http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704226004575262562366674750.html?mod=googlenews_wsjBy ADITI KINKHABWALA
On Easter morning, less than a week after accepting the job as St. John's basketball coach, Steve Lavin's cellphone buzzed. The caller was Ed Gonzalez, the coach at Brooklyn's Bishop Laughlin Memorial High. Mr. Gonzalez had never met Mr. Lavin, but he figured he'd leave the new coach a message of congratulations.
To his surprise, Mr. Lavin not only picked up the phone, he asked Mr. Gonzalez if he wanted to meet for lunch. That afternoon.
A few days later, when Mr. Lavin's new St. John's business cards came in, the coach wasn't pleased. The issue: His personal cellphone number had been left off. With the help of a student assistant, he wrote it, by hand, on all 300 of the cards.
At a time when coaches are more carefully managed and insulated, Mr. Lavin is a notable exception. Since his March 30 hiring, Mr. Lavin has been behaving in a way that might seem more fitting for the television personality that he was than the nationally known coach in a major sport that he is now.
On the streets of Manhattan, he bobs his carefully coiffed head to everyone and makes conversation with passersby. Talking to reporters, he barely breaks for a breath between totally free-wheeling paragraphs. He indulges long tangents, scrolling through his iPhone to share pictures of his parents and his wife, and explaining his theory of how to save room-service waffles from sogginess. All of this is peppered with outsized hand gestures and personal questions for others that all say the same thing: Mr. Lavin doesn't have a filter. What you see is what you get.
"I enjoy people—I grew up in a big family," Mr. Lavin says with a shrug. "If you're not curious about people, if you can't get along with a range of people, then you're going to diminish your ability to advance in any career."
As refreshing as Mr. Lavin's extroversion may be, it also raises a fair question. Since he last coached at UCLA seven years ago, much has changed. Given the enormous salaries and shoe contracts coaches are pulling down, the size and speed of the media, the pervasiveness of cellphone cameras, the growth of online forums that can quickly morph into firing mobs and the growling hunger for some winning basketball in New York, can this brand of candor survive?
"It's a very interesting question," said Brent Musburger, Mr. Lavin's former broadcast partner at ESPN and ABC. "I've never seen Steve get snippy with someone. But there's going to come a time when the New York media is going to be unhappy with how the team is playing and it's going to jump on the coach because that's the nature of the beast. It'll be interesting to see how Steve responds then."
There was a time when college-basketball coaches understood public second-guesses came with the gig, and that competing masters (re: writing the story versus being the story) didn't preclude friendliness. Here in New York, from the 1930s to the early 1980s, the college coaches from the area's biggest programs got together every week with writers at the now-shuttered Mama Leone's restaurant in midtown for three-hour lunches. Longtime AP sportswriter Jim O'Connell remembers how Bill Raftery from Seton Hall, P.J. Carlesimo from Wagner, Iona's Jim Valvano, Lou Carnesecca from St. John's and Fordham's Hal Wissel would talk freely about any and all topics.
Mr. Carnesecca, the iconic St. John's coach who retired in 1992 after winning 526 games, going to one Final Four and making 24 postseason appearances in his 24-year tenure, says he used to raise a hand to every kid who yelled "Looo-eee" on campus. "It doesn't cost you to talk to anyone," says Mr. Carnesecca.
As a college student at California's Chapman University in 1986, when Mr. Lavin aspired to be a coach, he wrote letters to some of the sport's luminaries: Indiana's Bob Knight, Purdue's Gene Keady, UNLV's Jerry Tarkanian and Mike Krzyzewski of Duke. Every one wrote him back, multiple times, he says, and he still keeps their letters in a box in his home.
"I was a dummy," says Mr. Keady, who gave Mr. Lavin his first basketball job as a graduate assistant. "I trusted everyone."
That's just not possible today. Coaches say the pressures and expectations on them have intensified—as has the spotlight on their every mistake. Hofstra coach Tim Welsh was just forced to resign earlier this month, 33 days after he was hired and three days after he was arrested and charged with driving while intoxicated.
