Legendary LSU basketball coach Dale Brown dies at 90 New York Times (Online) Brian Bennett Dale Brown nearly quit coaching in 1971. He was a 36-year-old assistant at Utah State, and he later wrote in his memoir that he'd already grown “disenchanted” with the seedy underbelly of college basketball. He strongly considered getting out and taking a job with Converse. One year later, LSU stunned him by offering him its head coaching position. Thank goodness Brown stuck it out, or else the sport would have lost one of its most colorful characters. During his 25-year tenure in Baton Rouge, Brown combined the soul of an evangelical preacher, the hucksterism of a traveling salesman and the motivational power of a self-help speaker. He coached immense talents like Shaquille O'Neal but seemed at his best when his teams were hopeless underdogs. He was both a thunderous critic of NCAA bureaucrats — once calling them “Gestapo bastards” — and a frequent target of their investigations. He lifted a program with little history, tradition or attention to championships through sheer force of will. He was known to stay awake for days on end, quietly help out any stranger or friend in need and take exotic quests in the offseason. Above all, he was a true original. The final record shows that Dale Duward Brown, who died Friday at the age of 90, won 448 games and led the Tigers to two Final Fours, in 1980 and 1986. He retired with the second-most wins in SEC history, behind only Adolph Rupp. His last accolade came earlier this week, when he was named the 2027 recipient of the John R. Wooden Legends of Coaching Award. With Brown, however, the most interesting stuff usually happened in between the games. “From the moment they snipped the umbilical cord,” Brown said in a 1985 Sports Illustrated cover story, “I've been in the middle of controversy.” If there was one major knock on Brown as a coach, it was that he over-performed with less talented teams and disappointed with stacked ones. That, however, is not exactly true; his 1980 Final Four squad, led by Rudy Macklin, featured plenty of skilled players. Still, that reputation was solidified by two outcomes. The 1986 team became the first No. 11 seed to crash the Final Four, with 6-foot-7 Ricky Blanton playing center. On the flip side, the loaded 1989-90 team, starring 7-footers O'Neal and Stanley Roberts and All-America guard Chris Jackson — all first-round draft picks — somehow lost nine games and flamed out in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. Despite having the otherworldly O'Neal on campus for an impossible three seasons, LSU never advanced to the Sweet 16 with him. Brown seemed more comfortable as an underdog. How could he not? He was born in Minot, North Dakota, the very definition of the middle of nowhere. He grew up dirt poor with two older sisters and a single mom, living on government assistance in a small bedroom apartment above a liquor store. His first several jobs were coaching basketball and other sports at remote high school outposts. When Brown arrived at LSU, he had two suits and $300 in the bank. Nothing suggested a fast track toward a future College Basketball Hall of Fame coaching career. Nothing, that is, except Brown's determination. “He is, without a doubt, the most positive person I have ever met,” wrote former longtime LSU assistant Johnny Jones in Brown's 2004 memoir. “The greater the obstacle, the more enthusiastic he is. I have never met anyone who channeled more energy than Dale Brown to battle overwhelming odds and challenges of unbelievable proportions.” Those hurdles included the job in Baton Rouge. He inherited an LSU program that hadn't made the NCAA Tournament in 18 years, had managed only four winning seasons during that span and had gone 10-16 the previous year under Press Maravich. Basketball wasn't merely overshadowed by football at LSU; it was engulfed. “It wasn't so much that LSU's basketball program had a poor image as it was they didn't have any image at all,” Brown wrote in his memoir. Like a campaigning politician, Brown set out all over Louisiana to drum up interest. He handed out coin purses embroidered with the team schedule and LSU baby bibs to newborns at hospitals. He paid out of his pocket for purple-and-gold basketball nets that he would hand out, along with a poem. He mailed brochures to total strangers and sportswriters and agreed to give speeches anywhere that would have him. Brown had a knack for convincing people to do things, whether it was a previously uninterested fan buying a ticket to a game or an unheralded player to believe he could accomplish great things. This skill earned him the nickname “The Master Motivator.” He was named SEC coach of the year in his first season but then posted three straight losing campaigns. He may have been fired at a school that cared more about basketball, but in 1978, his Tigers upset eventual national champion Kentucky in overtime even though all five starters fouled out. LSU made the Sweet 16 the following season and then broke through to the Final Four in 1980. Brown's teams had the unfortunate luck of losing to several eventual national champions deep into the tournament — Michigan State in '79, Louisville in '80, Indiana in '81, Louisville again in '86, Indiana again in '87. NCAA officials were probably relieved not to have to hand him a national championship trophy. Brown never hid his disdain for college sports' restrictive rules and argued constantly for players to receive a bigger share of the pie. He often threatened to walk away from the game over those issues. Here's what Brown told SI about the NCAA in 1985: “The NCAA doesn't solve the problem; they keep putting powder on a cancer. They legislate against human dignity. I'll tell you what you're going to have left in this [coaching] profession. A bunch of narcissistic, money-hungry sonofabitches that love to see themselves on TV in their three-piece suits and alligator because good people are fed up with the crap you've got to go through.” When that story ran, Brown and LSU had been the subject of a four-year investigation into alleged violations. The NCAA found only minor infractions, none related to Brown. He was once accused of offering Tito Horford money to sign with LSU, claims that Brown