Right now everything is pretty raw. Her husband of 48 years, Charlie Coles, the legendary Miami University basketball coach, died Friday at their home in Oxford. He was 71.
Delores found some comfort Saturday afternoon when she got back home and saw some of the photos of her husband:
“Every time I see a picture of him coaching it just warms my heart. I just say, ‘Love you, Charlie.’ It’s so good to see that because that’s what he was all about.”
Coles was one of the best-known and most-beloved coaches in the college game.
And whenever you think of him — even though he did work the sidelines of four high schools and at Central Michigan University, where he was the head coach, too — you think of him at Miami.
Darrell Hedric, who like Charlie played at Miami, was a successful head coach there and is in the school’s Hall of Fame, said Coles was one of MU’s greatest ambassadors:
“Charlie sold Miami every place he went. He believed in Miami. He loved the place. He truly was a Miami man.”
But that was not always the case.
His ‘Miami story’
It was a summer night in 1961 and Coles had just come from playing basketball with a bunch of his buddies in Springfield. He was at the refrigerator getting a cold drink when he heard his dad, Charles “Pete” Coles, behind him.
“Guess who called?” Pete said.
“Who?” Charlie answered.
“Coach Shrider.”
“Oooh, no.”
The year before, Coles had come to Miami as one of the more storied basketball players in Ohio high-school history. He’d averaged 42.1 points per game his senior season at Bryan High in Yellow Springs and then followed the path of a handful of noted black athletes from Springfield to Oxford.
But he lasted just a semester with Coach Dick Shrider.
“In the beginning I had a real inferiority complex,” he once told me. “I didn’t think I could do the work.”
He dealt with it by perceiving other slights and within a few months had left school and moved to Compton, Calif., to live with an aunt and attend junior college. Once he returned home for the summer, his father delivered that late-night heart-to-heart.
“My dad never forgave me for leaving Miami,” Coles said. “And that night he says, ‘Coach Shrider doesn’t have any scholarships left now and, you know, I don’t have any money, but here’s what I’ll do. I’ll remortgage my house to send you back to Miami.’
“Well, just then my mother comes bolting down the steps and says, ‘No … you … don’t! The boy’s hardheaded and we’re not gonna get in no financial bind over him.’
“I’ll never forget that look on my dad’s face — it still brings tears to my eyes. He turned to my mother and said, ‘Mary, I don’t have an education. If that boy wants to go back to Miami, I’ll do anything in the world for him to get there.’
“Once my mother left, he told me, ‘You know I want you to go back … and take care of your name.’ “
After his dad did refinance, Coles returned to Oxford and lived for a year with Willie Felder, the custodian at Withrow Court, as he took a redshirt season and worked on his grades.
After the first semester ended, he got a call from his father who simply said, “Got your grades.”
“Yeah, how am I looking?” Charlie asked.
“All Bs,” his dad said quietly. “I thank you so much. I needed for you to do that. I knew you could. …”
That’s when his father’s voice drifted off and Charlie heard him softly weeping.
As he retold the story to me, Charlie’s eyes glistened:
“And that’s my Miami story.”
Actually, that’s only part of it and the rest tells you just how gloriously he did salvage that name.
‘Dumb like a fox’
Part of the story can be told by numbers. In three seasons upon his return to Miami, he went on to score 1,096 points. Then nearly 30 years after he left Oxford, he returned in 1994 as Herb Sendek‘s assistant. A couple of years later he was elevated to head coach when Sendek left for North Carolina State.
And by the time he retired after the 2011-12 season, Coles had become Miami’s winningest coach.
But the true tale comes from behind those numbers.
“It’s been great to see how he embraced everything here,” said Hedric, who was Shrider’s assistant coach — and Coles’ mentor — in the mid-1960s. “Charlie won games, but he also pushed players to get their education and become good citizens.”
One of the players he most embraced was Kenny Hayes, the Northmont High School grad who had paid his dues at a junior college before coming to Oxford.
“When I first got there me and Coles kind of bumped heads,” Hayes said Saturday. “The way his teams played was something new for me. Once I adjusted, we became closer and closer. He was more than a coach, he became a father figure to me. Best of all we became friends. We’d sit in his office and talk for hours”
Hayes, who has been playing professionally overseas, said the older he’s gotten, the more he’s realized what a good basketball man Coles was.
Beneath the old-school ways and that folksy, “aw shucks” charm, was a guy, as Hedric put it, who was “dumb like a fox. … On the court he was a crafty, competitive guy.”
Every year Coles’ teams played one of toughest non-conference schedules in the nation and as Delores said: “He wasn’t doing it because it’d be fun to be on the court with teams like North Carolina and Kentucky. He wanted to beat them and he’d be at home watching film and making notes all night.”
Over the years his teams knocked off Purdue and Mississippi State. They got several wins against Notre Dame, Xavier and Dayton and made a run to the NCAA tournament’s Sweet Sixteen in 1999 as they upset Washington and then No 2 Utah on a day when he outcoached the legendary Rick Majerus.
He did the same to John Calipari in 2009 when his RedHawks nearly pushed aside No. 4 Kentucky, a team loaded with future NBA players, at Rupp Arena. Only a John Wall basket at the buzzer helped the Cats escape with a 72-70 victory.
A coaching fix
Coles actually died and was brought back to life on the court during a Mid-American Conference tournament game at Western Michigan in Kalamazoo in 1998.
There were other heart issues, including two bypass surgeries, over the years, and that’s why Delores now remembers his coaching days after ‘98 as “a miracle … a living miracle … thank goodness for the wonderful years we had. It’s a case now of remembering your blessings.”
Although retirement was rough for Charlie — he missed the collegiate ranks and a few months ago he was diagnosed with prostate cancer — he did get a sidelines fix by helping coach his 12-year-old granddaughter Jazz’s AAU team this spring.
Although he was drawing up plays at a tournament in Franklin last weekend, Delores said he had an episode coming into the gym before one game last Saturday.
He passed out and a bystander administered CPR. He spent three days in a Middletown hospital and then two more at McCullough-Hyde Memorial in Oxford. He returned home on Thursday and died Friday.
Final arrangement haven’t been set yet. The only thing Delores was sure of Saturday was that Charlie will be wearing his trademark red turtleneck in his casket.
And that reminded me of a conversation he and I had after he quit coaching.
”I’ve had a ball because I truly enjoyed putting on my red mock turtleneck and going to games,” he said. “As it turned out, coming here to Miami was one of the greatest things I’ve ever done.
“When I first came here, I had a little edge when I heard someone described as a ‘Miami man.’ I kind of resented the guy who had the great background. But now — and this is the only thing I’ll ever brag on at this university — I guess I’m as much a Miami man as any man who ever lived. And I’ll challenge anyone to be as proud, as respectful, and work as hard as I did at Miami.
“Now, they may well be smarter — they didn’t get any genius with me. And they didn’t get any NCAA championships. But they got a guy who tried to keep a good, positive frame of mind and represent our school because I knew it was a great place.
“In the end, the one thing I think they got out of me was their money’s worth.”
And a long time ago, as he sent his son back to “take care” of his name, that’s all Pete Coles was hoping for, too.
Part of this story appeared in a recent Tom Archdeacon story in The Miamian.
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