It was the kind of game that gives basketball coaches of a certain psychological bent the willies. Arriving at Maples Pavilion barely a week after Stanford’s upset win over No. 1 Kansas and right before a matchup with 13th-ranked Gonzaga, Florida International presented the kind of foe that could bring out the worst in a team. So what if the Golden Panthers were rated 310th in the nation and your team was ninth? They were five guys just like you who wanted to win, Mike Montgomery would tell his players. Don’t look past them.
Any pregame dyspepsia Montgomery might have had on December 15 was justified, it turned out. Let everyone else admire Stanford’s winning margin of 27 points—Monty saw the real story: 12 turnovers and a rebound margin of two. Two! His eyes skipped right over Rob Little’s team-high 17 points to the junior center’s rebound total. Two! “Maybe they didn’t feel threatened and as a result weren’t willing to put in the work,” Montgomery said of his players afterward. “Rebounding-wise, I thought we were poor; our reaction to the ball was poor. So it’s back to work.”
Some might call Montgomery a pessimist—bring up the 24 games his undermanned team won last season and he’ll bring up the eight they almost lost—but he is, in fact, a realist. To maintain a presence in the top 20, his collection of overachievers and the occasional All-American must have unwavering mental focus. They have to play together; they have to be consistent. They have to be as fundamentally sound and as detail-oriented as their coaches, who have heated debates about, for example, how to teach post-to-post screens.
That’s why it sometimes seems Montgomery is watching a different game than everyone else. The same moment fans are cheering a Rob Little dunk, he is exploding out of his seat, yelling at sophomore guard Jason Haas to get back on defense. “If you win by 27, but you give up five layups in the last two minutes, that’s really going to piss him off,” says Little. “Offensively, he looks to get people off rhythm. He doesn’t necessarily want to just pound it in your face. He wants to catch you on the backscreen, he wants to catch you looking one way when the ball is turned the other way. He wants to outsmart you.”
Few in the business are better at doing so. “We have a great coaching staff [in the athletics department], and some people would say it’s the best in the country, but I think most of the coaches on our staff would say that Mike Montgomery is the best actual coach we have,” says athletic director Ted Leland, PhD ’83. “In the old coaching parlance, he can take his five guys and beat your five guys and then take your five guys and beat his five guys.”
It sounds simple, but beating any five guys has historically been a challenge for the Cardinal. Before Montgomery arrived unheralded from Montana in 1986, Stanford basketball was a model of mediocrity, and few people imagined it could ever be anything more. Was there a better validation of the alleged incompatibility of elite-level basketball and high admissions standards than the previous four decades of Stanford hoops?
Since the banner year of 1942, when Stanford won its only NCAA championship, the Cardinal had stacked up 26 losing seasons against 15 winning ones (the 1982-83 season ended at 14-14). In that span it had not won a single conference title outright and had not been invited to either the NCAA tournament or its poorer cousin, the NIT. Television exposure was nil and fan interest was slight, especially among students, who might leave the library for games if Stanford was down by 10 or less at halftime. Maples was a gloomy concrete box that, aside from its unnervingly bouncy floor, offered little in the way of home-court advantage. Tom Davis, the school’s experiment with a big-name coach, could stand only so much of the indifference. After four years (and a 58-59 record) he fled the Farm in 1986, proclaiming that no one could win with such an intractable admissions office.
Taken together, the achievements of the basketball program since Montgomery replaced Davis seem a fever dream. Stanford has had a winning record in 16 of the last 17 seasons, and a slew of crowd-pleasing highlights: that first victory at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion in 1990, 25 years after the building opened; nine straight NCAA tournament bids; a Final Four appearance (1998); a preseason No. 1 ranking and the cover of Sports Illustrated (1998-99); three straight Pac-10 titles (’99, ’00, ’01); and perhaps the ultimate compliment—Arizona fans rushing the court in Tucson after the perennially powerful Wildcats defeated Stanford in 2000. Nowadays, Maples sells out consistently and tent cities occasionally spring up outside the arena as students vie for one of the toughest tickets in the Bay Area. Once described as “dark” and “echoing,” Stanford’s home court is now considered “intimate” and “raucous”—a credible snake pit for opposing teams.
The agent of this revolution hardly cuts a radical figure. Now in his 18th year at Stanford and 26th as a head coach, the 56-year-old Montgomery is graying at the temples, and he still lives his life to some extent as if he were what he once assumed he’d grow up to be, a high school P.E. teacher. His style of dress, if you want to call it that, is subdued preppy. He goes to work at 8, leaves at 5. He reads a lot—Ludlum and Michener and Clive Cussler and whatever escapist novels catch his fancy—golfs a little and spends as much time as possible with his wife, Sarah, and their kids, 20-year-old John, now a sophomore guard at Loyola Marymount, and 18-year-old Anne, a freshman on USC’s volleyball team. He doesn’t bother his assistants at home much, and they return the favor. He goes to bed at a reasonable hour, declining to stay up all night watching videotape. He has an open-door policy in the office, except when he closes the door to take an occasional pre-practice nap, stretching out on the floor sans pillow.
