For Herb Magee, road to 1,000 wins never left Philadelphia

PHILADELPHIA — The bus trips tend to blur together, littered with pranks and stories and Trivial Pursuit, so no one remembers exactly when this particular happening occurred. Herb Magee's best guess is about a decade ago.

Back then just as now, the Philadelphia University men's and women's basketball teams traveled to many of their road games together, playing double-headers. Back then, in a different conference that stretched much farther north, those trips were quite lengthy.

Pizzas were always delivered at the end of the games to accompany the long rides home. But on this particular day, there were no sodas for the players to wash down their pizza slices. Magee — who, by this point, had amassed more than 700 career wins and was well on his way to the Hall of Fame — told the bus driver to stop the bus. Across a four-lane highway, he saw a little store that would likely sell soda, a "mom and pop shop," as women's basketball coach Tom Shirley puts it. Magee insisted he'd handle this.

Magee hopped out of the bus, waited at the guard rail for cars to pass, then ran across two lanes. He climbed over the median, waited out traffic on the other side and sprinted across to the store. He bought the sodas, and ran back across, cans in tow.

After hopping back onto the bus, Magee handed out the drinks and turned to Shirley: "Ya think (Mike) Krzyzewski is doing this?!"

Of course not. They laughed the whole ride home.

This is what the quest for 1,000 career wins looks like — in NCAA Division II.

***

Magee is Philadelphia; its rhythms and its basketball course through his veins. He's lived here his whole life, and he's never come close to leaving. He grew up dreaming, as all kids from West Philly did, of playing someday for West Catholic High School. Making the roster then was all you had to do to gain respect around the city and its summer leagues. Magee made it.

At some point during summer league, Magee's team faced Bucky Harris, who was then the coach at Philadelphia Textile Institute (which became Philadelphia College of Textiles & Science and is now Philadelphia University), a Division II school in East Falls. "His team was in the summer league," Magee says. "I'm not sure that was legal at the time, but he did it anyway."

When Magee was 12, his mother died; his father passed away months later. Edwin Gallagher, a Catholic priest and Magee's uncle, became the legal guardian for Magee and his brothers. When Harris began to recruit Magee, who hadn't gotten offers to play at the Division I level like some of his teammates had, Harris smartly went after Gallagher. He won him over.

"We always did what my uncle said, so I came here," Magee says. "The rest is history."

Instead, he snagged a job coaching at his alma mater, but it was a job that came with conditions. He'd get to be an assistant to Harris and be around hoops — which had been the goal — but he'd also coach other sports over the years. Cross country. Tennis. Golf. At one point, he taught physical education classes. He also helped out with intramural sports. "All of it was for me to be involved with basketball," Magee says now.

At Textile, Magee was a two-time All-American who graduated in 1963 as the program's all-time leading scorer. (He still ranks third.) He was drafted late in the seventh round by the Boston Celtics, but passed on the opportunity to try out after breaking two fingers.

After four years as an assistant, Magee was handed the reins to the basketball program after Harris retired. In Magee's third season as head coach, Textile won a national championship.

"In those early years, he used to play against Villanova," says Jim Lynam, the former NBA coach who played alongside Magee at West Catholic. "His teams played some incredibly high-level games against big-time Villanova teams. That's when I really had the first sense that he was something special (as a coach).

"He stepped foot on that campus and never left."

Magee, now in his 48th season, is three wins away from career victory No. 1,000. The earliest he can hit the milestone is next Tuesday, at home against Wilmington University. He'll become just the fourth coach at any level of men's college basketball to win 1,000 games.

***

Magee's love affair with the sport began at a young age. By Magee's early teenage years, basketball had began to consume him. He'd make sure each and every day, no matter what time of year, that he found a court. There, he'd take at least 500 jump shots. Friends would ask him to play pick-up; he'd say he needed to practice his shot.

"Without maybe us understanding at the time, he had an incredible talent," Lynam says. "He was able to shoot the ball like nobody you've ever seen."

It was self-taught. Magee went to see Philadelphia's pro team, the Warriors, play at Convention Hall. He'd keep an eye on Tom Gola and Paul Arizin, who'd both played college ball locally. He'd watch Bill Sharman on the Boston Celtics. He'd notice their shooting mechanics, take what he noticed and work it into his practice.

"I knew I wasn't going to be a big, strong guy," Magee says. "I loved basketball so much I figured the way for me to get into a game, make the team at West Catholic, have a career of some kind was to become a shooter. So I did.

"What I do now is I simply teach shooting the way I taught myself."

In the ensuing decades, he would teach shooting at camps throughout the Northeast and guest lecture at friends' camps. He's worked with NBA players, from Malik Rose to Evan Turner. He still runs camps — now, sometimes for kids and grandchildren of earlier-generation campers — that get filled to capacity.

He's got his camp routine down pat. He'll shoot as he lectures, sinking every basket from 15 or 17 feet out. "You have to entertain them," he says. Former assistants say they've seen him hit more than a hundred shots in a row; he'd have random kids keep track at camps.

Later on in these demonstrations, he'll find a ball that's got a lot of air in it, bounce it sky high and watch it go through the net — to the delight of the campers. "I've made it more times than I've missed it," he says.

