The season hadn’t even started and Bruce Pearl was bare-chested again. The former Tennessee men’s basketball coach, who once painted his chest orange to drum up support at a Lady Vols game, is back coaching at Auburn and apparently showing some skin again.
On the eve of his first season back in the SEC since he was fired in 2011 on the heels of an NCAA investigation, his Tigers players have seen firsthand the kind of passion Pearl made his name on.
“A couple of days into practice, I think somebody might have missed a box-out,” said Auburn senior guard K.T. Harrell. “Or somebody might have been not sprinting hard and he takes off his shirt. And he starts yelling and screaming. I’m thinking in my mind, ‘Put your shirt back on.’”
Harrell and his Auburn teammates wanted to crack a smile, especially when Pearl, who isn’t exactly svelte, had a hard time getting the shirt over his shoulders. But the moment — and Pearl’s point — were serious. So the players just watched, wide-eyed.
“He threw it on the ground, he was yelling,” Harrell said, who could laugh about it on SEC media day in Charlotte, N.C. “That’s just how passionate he is. He loves the game and he wants to win. So hopefully he never does that again. But I get it; we get it.”
That’s just the kind of jolt to the system Auburn was hoping for when athletic director Jay Jacobs hired Pearl in March, even though the coach was still serving the third year of his show-cause penalty for lying to the NCAA about hosting UT recruits at a cookout at his house. For his first five months at Auburn, Pearl could have no contact with recruits, leaving it up to his assistant coaches. Among those he put in place were his son Steven and former Auburn and NBA standout Chuck Person.
But Pearl’s reputation — six NCAA tournaments in his six years at Tennessee including a 2010 run to the Elite Eight — preceded him.
Antoine Mason, son of former NBA star Anthony Mason, decided to transfer to Auburn from Niagara before he ever met Pearl. Mason was the nation’s second-leading scorer last year behind Creighton’s Doug McDermott with a 25.6-point average. He gained immediate eligibility as a graduate student for one year at Auburn.
“I looked at him as a legend,” Mason said of Pearl. “He’s been to the tournament — what? — 17 times out of his 19 years (including nine years at Division II Southern Indiana and four years at Wisconsin-Milwaukee). And when you heard of Tennessee, you heard of Bruce Pearl. As a kid watching college games, you see he’s the head coach and to have the opportunity to be coached by him, it’s a blessing.”
Pearl feels the same way about coaching again. He couldn’t be sure that would happen and he missed it during his three years as an analyst.
“I was grateful to ESPN and XM radio for giving me a chance to stay in the game after I’d made those mistakes and really could have cost myself an opportunity to ever coach again,” Pearl said. “So am I a better man now than I was then? I used to always believe that I was a good coach but tried to be a better man. I don’t know if I’m a better coach, but I do think in these last three or four years, I’ve really worked hard. God is going to have a much stronger presence in my locker room. … If not for his grace, I would not be back in coaching.”
At Auburn, as it was at Tennessee, Pearl’s task is building up a basketball program that toils in the shadows of a national football powerhouse. Auburn hasn’t made the NCAA tournament since 2003 and only three times in the past 26 years. The Tigers return only five scholarship players from a team that went 14-16, and 6-12 in the SEC last season.
But Pearl felt he was the right fit for a program that spent $92 million on a new arena and practice facility five years ago, and is itching for some passion to go along with it.
“I’m all in at Auburn and that’s what Auburn needed,” Pearl said. “Auburn didn’t need somebody that was going to go there for a while, get the program going and think about going someplace else. They needed somebody that wanted to live in that community, who wanted to build a legacy in that community, if that’s possible. And that’s why it was such a great fit.”
Pearl’s former ESPN colleague, former Virginia Tech coach Seth Greenberg, said that might be true just about anywhere.
“If there’s a microphone and a light, a court and a ball, Bruce is in good shape,” Greenberg said. “He just has so much passion and so much energy. It’s infectious. My only concern for Bruce is he always wants everything right now, understanding the process. But he’s got great momentum going on right now and with getting good players in last year, that could help him be competitive.”
Pearl brings his up-tempo style and emphasis on defense, while he continues to try to attract better athletes. He’s already got his sales pitch down and he doesn’t mind using football to his advantage, dropping Cam Newton’s name and the 2011 national championship.
“When you put up some star power, like I’ll put up Charles Barkley and you can put up Michael Jordan,” Pearl said, eyes gleaming. “But then I’ll raise you Bo Jackson. Where do you go there? And then Frank Thomas. And then Jason Dufner. And then Tim Hudson. (Auburn) has got star power. And I think I can sell that.”
Pearl already had Barkley in his back pocket before he set foot on campus. Pearl was coaching at Tennessee when he got an unprompted call from Barkley, who just wanted to tell Pearl he liked the way his teams played. Pearl still has the voice mail message.
Now that he’s actually on campus, he’s been working on winning over everybody else, visiting classes, going to football games and getting students “riled up,” as Harrell says.
The school, which has already sold out its season ticket allotment for the first time since 1999-2000, sold out its season-opener on Nov. 14 against Pearl’s former team, Wisconsin-Milwaukee. It’s only the sixth time the arena has sold out in its five seasons.
The only thing that’s slowed Pearl down is back surgery, which he underwent on Nov. 4, but he returned to practice just 36 hours later.
“It’s a good feeling,” said Harrell, the SEC’s leading returning scorer with 18.3 points per game. “The football team deserves a lot of the attention that they get; they do well pretty much every year. So that’s what Coach is trying to do. He’s trying to change the program, change the atmosphere at Auburn. And he’s doing it.”
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