With the basketball season about to open next week, Tim Floyd showed up at UTEP’s weekly media luncheon last Monday. This is Floyd’s third season as head basketball coach of the Miners but he and I hadn’t had a chance to sit side by side for a good chat. We did last Monday.
It was great re-living the 1980s. I was sports editor of the El Paso Herald-Post and Floyd had been signed as coach Don Haskins’ assistant. Tim was so young, so full of enthusiasm and had such boyish good looks I immediately described him as the “The Boy Next Door,” a phrase that caught on. He’s 58 now, but I still think of him that way.
ONE OF MY favorite stories about Tim is that Haskins almost didn’t hire him as an assistant. Haskins joked that Floyd’s writing was so bad in his letter of application that he almost threw it away. However, as Haskins was about to toss it in the trash the name of Lee Floyd (Tim’s father) caught his eye. Lee had been an outstanding athlete at Cathedral High School and UTEP and later a big booster of Haskins and the Miners.
Haskins decided to take a chance and hire Tim. And boy, was Haskins glad he did. Tim turned out to be perhaps the greatest recruiter of players in the school’s history and was a big reason the Miners won or tied for five conference titles during the ‘80s.
SOME FOLKS may think that the fact the Miners won the national championship in 1966 and that the movie “Glory Road” 20 years later has made recruiting a lot easier for UTEP. Tim revealed in our conversation Monday that it hasn’t been particularly so. The Miners, after all, had their name changed from Texas Western College to University of Texas at El Paso the very next year after winning the national crown.
So even today, when Tim uses the championship as a recruiting tool players sometimes ask him, “What happened to Texas Western? Was it a one-year wonder?”
Some think the name change was due to the Miners winning the title in 1966 but it wasn’t so. It’s just that University of Texas at Austin changed the name of all its branch schools in 1967.
BY THE WAY, both Tim and I, along with others, served as consultants for the movie “Glory Road.” His task was to explain and direct the type of plays the Miners used during their championship season, including Bobby Joe Hill’s two steals. Floyd did a great job.
My task was impossible. Since I wrote Haskins’ biography, “Haskins: The Bear Facts,” I was asked to clue Josh Lucas, who played Haskins in the movie, on some of Haskins’ mannerisms.
I tried but Lucas looked nothing like Haskins and there was no way he would get away with trying to imitate Haskins’ rough, tough style. So it was decided that Lucas would just be himself, but with a serious manner.
After all, I was told, this was a movie, not a documentary. It worked.
TI M FLOYD got off to a good start his first season as head basketball coach at UTEP, winning 25 games. But that was with players left by his predecessor.
He began recruiting his own players, had a tough season last year but is looking forward to better things this season.
A championship, maybe? He’s excited about some of the players he’s landed but he told me he needs “one more.” I asked him if he meant one more player or one more year.
He gave me that boyish grin of his and said, “Both.”
Whatever, you can bet the Miners will be tough to beat this coming season. And we’ll all be rooting for The Boy Next Door.