn’t do about four of those early interviews, get all the way through without the emotions coming back and breaking down a little bit."
In the spring of 1971, D’Antoni left Huntington. He and his wife loaded the Skylark and drove to Myrtle Beach. They had no jobs. D’Antoni said they had less than $1,000. Alice got a job as a junior high teacher. Two Marshall connections, Tom Langfitt and Buddy Rogers, helped D’Antoni get a coaching job at Myrtle Beach Junior High.
He went from that job to managing a strip mall, moved to another school as a physical education teacher, then to another as a guidance counselor, and eventually became the basketball coach at Socastee High School.
He stayed there 28 years, and all that time never realized how much the plane crash and its devastating aftermath had changed him until a point guard that followed him at Marshall – his brother, Mike – brought him to that first of three NBA jobs prior to the April 2014 move back to his college town.
"It started getting better and better in Myrtle Beach, but I was different … a different person," D’Antoni said. "It’s funny how it changes your whole outlook in life. I think I’d gone from a person who was ambitious, was about what’s ahead, with a plan for the future, and I changed to ‘live it now.’ Forget the rest … an enjoy-the-day type of person.
"And then when all of that stuff came out in Phoenix, I started going back and ‘OK, I want to get this in my life.’ I figured out what I wanted to do in the future. I started thinking more about ‘Where do you want to go?’ instead of just ‘Live this’ because you don’t know what’s going to happen. I went more to where this is the direction I wanted my life to go."
Did he feel his divorce from Alice in those days in Myrtle Beach may have been rooted in the plane crash?
"It could have been," he said. "Alice wanted me to be more ambitious, and I was content to be what I was. She wanted me to move up, especially financially. High school teachers and coaches don’t make a lot. She said to get a college job. I’m happy where I am, stayed right where I was all the time, never thought about doing something else unless people asked me to do something else."
D’Antoni said he never wrote a resume "until I had to write one for this (Marshall) job." He lived day-to-day, coaching, running three restaurants, an ice cream shop and a bumper pool room, "working 24/7," he said.
He was inducted into the Marshall Hall of Fame in 1990, but asked if he ever figured when he left Huntington that he would return for more than an occasional visit, D’Antoni said he hadn’t really thought much about it.
"Again, at that time, I never thought ahead," he said. "I never had a plan … I’ve just kind of meandered through life, I guess. Somebody kind of up there is watching me, because they’ve always put me in good positions. I will say that wherever I was, it was working real well.
"If you do well in the moment, most likely, somebody will be watching for your next moment. So, I was doing well, certainly spontaneous, didn’t set a plan."
The plane crash remained a bad memory, but a distant one … until "We Are Marshall" reached the theatres.
"No, I’ve never seen it," D’Antoni said. "You know, the thought of it, I can’t do it. Probably I could, because from what I hear, it’s about what happened after the crash. But I just couldn’t.
"I didn’t want to go back and revisit, you know? It’s easier for me now, but back when the movie came out, I hadn’t done that yet. And it’s very hard to deal with sometimes."
The Herd coach said seven hours before his debut game, he will try to deal with those feelings at the annual Memorial Fountain Ceremony that pays tribute to the 75 lives lost in the crash.
"I’m going to try to go," D’Antoni said. "Again, this is what I was saying … No one told you back then how to handle it, and burying things isn’t the way to do it. I learned that when I got to Phoenix. I still struggled to get through it all of the time and when you start talking about that incident, that tragedy, or my family, I think it’s connected.
"I struggle sometimes talking about my dad (former coach Lewis D’Antoni is 100). My mom (Betty) passed away back in 1989, I guess it was. For some reason, I get emotional talking about thing like that … I lost a son who was born, less than 24 hours in (the second of he and Alice’s four sons). I named him after Mike.
"I buried that, too. I guess I just didn’t handle death very well."
When D’Antoni walks onto the floor Friday night for his first game, his family support will be strong. While his wife, Vanessa, and daughter, Morgan, remain in California while Morgan finishes her final year of high school, D’Antoni’s father, sister (Kathy) and brother (Mark) will be attendance. The Herd coach said his brother, Mike, will be here Sunday for Game 2 (Savannah State) and stay "through part of December. My sons (Matt, Andrew, Nick) will be in over Thanksgiving."
One person D’Antoni wishes could be in attendance won’t be there.
Will he think of Doc Hagley when he walks onto the floor Friday night?
"I don’t need to walk out there to do that," D’Antoni said. "I always think about him. He’s right there (with wife Shirley, in a framed photo next to D’Antoni’s desk computer monitor). He’s a guy who bled green. He started the Big Green.
"It’s a good feeling for me. I’m where I wanted to be and where he wanted me to be. It was a good time … and it ended quick."
