Once 'Pope of Cleveland,' Mackey just wants back in
"I've gotten a few calls from third and fourth parties to see if I was interested," he said. "I'm still interested in coaching if the right opportunity presented itself."
Tom Davis: "I think he could (coach again). People are understanding. He's certainly capable and he's proven he can coach."
Jim Haney, executive director of the National Association of Basketball Coaches: "To me one of the great difficulties anymore for a coach is if you're fired. You become tainted in some ways ... In this P.R. world that we live in. I just think it's really hard for guys to get back in."
Shanaberger: "To this day I haven't been given any rational explanation. He must be the only person who wasn't given a second chance. It wasn't like he committed murder."
After his arrest, Mackey spent 13 years at a variety of backwoods minor-league jobs, coached in Canada, Argentina and Korea too. It didn't bother him much because all his teams won.
Coaches still call to get the details on his Run-and-Stun style. Think of it as Arkansas' 40 Minutes of Hell on steroids. Even Pearl, the crazed student manager, taps Mackey now and then for trapping tips for his Volunteers. After four or five possessions of that long-ago Indiana game, Bob Knight had to send Steve Alford, his best player, into the backcourt to start bringing up the ball.
Preoccupied with breaking the Cleveland State trap, Alford wasn't the same offensive force.
"I had a lot of things on Knight," Mackey said. "I had his books, his tapes. I studied them because I thought he was a great coach."
Kevin Mackey was a great coach too. Pacers' president of basketball operations Larry Bird threw him a lifeline five years ago and asked if he'd like to scout. Mackey has a nice car, cell phone, sees five or six games a week.
"I'm not happy if I can't go to the gym every day," he said. "I've had like 36-plus guys go to the NBA. There's no one on the planet who has done that."
You get the feeling that Mackey won't be fully whole until he coaches again. Or maybe this is the way it was supposed to be -- a story about cocaine, booze, a career thrown in the gutter.
Then Mackey starts thinking he can do it again. Cleveland State itself might be waking from a long slumber. The Vikings beat a ranked team this season (Butler) for the first time since that Indiana win. Second-year coach Gary Waters got his team to the championship of the Horizon League tournament.
"The kids we had were passed over," Mackey said. "They were the wrong size for the position. They didn't fit the IBM computer printout. Guys who went to the wrong high school, played for the wrong coach, went to the wrong summer camp. Those are the guys I could get at Cleveland State.
"It was very easy to do, us-against-them."
Easier, it seems, than Kevin Mackey against the world.