One of the most significant moments was when a student snapped photos of then-Iowa State coach Larry Eustachy drinking at a student apartment near the University of Missouri campus in January 2003. The photos were published, and reports surfaced of Mr. Eustachy's drinking at a Kansas State fraternity the year before. Three years after being named the National Coach of the Year, Mr. Eustachy was fired.
Many coaches say incidents like those have people, from reporters to bloggers to average fans, seeing scandals where there are none. Michigan State coach Tom Izzo tells a story of a man calling in to a radio show to say he saw Mr. Izzo knocking back drinks at a restaurant. Mr. Izzo said he listened incredulously and that just as he was pondering how to respond, the waitress who had served him called the same show, to rebut that first caller and say no, she only served the coach sodas.
It follows then that coaches have surrounded themselves with more layers, and some have become more prickly. Many use sports-information directors to run interference and to keep both the public and the media at arm's length. There are coaches who will be very selective with whose questions they respond to, even in structured postgame news conferences. Even Mr. Krzyzewski, the exceedingly polite Duke coach, now has his office on the sixth floor of a building that requires thumbprint access, for security reasons.
Since he was fired by UCLA in 2003, after five Sweet Sixteen seasons gave way to a 10-19 year, Mr. Lavin says he has watched from the broadcast booth as many of his fellow coaches pick a spot somewhere between indifferent and inaccessible—and he has felt they have been missing something.
While conviviality doesn't necessarily translate into the X's and O's, it is, he says, vital to being an effective coach. Nineteen years ago, Mr. Lavin says, he befriended a UCLA fan and self-made local basketball hobbyist who was sitting in the bleachers near him at a high-school game. He gave the fan his phone number, and the two men have stayed in touch since.
Two weeks ago, while in Los Angeles to visit a since-signed St. John's recruit, 6-foot-7 forward Dwayne Polee, that same friend called. He told Mr. Lavin about another prospect in Sacramento, a player under the radar because he hadn't competed the previous year. Mr. Lavin said he hopped on a plane immediately. NCAA rules prohibit a coach from naming any unsigned recruit, but 6-foor-7 forward Remi Barry, a French national at Sacramento's Del Oro High School, said he was that prospect. Just weeks after meeting Mr. Lavin, his college choices are now down to UCLA and St. John's.
It was another long-ago cog in Mr. Lavin's extensive network that he says helped him find his first assistant coach on this new Red Storm staff, former Columbia point guard and Drexel assistant Tony Chiles. In this case, he says the recommendation came from Brad Shapiro, who was the coach of the Milford (Conn.) Academy high-school team 12 years ago, when Mr. Lavin recruited one of his players and who during the course of that process—stop if you've heard this—became a friend.
"He's got a great personality. He's very approachable, and he's good-looking too," Mr. Carnesecca says. "He has it all."
There are no empirical data on the relative success of friendly coaches, but there's no saying that they can't win. Michigan State's Mr. Izzo is perhaps the most famously friendly coach in the game. His home number is listed in the East Lansing telephone directory.
But even he says it's more challenging to let people in than it once was. He won't ever drink in public. He admits to thinking more about protecting himself, and he says Mr. Lavin will "have it a lot worse out there in New York."
"I think Steve's going to find out it's a little harder than it was seven years ago. Talk radio has changed some. Bloggers have changed enormously. All the things that can affect your daily life have changed so much," Mr. Izzo said. "Steve's a great people guy and he's very genuine, but the landscape has changed so much. Every little thing can get blown up."
As Mr. Lavin sees it, that's a danger he has to court. He has no choice but to shake every hand and kiss every baby. After all, he's on a campaign to win back this city one fan at a time.
On his way out of a Columbus Circle eatery after an interview, he waved goodbye to the unshaven waiter who'd greeted him with a "Hi, Coach" when he walked in. "Energizing our base is critical," he says. "This city is our base. If I can't talk to people here, I'm not doing my job."