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On the Same Page
The Coach and the home team
At the end of Bruiser's first season as head coach of men's basketball at UMass, the Flints lounge in their family room, sharing a bag of Ruffles. Bruiser wears a warm-up outfit and sneakers, Rene a denim top and black slacks. Only seventeen-month-old Jada (pronounced Jay-da), in a denim dress and white-and-blue hair ribbons, surveys a stranger with some reserve. She has those plump toddler's cheeks that dads so love to nuzzle, which is what her dad, just home from work, is busy doing, oblivious to whatever other agenda may be in store. "Who's Jada Flint?" he says. Jada feeds him a potato chip.
Clearly, this is how they relax, but what else do they do for fun? Rene and Bruiser silently communicate, then burst out laughing. Rene says they don't get out much. Having Jada ("the most amazing experience in the world") has changed their lives. Home is the refuge where they can loll on the couch, watch videos, be parents. "And sleep," Bruiser adds. "We're always trying to catch up on sleep."
As anyone who's seen Bruiser Flint's dazzling smile on television can imagine, his household is one of abundant good humor. Jada bounces from parent to parent, bringing in her toys for inspection and inspecting the visitor's toys, the tape recorder and computer, in turn. There's nothing formal, much less ostentatious, about the way the Flints live. So what gives? How did they achieve success and deal with it so graciously? Doesn't Bruiser wake up in the middle of the night and ask himself, in the words of the Talking Heads, "How did I get here? This is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife . . ."
Every night Bruiser gives thanks for his good fortune. Aside from his family, he can lay claim to being the youngest coach with the most first-season wins in NCAA Division 1 history. But the ingredients of his success and the future of the UMass basketball program are not left to chance; they can be found in some essential truths that are as grounded as Bruiser himself: discipline, patience, and expectations.
Bruiser's youth, modesty, soft-spokeness, and smile mask the heart of a warrior. Unlike his predecessor, who was, in Bruiser's words, "the show," Bruiser is "more laid-back" and doesn't intend to change. Being the constant focus of attention is "just not my style." But even in athletic clothes (crisp and squared-away as Navy dress-whites), even in the bosom of his family, he is a quiet focus of energy. The swoosh-adorned warm-up suit isn't a fashion statement; as soon as the interview is over, he plans to be on his exercycle. Make no mistake about it, Bruiser is always ready to play, and when he plays he intends to win.
The key to winning next season? "We have to play better together, be on the same page. A lot of the young players really didn't understand about making the adjustments to college. The practices, the games, the school work are different. It took us a while to come together." Players arrive on the same page from different directions. Bruiser's job is figuring out what they need. "Sometimes that means hard discipline, sometimes it means a hug, sometimes it means what's called 'counselling aggressively.'"
Bruiser and Rene anticipate each other's responses: definitely on the same page, except where you might expect an ambitious young couple to differ. Envisioning their lives five years from now, Bruiser has taken his team to the Final Four and a national championship: not surprising goals for an NCAA coach with a premier program; Rene has gone back to work.
"Back to work?" cries Bruiser.
"He wants me to stay home and have ten kids," Rene says.
"In five years, she should have three or four little babies," Bruiser says reasonably.
"I don't think I'm capable of that," says Rene without missing a beat.
She goes on to describe what she might do outside the home. She formerly worked for Senator David Patterson out of her home district in Manhattan, but she's not drawn back to that kind of work. She'd rather try exercising her creative side in the arts.
Bruiser suggests that she go on HGTV: "She's always watching Martha Stewart," he says.
"That's because I have to learn how to do everything around the house!" she shoots back. He laughs good-naturedly as she describes how unassisted she recently put up some shelving.
They agree that their biggest lesson learned has been patience. "I never knew I could have this much patience," says Rene. Bruiser goes to work early and comes home late. "Not many people like Bru have the chance to accomplish what they set out to do, to do what they truly love, and I respect that, and try to live with his schedule. It's just when things come up out of the blue that I draw the line."
Bruiser is also on the road for extended stretches. The kind of travel familiar is to every business person: "go everywhere, see nothing," is how he describes it. He contends that now that he's head coach, "I'm home more, but come home later. As an assistant I was recruiting, so I was on the road more."
"That's not true," Rene says, provoking Bruiser's laughter. "If Bru wants to get a player, he goes himself. Bruiser thinks that if it's not done his way, it's not done the right way."
As a devotee of Martha Stewart, Rene surely must recognize the desire for perfection when she sees it. Perfectionism and patience don't abide peacefully in the same person, so it's no surprise that early last season, Bruiser was, in his own words, "Tough to be around." With his intense desire to win frustrated too often, he had to learn to step back and let things develop without rushing in.
"You want to win, and want to push the guys to win, but sometimes you're not going to get it out of them. You can't want it more than the players. When we went to the Final Four, the players wanted it more than Coach Cal and I. We all have to have the same expectations."
To understand how Bruiser came to expect nothing less than victory, it's helpful to review his upbringing. Born a sickly child -his grandfather, on seeing him in the hospital said, "don't worry, this boy's going to be a bruiser" he fought to stay alive and came home to a close-knit family steeped in the values of hard work and achievement. When Bruiser was in the sixth grade, his father, exasperated by the long and frequent teacher's strikes in Philadelphia's public schools, enrolled Bruiser in Episcopal Academy. The Academy opened the boy's eyes to a world outside of "the neighborhood."
"I saw how other people lived. Some kids were dropped off at school in limousines." The school's competitive atmosphere goaded him to work hard academically, and, a tiny kid with unlikely prospects, he strove to become a basketball player.
In his teens, he worked for his grandfather's contracting business, tarring roofs and building sidewalks. The hard labor transformed a skinny boy into a young man with the strength and toughness to match his nickname. He became what some have called a "Philadelphia Player," someone never without his ball and always in search of a game. In the neighborhood schoolyard, forty kids would wait for a court. "If you lose, you're going to be waiting to play. You better win, or you're going to be sitting down for awhile." Anyone who's seen Bruiser on the sidelines knows he doesn't like to sit down. He took his winning attitude with him into the school room and into the gym. A good student and a standout player at Episcopal Academy, and later at St. Joseph's University, he measured up both on and off the court even without the limousine.
His challenge now is to instill his attitude and expectations in his players: not an easy task when many young players are happy just to be in one of the top programs in the country. "I ask them, 'What's your goal?' And they just say, 'I want to play.'" But Bruiser hopes that this year the players have realized the importance of winning. He believes that losing the Atlantic 10 Championship has made them hungry for wins.
"I didn't expect them to be where we were when we had last year's players. But now I expect that of them. At the end of the season, I told them, 'Expect more of yourselves, expect to work harder, now that you've been around and know what it's all about. Some of the things you got away with last year, you won't get away with now.'" He flashes that famous Bruiser smile, the same one he uses when he's berating a referee for a bad call: a big smile, arms stretched wide as if trying to get his arms around an explanation for the ref's flagrant idiocy.
From now until August, the Flints are enjoying a welcome hiatus, a saner schedule before revving up for even greater things. If Rene, a determined match for her husband, takes Bruiser's suggestion seriously, HGTV had better set aside a slot for her. And although Bruiser's content to log some couch-time now, next season if it's a question of winning or sitting the UMass Men's Basketball team, their coach, and all the fans will be on their feet.
