Ivano Newbill can still see it his mind’s eye.
He is a freshman at Georgia Tech, redshirting during the 1989-90 season. The Yellow Jackets are in their locker room at halftime of their NCAA tournament game against LSU and Shaquille O’Neal in Knoxville, Tenn. Coach Bobby Cremins is appealing to the Jackets to raise their play.
“He said you always have to be your best and do your best because you will not get an opportunity again to do anything you have done today,” Newbill said.
Newbill wasn’t even playing, but he could tell the room was energized. The Jackets roared back after halftime and beat the Tigers 94-91, the second step on the road to Tech’s magical ride to the Final Four. The team will be celebrated at halftime of Saturday’s game against Wake Forest at McCamish Pavilion.
Asked about the locker-room pep talk Friday, Cremins had no recollection of it. But for Newbill, a 19-year-old freshman from Macon, it was a life-guiding moment. He said he thinks about it on a weekly basis. After an 11-year professional basketball career and now living in Los Angeles, he tries to live it out with his pregnant wife, 2-year-old son, his positions as a health-and-fitness teacher and an assistant women’s basketball coach at Santa Monica College and through his passions to end world hunger and clean the environment. He is learning computer networking and has an idea for a social-networking site. He said he thinks about Cremins often.
“The crazy thing about life is, you hear people say things when you’re 19, 20 years old,” he said. “You’re like, What are they talking about? It doesn’t make sense. You have to trust them. Then when you become a coach or become a teacher, you’re like, Wow. … Coach Cremins said this. It’s like it goes on and on.”
Newbill is like most, if not all of the players coached by Cremins. The imprint that he left through recruiting, practices, games and life together has remained far longer than their basketball careers. A handful of the members of the much-loved 1990 team joined Newbill in sharing the impact that Cremins has had on them.
Rod Balanis was to enroll as a freshman in the fall of 1988, a guard out of Williamsburg, Va. In August, he was in a car accident, fracturing his femur and arm and throwing his basketball career into question. Soon after, Cremins called.
“He said, ‘Listen, I don’t want you to worry about a thing,’” said Balanis, now an assistant basketball coach at Notre Dame. “’Your scholarship will always be good here. You do what you’ve got to do in regards to getting yourself ready and doing that.’”
Balanis knew that wasn’t necessarily the standard response from a major-college coach. He stayed at home for a year, recovered and enrolled in 1989. He redshirted the Final Four season, but played his four seasons with an indebtedness to Cremins, ready to attack any role he was given.
“He’s one of the few guys in this profession — and I’ve been in it for a long time — nobody has anything bad to say about him,” Balanis said. “That’s the way he treated people. … The guy has a heart of gold.”
After Malcolm Mackey retired from professional basketball following the 2004-05 season, he met with his old coach to figure out what he wanted to do. Mackey decided to try working as a car dealer. Cremins offered himself as a reference.
The dealer called Cremins, who spoke well on Mackey’s behalf, and he got the job. Mackey now works at Mercedes-Benz of Buckhead. (“Ask for Malcolm,” he said.)
Mackey remembered when he was recruited, Cremins promised him and his parents that he wouldn’t recruit anyone else at his position. Mackey went on to become an all-time Tech great.
“He was a guy that kept his word,” Mackey said. “He was an honorable man that keeps his words. If he tells you he’s going to do something, he does it.”
In no small part because of Cremins bringing Mackey to Tech, Mackey’s daughter Jasmine earned her Tech degree last May.
“I absolutely adore coach Cremins,” Mackey said. “That’s my guy.”
James Gaddy was a walk-on, a freshman in the Final Four season. After his career, Cremins helped him get into graduate school at Tech. Last year, after Gaddy returned to work following his brother’s death, there was a message from Cremins. The two ran into each other a couple of years ago at a Tech game, and Cremins made a point to walk up into the upper deck to greet Gaddy’s mother.
Said Gaddy, the president of a real estate development and management company in McDonough, “He was the most loyal person I’ve ever met in my life.”
At the end of his freshman season in which he catalyzed the Jackets’ run, star point guard Kenny Anderson got his girlfriend pregnant. His coach stood by him.
“He just comforted me, sat me down, told me what to do, how I should go about it,” Anderson said. “I was 18, 19 years old. Not having some advice, maybe things would have gone haywire, but he helped me.”
The lesson: “Do the right thing. Just treat people fairly,” Anderson said.
The course of Anderson’s life has hardly been smooth. After a 14-year NBA career, he has veered through a handful of coaching jobs and is now coaching an AAU team and is hoping to land a college job. He said he speaks with Cremins two or three times a month.
“I’m learning now,” he said. “At 44 years old, like, Wow, Remember when (Cremins) said that? Remember when he said this? The light bulb has come on.”
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