vehemently denied. In November 1998, about a year and a half after Brown's retirement, the NCAA put LSU on three years' probation after a 21-month investigation related to former Tigers player Lester Earl. Brown had suspended Earl, who then transferred to Kansas. Earl told NCAA investigators that an LSU coach had given him money. The investigation found no evidence that Brown or any members of his staff had paid Earl, though it concluded a booster did give him $5,000. Nine years later, Earl publicly apologized to Brown, Jones and others and suggested that he'd been pressured by NCAA officials to point the finger at the coaching staff. Brown would bend rules to surreptitiously give money to players in need. When former player Mark Alcorn was dying of cancer in 1982, Brown begged the NCAA to let him fly the team on the school plane to visit Alcorn in St. Louis. When the NCAA refused, Brown gave each of the players $300 so they could buy a plane ticket. His heart for the underprivileged knew few limits. Brown hired people with mental and physical disabilities to various jobs around the program. Brown used to get mercilessly heckled by a man in a wheelchair every time the Tigers played at Tennessee. He later discovered that the man couldn't afford to go to college. Brown put him on scholarship and made him LSU's official statistician. “Maybe he was the pioneer for NIL, indirectly,” said Blanton, who played for Brown from 1984-89. “I'm not going to say he was the sole one, but he always felt there was an injustice in the system. All these things we couldn't do was crazy to him. In this day and age, boy, he would have been on the forefront of NIL, for sure.” He could also rub people the wrong way. Alabama coach C.M. Newton was enraged when LSU unfurled an SEC championship banner on its arena catwalk in 1979 — while the game between the Tigers and the Crimson Tide was still going on. Three years earlier, Brown infamously tossed his sports coat onto the court to show his frustration over a call at Kentucky. As Brown's profile rose, so did the caliber of players he could talk into coming to Baton Rouge. Still, it wasn't always the perfect mix. His 1985 team had major recruits like Jerry “Ice Man” Reynolds, Nikita Wilson and John “Hot Plate” Williams. It lost against Navy in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. The '89-90 team started the year ranked No. 2, thanks in large part to Brown's happenstance discovery of O'Neal. The coach was in Germany giving motivational speeches and running basketball clinics for U.S. troops when an enormous 13-year-old asked him for workout advice. O'Neal was living on a military base where his father, Phillip Harrison, served as a sergeant. Brown asked that they stay in touch and sent O'Neal an encouraging poem after he was cut from a youth team. That Brown would come across the best player he'd ever coached on foreign soil was fitting. During his summers, Brown climbed the Matterhorn, spent a week in the Amazon jungle, visited Russia and Cuba during the Cold War, met with Mother Teresa in Calcutta and walked on the Great Wall of China. He went looking for Bigfoot in British Columbia — twice. A man born with almost nothing in a nowhere town wanted to see and learn everything the world had to offer. Such was his thirst for adventure and knowledge. Brown quoted Socrates, brought in people from all walks of life (including some true oddballs) to give his team pregame speeches and credited Norman Vincent Peale's “The Power of Positive Thinking” for changing his life. At his news conferences, Brown was just as likely to go on a monologue about some societal ill as he was to break down his “Freak” defense. “One thing we saw on a daily basis, but we didn't recognize at the time because we were so young, is that he was such a humanitarian,” Blanton said. “He was always trying to help people. People were coming to practice; he was bringing this family over, this guy, that guy. He knew the basketball program was the vehicle to do something positive. It was always that. “He was always wanting to motivate. That's what he loved. He wanted to get the best out of everybody. He had a big thirst for knowledge.” LSU, which was barely on the basketball map before Brown arrived, did not have a losing season between 1976-77 and 1992-93. The program made the NCAA Tournament 13 times during those 17 years and won four SEC regular-season championships. In a conference where everyone measured itself against Kentucky. Brown's Tigers went 12-11 versus the Wildcats from 1978 to 1992. Three of those losses came in the 1986 regular season and SEC tournament. LSU played Kentucky a fourth time that season in the Elite Eight — and won. Brown's final chapter did not contain a happy ending. His last four LSU teams all finished with losing records. Star recruits got injured or didn't live up to expectations. Brown grew tired of the corruption involved in chasing teenagers and the NCAA investigations wearing his program down. Still, the man who threatened to quit coaching early and often in his career had a hard time letting go. “I struggled like most people with the big tragedy — when to walk away,” he wrote in his memoir. “I didn't want to get to the point where I was embittered by the game.” “His last year,” Blanton said, “he was a shell of himself.” In his later years, Brown would occasionally supply an op-ed to a media outlet, often heavily tinged with religion. In March 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, he wrote this for VaughtsViews.com: “Maybe we don't need a vaccine. Maybe we need to take this time of isolation from the distractions of the world and have a personal revival on the only thing in the world that really matters and that is to please God.” In another life, Brown would have made an excellent preacher. He surely would have often quoted scripture about how faith could move mountains. His whole life depended on doing just that. “I knew I had to think as big as possible to offset the indifferent attitude, convince the players we could overcome, motivate them to do the impossible and then make our fans believe it was possible,” he wrote in his memoir. “I had to change everything about LSU basketball. Or else who would come to see LSU play in the first place?”