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Tom Izzo has long embraced the public side of his job at Michigan State.
(Mike Mulholland | MLive.com)
This is an opinion piece by MLive.com columnist David Mayo.
Tom Izzo wants you to know.
Whatever is involved in becoming a Hall of Famer in any sport or endeavor, as Izzo will this week, there always is some quality or qualities, beyond the obligatory championships, or winning percentages, or statistical outliers, that puts someone in that exclusive society.
For Izzo, that trait is communication, and the desire to inform and involve others, and help them understand his thinking. He won't change that thinking for most, except perhaps in those rare instances when someone has invested similarly extraordinary time and energy into Michigan State athletics as he has, which narrows the field considerably.
But to whatever degree someone embraces Spartans basketball and wants to understand it, Izzo wants to help like few coaches anywhere.
Izzo will be enshrined in Springfield, Mass., this week, a living and breathing icon in our midst, certified formally by the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. He joins Jim Boeheim, John Calipari, Mike Krzyzewski, Rick Pitino and Roy Williams as active men's college coaches so honored.
He is as Pure Michigan as it gets, born of the Upper Peninsula, dismissive of snowfalls that fall short of requiring a ladder to enter a second-floor window, picky about his pasties, and firm in his recommendation that everyone should visit the Mystery Spot when driving through God's Country. He left once to become an assistant at Tulsa after Jud Heathcote said he needed to flesh out his resume, then reneged before his first game there and returned to the Michigan State bench.
He loves Michigan State basketball and wants to help others know the whys and hows of its inner workings, to what degree possible.
IZZO'S CAREER
* Record at Michigan State: 524-205 (.719) in 21 seasons
* 19 consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances
* Seven Final Four appearances: 1999, 2000, 2001, 2005, 2009, 2010, 2015
* National chaionship in 2000
* Seven Big Ten championships: 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2009, 2010, 2012
* Five Big Ten Tournament titles: 1999, 2000, 2012, 2014, 2016
* AP National Coach of the Year in 1998
* Big Ten Coach of the Year in 1998, 2009 and 2012.
Izzo long has understood there is an esoteric quality to what he does, that average observers, including media, can't grasp how coaches obsess over a six-inch differential in post positioning, or the keen fractional-second timing involved in screening, without explanation.
So he has efforted, for two decades in the same job, to bridge that gap.
Michigan State basketball offers an NBA-like atmosphere that exists virtually nowhere else. Players are not protected and coddled. They are not shielded from media, which in turn would shield them from the public. Locker rooms are open. Post-practice sessions are open. That is part of the college experience. Izzo long since adopted the stance that if the games are on national television, muting players serves little purpose.
It goes beyond what most see.
Michigan State practices generally are open to observers, with some limits. Depending upon schedule, the principle is that one practice before each game will be open to NBA scouts, ranking administrators, media -- just about anyone with clearance and a reason to be there.
There are two general philosophies about allowing such open access to view practices. The prevailing one is that the risk of allowing media into a live practice outweighs the reward. Then there is a small minority that sees it another way, that if media familiar with his team are also familiar with his practices, then they will have a better grasp of what the Spartans are trying to do in real-time game applications. Izzo has adopted the latter view.
There is self-serving interest at play there, for sure. The idea is that a better-informed media corps might be more understanding when things go wrong. And the agreement to open practice comes with one major caveat, no reporting on what you see there.'
But the open society that is Michigan State basketball extends far beyond practices.
In 2010, Izzo was suspended a game for a summer-camp miscue. It was a typical six-degrees-of-separation-from-reality NCAA violation: Izzo had hired a camp counselor, who also maintained personal contact with a college prospect at the time, for a six-day assignment that paid $475. For that mistake, Izzo sat out a game the Spartans won by 39 points without him. The college prospect went elsewhere.
A couple days later, during a 2 1/2-hour personal catharsis in Breslin Center, Izzo calmly sat at a round table and splayed out his frustrations in a wide-ranging discussion with media covering the Spartans. There were maybe six or eight people there. It was all completely off the record and nothing was off limits. The discussion might have gone on even longer if not for the calls of Mother Nature and basketball practice.
Whether Izzo left that exchange feeling better, at least he left it knowing that those who help to shape public opinion understood his perspective.
Izzo flirted with the NBA, in 2000 with Atlanta and again in 2010 with Cleveland, but never left. He would have loved the all-basketball element of it. No NCAA poring over summer-camp hirings. No more wooing 17-year-olds.
Going to the NBA never was the problem.
Leaving Michigan State was.
He communicated that, too, saying after the Cavaliers flirtation that he never would coach anywhere but East Lansing again.
Numbers alone would have gotten Izzo into the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame, 524 wins, seven Big Ten regular-season titles, seven Final Fours, one NCAA title in 19 seasons. Eighteen Spartans have been drafted by NBA teams on Izzo's watch, nine of them in the first round.
But numbers aren't always enough. While the separate National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame recognizes more college-specific figures, the Naismith Hall is more comprehensive but also more exclusive, such that there are 12 coaches who won men's national titles before Izzo's in 2000 who are not in it, including names like Joe B. Hall, Steve Fisher, Rollie Massimino, Norm Sloan, Tubby Smith, and Izzo's old boss Jud Heathcote.
Izzo is accustomed to having most of his public utterances disseminated and recorded. He long since decided that embracing that public side of his job serves everyone better than shrinking from it.
In his induction speech at Springfield, Izzo must determine how best to acknowledge those who helped, and listened, along the journey.
Even for the great communicator, that will be a challenge.