None of which is to suggest he isn’t driven to win. “If you’ve ever played golf or racquetball against Mike, you feel like technically you shouldn’t lose to him, but you do a lot of times because of his competitive nature,” says his good friend and former Montana assistant, Utah State coach Stew Morrill. “I think you see that in coaching as well.” Montgomery says he enjoys wins for about two hours while he endures losses like a 48-hour flu. Even so, as college basketball coaches go, he is a relatively untortured soul.
You wonder, in fact, if he will ever get the hang of being in the big time. Forget the utter lack of scandal attached to his program. He hasn’t written a “My Ten Keys to Success” book, doesn’t host a Mike Montgomery-brand basketball camp or TV show, doesn’t have a famous mentor, doesn’t wear an iconic sweater. The guy doesn’t even have an agent, for Pete’s sake. He pooh-poohs most coaching awards and milestones (although he allows that a recent honor, the prestigious John R. Wooden “Legends of Coaching” Award, is “probably the best thing I’ve ever won”). “Mike has always thought it’s about the program, about the kids,” says Blaine Taylor, a former assistant who is now the head coach at Old Dominion. “Some programs, you see the poster and there’s the coach standing on top of the Empire State building. Mike doesn’t think that that’s the way it is.”
Montgomery’s teams are usually a reflection of him: straightforward, humble, hardworking, disciplined, consistent and unflashy. Their specialties—setting screens, making that extra pass, playing stingy defense—don’t often make ESPN’s highlight shows, and neither does he. After his team lost in the first weekend of the NCAAs a few years ago, ESPN asked Montgomery to stay on the East Coast to be an analyst for the rest of the tournament. He declined, telling Leland, “Why would I want to do that when I could be home with my family?”
It was TV’s loss. Besides having a great basketball mind, Montgomery has a needle-sharp wit that he occasionally unveils in public, frequently turns on himself and sometimes employs as his primary form of communication. Some who have worked with him say his wisecracks are the clearest signs of his approval and/or affection. Says Morrill, “I used to tell people, if he doesn’t give you a bad time, you should worry; if he gives you a bad time, that means he likes you.”
Montgomery may strike some as an old-school guy, but his reputation as straitlaced and uptight isn’t right either, says former assistant Doug Oliver, now the coach at Idaho State. “Mike’s very easygoing and a lot of fun to hang out with. I’ve driven down the highway singing Bob Dylan songs with him, and he knows all the words to some of those songs. He thinks he can sing but he can’t. He’s just a normal guy.”
Montgomery is, as he likes to remind people, just a physical education major from Long Beach State. When he was growing up in Southern California, coaches populated his world and P.E. was the highlight of his day. His late father, Jack, who became the first athletic director at Long Beach State, was also a football coach at UCLA. There, Jack hung out with track coach Ducky Drake and basketball coach John Wooden, on whose lap baby Mike once sat at an athletic department picnic—or so Wooden likes to tell people.
“I thought I’d be a coach or a P.E. teacher because I didn’t know what anyone else did for a living,” says Montgomery. Neither, apparently, did his brothers. Dick is a former women’s volleyball coach at San Jose State and Don was head golf coach at Cabrillo College until he recently retired and moved to Hawaii. Mike, the youngest and smallest (he topped out at 6 feet), played all kinds of sports with his brothers in their backyard, but he was smitten with basketball. Between seasons at Millikan High, he spent summer evenings playing three-on-three in gyms all over Long Beach. “Not being very physically gifted, I had to figure out how things worked in order to survive,” he says. “I think that’s why a lot of guys who are like me are successful coaches as opposed to the great athletes, who never had to figure it out. They could just do it.”
Montgomery figured it out well enough to start at guard as a senior at Long Beach State. That year he experienced a fleeting moment in the spotlight: after scoring 17 points and displaying deft ballhandling against Fresno State’s press in a rare televised game, Montgomery was named college division conference player of the week the same week UCLA’s Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then known as Lew Alcindor) was honored for the university division. Characteristically, Montgomery explains away the award as a “kind of a lack-of-anybody-else type thing.” (Nevertheless, the 35-year-old plaque is displayed prominently in his office.)
Facing the draft after graduating from Long Beach in 1968, Montgomery joined the Coast Guard, “in retrospect, the best thing that could have happened to me,” he says. After a two-year training stint, he landed a gig coaching the freshman team at the Coast Guard Academy. From there he bounced from one assistant’s job to the next, at Colorado State, The Citadel, Florida, Boise State and finally at Montana. After two years as a Grizzlies assistant, he became head coach in 1978, at the age of 31. Four winning seasons later, Montgomery heard Stanford was looking for a replacement for coach Dick DiBiaso and called then athletic director Andy Geiger. “Geiger was very nice and polite and said he had somebody else in mind,” recalls Montgomery. When that person, Davis, blew out of town four years later, Geiger remembered Montgomery and eventually offered him the job.
Unknown though he was, Montgomery made an imprint his first year. With a group of good players that Davis had left him, including Todd Lichti, ’89, and Howard Wright, ’90, he fashioned a winning season and a competitive 9-9 Pac-10 record. “That was a huge deal to everyone here because we hadn’t done that in many, many years,” says Montgomery. “I had most everybody back the next year so it created some excitement, and we just built on that.”
