Couch: Back at MSU, Brian Gregory is reconnecting with his beginnings
EAST LANSING – To understand Brian Gregory’s loyalty to Tom Izzo and to Michigan State basketball, you need to understand who Izzo is to Gregory and what MSU means to him.
“Everything I’ve ever gotten is because of this place,” Gregory said this week, sitting in MSU’s practice gym after practice.
He’s not kidding. His coaching career, his financial freedom, many of his friendships, his early memories with his wife and first child — MSU is tied to all of it. Izzo is tied to all of it.
And so now, at 50, having been fired for the first time in his life, his career in transition, Gregory came home. After 13 years as a head coach — eight at Dayton, the last five at Georgia Tech — Gregory has become a consultant for his friend and mentor.
No on-court coaching. Just advising. Analysis of practices and players, helping with game plans and film study and asking big-picture questions that aren’t as easily raised by someone in the thick of it and or someone who hasn’t been away for more than a decade.
“He’s not a guy who’s afraid to speak,” Izzo said. “He’s not worried who I am.”
Gregory knows who Izzo is. He knew Izzo before the world knew Izzo, when Izzo was a young assistant for Jud Heathcote.
“I used to drive Coach Izzo on recruiting trips (in the early 1990s), and he’d have the bag phone next to him, and he’d be on the phone on recruiting calls,” Gregory said. “That’s how I learned to recruit, listening to him.”
Heathcote gave Gregory his chance as a graduate assistant in 1990 and later hired him as restricted-earnings assistant (a now-defunct position in college basketball).
“He let you coach, even though I was a GA,” Gregory said. “But he held you accountable for what you were coaching. He would always say, ‘I don’t have time to coach my coaches,’ so you had to learn stuff on the fly, but you’d better be able to teach it.”
Under Heathcote, Gregory learned how to develop players. From Izzo, he learned how to prepare and how important relationships were to winning.
This season, Gregory is back behind the bench during games with the graduate assistants. Guys who look as young as he once did. “Full circle,” he called it.
There’s no grunt work anymore. He is here to be a wise set of eyes, a familiar voice with a fresh perspective. But he’s also at MSU for a refresher course.
After Georgia Tech fired him following last season, Gregory had opportunities to be a television analyst or NBA scout. None of it tugged at him quite like Izzo and MSU.
“It’s a big transition time for us,” Gregory’s wife, Yvette, said. “For Brian to have this time with Coach Izzo is invaluable. I think it’s just what he needed. For himself and really helping Coach Izzo.”
Opportunity by firing
Gregory didn’t want to be at MSU this year. He hoped to be coaching his sixth season at Georgia Tech, further developing a culture he saw beginning to take hold in his final season, as a senior-laden Yellow Jackets team won 21 games and reached the NIT. He couldn’t convince his athletic director that the young pieces in his roster and incoming recruits were ready to take the program to new heights. Perhaps Georgia Tech’s surprising success this season, with mostly Gregory’s players, is proof he had something going.
“It’s definitely humbling,” Gregory said. “A lot of guys struggle (when they’re fired), a lot of guys are ticked off and bitter. I was in a good place, mentally, physically, spiritually. I had a heckuva time coaching that team last year, I really did.”
If Gregory is bitter, he doesn’t show it. Not in a 40-minute interview or to his wife and daughters, one a freshman in high school, the other in the sixth grade.
“I think (our daughters) realize not everything goes your way in life and you’ve got to adjust,” said Yvette, who met Brian on one Easter weekend in Chicago in the early 1990s, a love-at-first-sight encounter (both are from the Chicago area).
“To see the way Brian has put a positive spin on this whole experience, I think it’s invaluable for our family,” Yvette continued. “For all of us to see his strength and the way he’s handling all this, for our girls to see that you bounce back from adversity — life lesson, all around, awesome.”
Gregory makes frequent trips to visit his family in Atlanta, a few days a time. He skipped the Purdue trip last week. They’ve visited East Lansing twice, making the Sparty statue part of their family Christmas card. They were here two weekends ago when MSU played Iowa, his oldest daughter getting to experience the town in which she was born — and perhaps be reminded that her mother went into labor while her father was with Izzo visiting recruit Paul Davis in suburban Detroit.
“I left my phone in the car, and my wife went into labor,” Gregory explained. “And kept calling, calling, calling. We get into the car, and we had like 20 messages from her.”
His second daughter was born early on a game day while Gregory was coaching at Dayton. “My wife says about 4:30 (p.m.), ‘I think you can make the game tonight,'” Gregory said. “We beat St. Joe’s that night.”
Reconnecting with MSU
Lessons of life and of the coaching craft are what Gregory is able to bring to Izzo and his staff. Izzo has two other former head coaches on his staff in Dane Fife and Mike Garland. He has long histories with Garland and associate head coach Dwayne Stephens, whom he signed as a recruit not long before Gregory was hired as a GA in 1990. But Gregory is different. He’s been removed long enough to see it as an insider and outsider, to understand the external expectations of Izzo and the Spartans from afar.
“He’s a great bridge between what we did and what it took to win it all and the different things we went through and now,” Izzo said. “Getting the perspective, my own staff, are we doing the right things in a practice? Are we organized enough? Are we doing this? Why would you quit doing this? And then when you get fired somewhere, you went through a lot of things there, too, so you have a great input on just making mistakes or things he felt he could have done better. He makes me think. It’s kept me thinking about a million things and making sure I try to get this thing back to where we want it to be. It’s really been an enjoyable four or five months.”
In return, Izzo and Co. are able to remind Gregory why things are the way they are, why Izzo is who he’s become, why MSU basketball is what it is.
“Being gone for 13 years, because I was in the middle of it, so you don’t always realize, ‘What makes Tom so successful, why is this program on the same level the Duke, the Carolinas, the Kentuckys, Kansas,” Gregory said. “You name the top-five programs, those are probably the four and we’re the fifth. And so that’s one of the things I hope to get a little better read on.”
The exhaustive preparation. The synergy within the program, Izzo on down. The time spent with players. These are things Gregory thought he took with him when he last left in 2003.
“I thought, because I learned it here, that I spent a lot of time with our players (at Dayton and Georgia Tech),” said Gregory, who left MSU for three years to be a full-time assistant at Toledo and then Northwestern in the late 1990s, before coming back for the national championship season in 1999-2000. “It ain’t even close to what Tom does. What he’s able to do with players is get guys to believe that they could be better than they ever thought.”
“That kid’s a perfect example. Think of what that kid’s doing,” Gregory continued, pointing to Bryn Forbes, working out in MSU’s practice facility during the NBA All-Star break.
Gregory’s time in East Lansing is limited. He wants to be a head coach again, hopefully next season. Being at MSU has made him long for that. After 13 seasons in the position, that’s who he is.
“I’d like to get an opportunity to run my own program again,” Gregory said. “I think when you’ve been fortunate to have the opportunities I’ve had, you miss the impact you can make on a daily basis. You miss watching guys grow, both as men and as students and as players, as well. That camaraderie, that culture building …
“I’m in a fortunate situation (financially), I don’t necessarily have to do anything. But this time away from that particular role has only driven me to realize that’s what I’m supposed to be doing and if given the opportunity, I’d love to be doing it again.”
Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.