BTO Exclusive: Houston's Road To Respectability

BTO Exclusive: Houston's Road To Respectability

FREEDMAN:  In its quest to return to the glory days, Houston hired Tom Penders in 2004.  A few seasons later, Penders recruited Aubrey Coleman to lead the Cougars back up the mountain.  Now, it looks like Houston could be ready to peak again. 

By Lew Freedman
Basketball Times Online

    ANCHORAGE — Aubrey Coleman is a fast learner. Turns out his accuracy rate throwing snowballs in the streets of Alaska’s largest city is at least as good as his 12-to-15-foot jump-shot range.

  Both were deadly during the University of Houston’s recent sojourn to the Great Alaska Shootout.

  Coleman, a 6-foot-4, 200-pound guard whose biceps look as if he has been going can for can on the spinach with Popeye, is the centerpiece of head coach Tom Penders’ mission to restore the Cougars to the glory years of Elvin Hayes and Don Chaney.

  This looked like Mission Impossible when the veteran coach followed up his decades coaching Tufts, Columbia, Fordham, Rhode Island, Texas, and George Washington by adopting Houston for the 2004-05 season. The Cougars had experienced seven losing seasons in their previous eight and could have been poster children for the film version of “How the Mighty Have Fallen.”

   But Penders delivered an 18-14 record in his first season and things have improved from there with 20-victory campaigns three times. In recent years, Memphis has made Conference USA seem like Gulliver and the Lilliputians, but Penders thinks this time around Houston is one of four teams with a shot at the league title.

  If such a restoration is to occur, a lot of the weight will be carried by Coleman, who despite growing up in Houston, would never have signed with the Cougars if Penders hadn’t showed up and begun turning things around.

   An all-state player in high school, Coleman spent two years at Southwest Mississippi Community College.  When he finished, schools like Mississippi and Mississippi State wanted to seal the border and prevent him from returning to Texas. Coleman was savvy enough to recognize that Penders wouldn’t hold too tightly on the reins, so he went home.

  “I knew he was gonna let me go,” Coleman said.

  Penders gave Coleman the ball and his freedom. As a junior, with the Cougars boasting a 21-12 record, the multi-tattooed guard averaged 19.4 points and 8.2 rebounds a game.

  “I’m in my 36th year of coaching,” Penders said. “He’s in my top two or three guys of all time. There’s nothing he can’t do. He plays as hard as you can.”

  Coleman looks mature on the court. He wears a black goatee, has a filled-out NBA-style body, shows good judgment, and can score in a hurry when he has to. He can penetrate and he can shoot from afar, but he doesn’t do so very often. Rather than mimic the many college players weaned on the three-point shot, Coleman specializes in killing teams from inside the arc, nailing those mid-range jumpers that often seem to be a forgotten element in the game.

  “He’s kind of an old-school guy,” said University of Alaska Anchorage coach Rusty Osborne, after Coleman dropped 25 points on his Seawolves in the third-place game at the Shootout. “He’s strong for his position. He has great anticipation.”

  Five games into the season, Houston is 3-2, and Coleman is averaging 26.6 points a game. He has been named Conference USA player of the week two weeks running.

 College basketball fans with long memories, of course, will remember when Houston was a tremendous power, at its pinnacle roughly the equal of UCLA for a short period of time. On Jan. 20, 1968, the Cougars upset the No. 1 ranked Bruins of John Wooden, 71-69. The game was played before 52,693 fans at the Astrodome, and was the largest crowd to ever see a college game, a record that lasted for years.

  The milestone game elevated college hoops to new heights, and introduced the nation to Elvin Hayes and Don Chaney – the first two African-Americans to play for the Cougars – and a towel-chewing coach named Guy Lewis. That bunch advanced to two NCAA Final Fours. Later, the Cougars suited up such luminaries as Clyde Drexler, Hakeem Olajuwon, and Otis Birdsong.

  Penders tells his present-day players that Hayes and Chaney helped revolutionize the college game in the South and he believes that teaching them history is important.

  “He always tells us,” Coleman said, noting that some guy named “The Big E,” (alias Hayes) talked to the team on a trip to Tennessee.

   Oh yeah, some other guy who attended Houston and had some athletic fame – multiple Olympic track and field gold medalist Carl Lewis – was also invited by Penders to chat up the squad. Penders is thinking big and long-term, but he also wants his team to be proud of the school’s past and the way it embraced black players before it was fashionable.

  “I’m very big on that,” Penders said of the team’s social history and court accomplishments. “This is the most diverse public university in the country. We’re trying to get it back to where it was.”

  Penders also wants his team to have a little fun along the way. Turns out it was the coach who threw the first snowball.

   “I hit four of them before they knew it was me,” Penders said.

   Sneak attack was probably the best approach for firing at Coleman. Penders could get out of the way before his best sharpshooter got the hang of this new game.

Lew Freedman is a Chicago-based sportswriter and a long-time contributor to Basketball Times.  He is also the author of 42 books. 

Phote Credit: www.uhcougars.com