There is, of course, much more to the story: the transformation of the Maples environment with a coat of paint. The development of the rabid Sixth Man Club student section. All the great assistants Montgomery has hired. (Ten have gone on to Division I head coaching jobs.) The profile-lifting recruits, like Adam Keefe, ’92, and Brevin Knight, ’97, and the incredible luck of landing twin towers Jason and Jarron Collins, both ’01, after UCLA screwed up their recruitment.
Through it all, Montgomery has been faced with the same admissions challenges that brought his predecessor to his knees. Instead of railing against a system he couldn’t change, Montgomery embraced the school’s mission so tightly that Leland says his relationship with the admissions office is the best of all his coaches. But the pool of players who are both excellent students and elite basketball players remains small. Montgomery has two student interns who do little but call schools to get the transcripts of top high school players so his staff can determine whether to even bother pursuing a kid. Then they have to get test scores, and unlike every school save for a few Ivies, Stanford must have a completed application, with essays, before it will offer admission.
“It’s tough getting kids to do the application, but the really motivated ones who know they want this level of school of course will do it, and that’s great,” says Montgomery. “When we find a kid who wants this level, we are generally in great shape. It’s just finding more than one. Once we get a group of players, this is the best job in the country, because the kids are just terrific to work with.”
Montgomery is a great evaluator of talent; moreover, he is a superb salesman of his coaching philosophy. “He can watch an athlete and see precisely what he can do well and what his limitations are and how he can fit into the mosaic of a team and help a team win,” says Leland. “Mike gets an athlete to buy into that and to actually try to do that. And that’s a difficult sell job.”
Putting together a team and watching the players learn to execute “is where the fun is, even more so than the games,” says Montgomery. “I really enjoy watching the whole thing come together as a team or as a program, where they like each other, their highs and lows, that whole thing.”
Chemistry is critical to Stanford’s game and not something Montgomery can really control. Weirdly, his tendency to see the glass as half empty sometimes helps. “Even if you had a great game personally, he wants to know how that relates back to the team,” says Little. “How does that relate back to everyone doing well? In what he calls his equal-opportunity offense, everybody needs to be a threat, otherwise you are a detriment to the team.”
Somehow, in this team-first environment, virtually every individual improves. “People get so much better under Coach Montgomery,” says former player Mark Madsen, ’00, now with the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves. “Would I be in the NBA if I hadn’t gone to Stanford? I don’t know. Some guys are good enough to make the NBA from wherever they are. I don’t think I’m in that category. I’m grateful that Montgomery really pushed all of us to achieve our potential.”
Despite the greatly increased profile of his program, Montgomery still flies mostly under the radar, even locally. (Note that it has taken this magazine 18 years to get around to profiling him.) Part of that is calculated. One of the reasons Montgomery has stayed at Stanford instead of pursuing higher-paying, higher-profile jobs elsewhere is that Stanford has allowed him relative anonymity. He can go out for a beer and pizza in Palo Alto and not be approached or even recognized.
Of course, he has mixed feelings about that. On one hand, he wishes college basketball fans here were more passionate, involved enough to call into a talk radio show now and then and rant, “Why didn’t that sonuvabitch call timeout!?” On the other hand, he’d hate living under a spotlight. “The perspective here can drive you nuts but it’s also very healthy in terms of what I prefer,” says Montgomery. “It seems like fans here don’t care how we do, but they do care. It’s just not the only thing. It’s a trade-off. Okay, I’m not a big deal, nobody lives or dies by what we do, but the benefit of that is a peaceful sort of existence. I wouldn’t want everybody to want to talk to me all the time. I want to go on the driving range and drive golf balls without that.”
If there has been one criticism of Montgomery’s program of late, it is that his teams seem to peak early. In the last five years, the Cardinal has had big wins against highly ranked teams in December. But only once during that time has Stanford advanced beyond the second round of the NCAAs. Montgomery could point out that with the exception of the loss to a subpar North Carolina team in 2000, those second-round losses came against good teams. But he doesn’t bite. He simply says he doesn’t pay much attention to the naysayers. “They are going to criticize whatever you don’t do short of a national championship.”
Naturally, he’d like to win an NCAA title. “Logically, realistically, should we be able to win one here?” he asks. “Probably not. Can we? Obviously, yes, based on the fact that we got close to it. Does it consume me? Not at all.”
Winning the Big One would propel Montgomery into a different stratosphere in terms of national recognition, and it might even increase his visibility around Palo Alto. But not winning it should not diminish a coaching legacy that Madsen unabashedly calls “the greatest success story in Division I basketball.” Montgomery will be the first to tell you that winning an NCAA title would not suddenly make him the world’s best coach. “I think it was [former North Carolina coach] Dean Smith who said after a big win, ‘You know, I’m no better coach than I was two hours ago,’ ” he says. Fortunately for the Cardinal, Montgomery is as good as it gets right now.
KELLI ANDERSON, ’84, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, lives in Sonoma, Calif.
