Joy Hammatt

In 1984 a college basketball coach was running a clinic on an American military base in West Germany when a 6 foot 9 kid came up and asked him how to get stronger. The coach asked him how long he had been in the Army. The kid said he was 13 years old. That was Shaquille O'Neal. The coach was Dale Brown, and Brown passed away today at 90, eight days short of his 91st birthday. Here is what Shaq has said about that afternoon. "He put his arms around me like he found gold." Brown wrote him letters for years after that. Sent him exercises in the mail. O'Neal came to LSU in 1989 and left in 1992 as the first pick in the NBA draft. Seven years after he left, Shaq wrote him a letter back. "The only college coach I ever had, and the only one I ever wanted." Now understand where Dale Brown came from. He was born in Minot, North Dakota, and raised by his mother Agnes. She cleaned houses for a living and she had an eighth grade education. He had two older sisters and every one of them worked. He went to Minot State and earned twelve varsity letters in football, basketball and track. LSU hired him in March of 1972, and almost nobody in Louisiana knew who he was. The program had not been to the NCAA tournament since 1954. So he drove the state. He kept nets in his car and he stopped at bare rims he passed and put new ones up. He won 448 games, which is still the most in school history. Four SEC championships. National coach of the year in 1981. He took LSU to the Final Four twice, and the second time, in 1986, his team was an 11 seed and became the lowest seed ever to get that far. He spent years arguing that college players should be paid, decades before anybody was ready to hear it. Now the part that complicates it. For all of that talent he never got past the second round with Shaq. His last four seasons were losing seasons. And LSU went on probation in 1998 after the NCAA found a booster had paid a former player, though the NCAA found nothing on Brown himself, and that player later apologized and said the NCAA had pressured him into it. He built something else too. His foundation puts students through school. Specifically students with disabilities, and students whose families have no money. The kind of kid he was. And here is the part that is hard to take. Two days ago, LSU announced that Dale Brown had been named the 2027 recipient of the John R. Wooden Legends of Coaching Award. Shaq recorded a video to congratulate him. He was supposed to accept it in April. His family said this today. "We have lost the most loving and most loved man any of us has ever known." The son of a house cleaner from North Dakota spent his life handing out nets to rims nobody was using, and once asked a 13 year old on an army base in Germany how long he had been a soldier.