Georgia’s new coach fueled by drive to excel

It was this time of year, 18 years ago, when Ray Fox’s youngest son made a surprise trip home from school, a collegian on a quest.

“Dad, I need to borrow some money,” young Mark Fox said.

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Brant Sanderlin/bsanderlin@ajc.com

Mark Fox, who coached for the last five years at Nevada, is Damon Evans’ first major coaching hire as Georgia’s athletics director.

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He wanted the scratch to travel to Indianapolis, the site of the 1991 Final Four. Now, this was Ray Fox he was asking, a buzz-cut, Pleistocene-era coach who never worked one job when two would do. Ray wasn’t in the business of financing larks.

“Whaddya going there for?”

“I’m going to get a coaching job,” Mark said with the same certainty one would say, “I’m going to the corner to buy a Slim Jim and a Coke.”

“And, you know,” Ray said all these years later, “he left there with a coaching job.” Not a great job, a menial grad assistant position at Washington, but a start.

Thus cranked up a professional caravan that arrived Friday in Athens, where Mark Fox was introduced as Georgia’s fifth basketball coach in the past 14 years.

Pretty much no one in these parts saw him coming. The Fox news barely broke before he arrived. But he certainly has no doubts about what he is doing here.

“I knew when I was young I was not going to make it as player. I’m smart enough to realize that,” he said. “My entire focus was to try to become as good a coach as I possibly could be.”

He is just 40, and with the Georgia job, Fox has now played or coached basketball in all four time zones of the continental United States. He is not a low-mileage model.

While the Georgia job seldom is portrayed as a prime one — and likely won’t be until it begins outdrawing women’s gymnastics — it is the kind of job Fox has spent a lifetime campaigning for.

His father coached high school basketball briefly and then settled into a long stay with Garden City (Kan.) Community College football and track. On the side, Ray did construction, and his boys were expected to pitch in when it was time to hang drywall or pour concrete.

To Mark, coaching seemed the much better part of the equation. “He found out real quick he didn’t like to work,” laughed Ray.

A middling player at Garden City and Eastern New Mexico — surely the Area 51 of college basketball — Fox focused on coaching early. When he hit up the old man for money to the Final Four, it wasn’t to join the party but rather to network with all the coaches there.

When he eventually left the low-rung position at Washington to pursue a master’s degree at Kansas, he did not give up working the coaching angle. He wrote then-Jayhawks coach Roy Williams and asked if he could observe practice. Williams picked up something in the letter and agreed.

Fox’s mentor at Washington, Lynn Nance, suggested he watch every practice, every shootaround every day. “You tell a lot of young guys that and they would say, ‘Why?’ He just did it,” Nance said in a 2007 story.

By 1994, Fox was an assistant at Kansas State working against Williams and the Jayhawks. In 2000, Trent Johnson (now at LSU) brought Fox to Nevada as his assistant; and in ‘04 he took over for Johnson when he left for Stanford.

“When I married Mark, the one thing I really loved about him he had a clear picture in his mind what he wanted to do,” said his wife, Cindy. “He had a road map and he was never going to stray from that. He listens to his mentors, he consults people, he’s constantly learning.

“He is so focused, that was an immediate attraction. [The Georgia job] is a culmination of all those dreams.”

The culture of coaching has dominated all facets of Fox’s life. It was Johnson, at Washington, who introduced Fox to the woman in marketing who would become his wife. “Ninety-nine days out of a hundred, I thank him for that,” Fox laughed. Hopefully, that one exceptional day coincides with a Georgia-LSU game.

So caught up was he in the competitive business of recruiting, Fox missed the birth of his second child, daughter Olivia. “I tried sneaking in one more game [on a recruiting trip] than I should have. That’s not one of my prouder moments,” he said.

Ah, but here is the essence of the perfect woman: “That’s OK I understand — he got a greaaaat player. It was worth it,” said Cindy, an associate athletics director at Nevada who might spend some time at home in Athens.

Obviously, the Bulldogs are getting a smart, driven man. But aren’t most coaches?

In five seasons at Nevada, Fox’s teams made three trips to the NCAA tournament and averaged 24 wins a year. “I’m not looking forward to competing against him,” said Johnson, “because I know what he can do. His teams are going to be prepared, and they’re always going to overachieve. That’s what he’s all about — maximizing what he has.”

Behind the fashion eyewear and the nice suits, there also is a molten core that can erupt in any number of ways. Fox is the coach known to get down and bang the floor with his palms to exhort his team, or to break the occasional white dry-erase board to get its attention. In 2007, the Western Athletic Conference reprimanded Fox for a profane postgame confrontation with an official at the conference tournament.

“I wear my emotions on my sleeve sometimes,” Fox said. “I’m passionate, very competitive, want the game played the right way because I think the game deserves that.”

Many questions surround Fox. Can he build a new base of recruiting in Georgia and the South? Can his way work in the SEC? Is he the man to make basketball matter at Georgia?

In retrospect, there is no question — yes, as a matter of fact, that little Final Four grubstake 18 years ago was the best investment Ray Fox ever made.