Before the Georgia basketball team left for a recent game at Missouri, Mark Fox told his players a story. It was about his father.
Raymond Fox, a longtime high school basketball coach in Kansas, was attending a game several years ago at historic Allen Fieldhouse in Lawrence. He didn’t like his seat, so at one point he got up and walked to a corridor where he could stand and get a clear view of his son, Mark, who was the coach of visiting Nevada. Mark’s team was winning, but Kansas was making a run and the father needed a closer look.
“I turned around and I saw my dad standing there,” Mark Fox said. “He had his arms crossed, looking at me like when we were kids, as if to say, ‘What are you going to do? Are you going to buck up? What now?’”
Nevada held on to win. It was a big night for father and son, both Kansas natives. Fox told that story to his Georgia players, who were coming off a miserable loss at George Washington and were preparing to play in one of the more difficult college venues in the nation.
“What are we going to do?” he repeated.
On Jan. 8, Georgia ended Missouri’s 26-game home winning streak. It was a bright moment for a program still struggling to get traction. It was an emotional night for Fox, who over the previous four days had traveled from Washington, D.C., to Kansas to Georgia to Kansas to Missouri and hadn’t allowed himself a moment to grieve the loss of his father Jan. 4.
“I lost it,” he said. “We were up by four with single-digit seconds left. I knew it was over and all of a sudden — bam.”
He sat on the bench, covered his face and broke down in tears, thinking not of the victory but of Raymond Fox, who died the day before his 79th birthday following a lengthy battle with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Mark attended a memorial service in Kansas the night before the Missouri game and drove 500 miles to make it to Columbia before tipoff.
It’s a week later. Fox still chokes up and pauses between sentences when talking about his father. He was sitting on a couch in his office Wednesday, the morning after a blowout loss at Florida. This game was as accurate a barometer of where Georgia stands in this 8-7 season as the Missouri game. The Bulldogs are capable of gutting out victories, but probably not talented enough to string many together.
Losing Kentavious Caldwell-Pope early to the NBA was a significant hit, similar to when Trey Thompkins and Travis Leslie left in 2011. “A program that’s established and has depth can deal with that,” Fox said. “For us, it’s made it harder.
“I had a conversation with coach (Mark) Richt this summer. He said, ‘You may not realize it now, but in the long term this will help you.’ We had to prove to people that if you go to Georgia you can go to the NBA.”
The problem being, there’s no guarantee Fox has the luxury of “the long term.” This is his fifth season. He has made it to one NCAA tournament. He needs to impress his boss, athletic director Greg McGarity, who didn’t hire him. Bad programs take time to build. But recruiting remains a struggle, and basketball still seems to be off the radar in Athens.
Fox understands the criticism. “It comes with the territory,” he said.
But he is convinced things are moving in the right direction. He believes he can achieve success without ignoring rules, cutting corners and leaving a Jim Harrick-size grease stain on campus. He believes that because that’s the way he was raised. That’s what Raymond Fox of Garden City, Kan., taught him.
“My dad’s life, whether he was coaching boys or girls, basketball, football or track, was trying to impact young people,” he said. “He coached at a different level than I do, but with the understanding that your fundamental responsibility is to the student first. When I got the Georgia job, I called him from the airport even though I wasn’t supposed to say anything yet. He was happy for me. He was proud. The only thing he said to me about Georgia was, ‘Do it right. You can get there doing it right.’”
Before the George Washington game, Fox spoke by phone to his father’s doctor. He was told his father might not make it through another day.
“The doctor told me, ‘I can try to keep him alive until you get here’ but I wasn’t going to let him suffer,” he said. So Fox coached the game and was such an emotional mess that a longtime friend watching on television phoned him the next day and said, “What’s wrong? You don’t look yourself?”
Fox flew to Kansas the morning after the game, but arrived four hours after his father’s death. “I never got a chance to say goodbye,” he said. “But I was blessed. I know a lot of kids who never had the luxury of having a father.”
The last time Fox spoke to his father?
“I called him on Christmas,” he said. “The one thing he said was, ‘You’ve got to play some damn defense.’ He was right.”
The Dogs don’t have a player of Caldwell-Pope’s caliber, but Fox believes “we can do some good things when we play together as a unit.”
He’s also trying to do things the right way. He suspended forward Brandon Morris for the first three games of the season for disciplinary reasons. Morris is starting again.
“He’ll end up having a better life and a better career because of that,” Fox said. “Our commitment has to be to help young people.”
The ways of the father.
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