Jay Wright, now Villanova's coach, was one of those enthralled by Magee's shooting prowess, then as a kid at a camp in the Poconos. Magee also tried to recruit Wright to Textile; Wright went the Division I route, instead, to Bucknell.

"I would say everybody that's coaching in the Big Five right now, maybe not (La Salle's) John Giannini, but definitely everybody else because we're all from Philly — we all learned how to shoot from Herb," Wright says. "He was such a prominent speaker and teacher of shooting, if you went to any camp, you'd see him."

***

Division II means basketball, just basketball without much of the accoutrements that accompany it at the Division I level — things like chartered flights, endless pairs of sneakers and piles of new athletic gear.

Here, there's barely enough money to pay assistant coaches, not without them holding down other jobs. Here, Magee's daughter, Kay, who is also the team's volunteer director of operations, takes home the team's uniforms over winter break to do laundry.

Earlier this season, Magee's team dressed for a road game in the opposing school's library. He gave the pre-game speech inside a racquetball court, with a single, bare light bulb swinging above.

Magee has had his fair share of job offers over the years to leave, either from Division I or to be an NBA assistant coach. He hasn't taken any of them, mostly because they would have taken him away from Philadelphia.

"I had decided a long time ago I was going to live in the Philly area," Magee says. "I got divorced 30-something years ago. The kids were here, Kay, and her sister Eileen. There was no way I was going to take a job in some other city if my children were living here. … I never would have taken a job just for money. Now, could I have made more money going some place else? There's no question about it.

"This is my school. When I came here, there were 350 students here."

Now there are about 3,000. Some things, such as the basketball facilities, have been upgraded. But the program itself still requires fundraisers to stay afloat. Assistants work for very little pay, but they know what they lack in income, they'll make up in experience and connections. Coaches with ties to Magee are sprinkled throughout the city's prominent Division I programs, and some former assistants have become Division I head coaches. Billy Lange, a former assistant, is now a player development coach for the Philadelphia 76ers.

"A lot of people say I worked there because I spent so much time there," says current Penn State coach Pat Chambers, who played for Magee and hung around the program afterward. "People respect Herb. They respect his coaching. They respect what he's done over the long haul. You want to hire his guys. … It's like, 'If that formula has worked for Philadelphia Textile for the last 40-some years, why won't it work at my program, too?' "

It pays to know Magee, or any of the Philly coaches, at the very least to get an invite to Division I Final Four shenanigans. Everyone gets together on the Thursday before the games, at some bar or restaurant in the host city. It's part of a tradition that goes back quite some time; Wright remembers drinking with Philly coaches in Magee's hotel room back when he was an assistant coach at Rochester in the mid-1980s, "thinking (he) was with royalty at this party."

"It still goes on strong today," Chambers says. "It's the party you can't miss."

***

Part of the reason Magee has stayed put all these years is that he's a creature of habit.

If he likes an Italian restaurant, he and his wife, Geri, go there so much they liken it to being characters in Cheers. If he likes a diner on a road trip, the team will go there every time it plays there. If he likes a bus driver — Barry! — he's got to have that bus driver all the time. Shirley, who also is Magee's boss, once played a trick on Magee, telling him the NCAA tournament had hired a different bus company. New bus driver. No Barry.

"Coach would stop me in the middle of the scouting report, like, 'Are you kidding me? No Barry?' " says assistant coach Jimmy Reilly, laughing. "It was totally affecting practice." They quickly had to let Magee in on the joke.

Even vacations are habitual. Magee and Geri were married in 1996, and they honeymooned in Disney World. Every year since, they've celebrated their anniversary with Mickey Mouse. The trip always falls just after Labor Day and kind of serves as a bridge between the offseason and the start of basketball season. The two go to Disney parks in the morning, then spend most of the day relaxing by the pool.

"Can you believe it?" Geri says. "It is really a lot of fun, and it's funny."

Back home, Magee and Geri wake up around 5:15 and walk up to four miles every other day. On non-game nights, Magee will head to bed early, sometimes as early as 8:30 p.m. After games, it's always the same ritual: Sandwiches, a few drinks and time spent with family and close friends. That's what Geri assumes they'll do after win No. 1,000, whenever it comes.

"He's very regimented," Geri says. "He really likes having that type of thing, where everything's in place.

And so, he's stayed. Philadelphia, born, bred and happy.

"He's had the good fortune of being in a comfort zone for the last 50+ years," Lynam says, "and credit to him that he knew it. Some of us can't appreciate the moment. I'd say he would be the polar opposite of that. He's appreciated every moment."

Says Temple coach Fran Dunphy: "He was just one of those guys who was more secure than the rest of us. Always fighting for the top prize, the rest of us. He said to himself, I've got a great thing going, I know exactly who I am and what I want to accomplish. He's had a wonderful life."

***

In 2011, by which point he'd piled up more than 900 wins and reached 25 NCAA tournaments, Magee was inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame. It was the only individual accomplishment he'd ever hoped for and also fulfilled a prediction John Calipari made a decade and a half earlier.

Twenty years ago, the then-UMass coach introduced Magee to a team they were coaching together, the East squad at the 1995 Olympic Festival. Calipari called Magee a future Hall of Famer, a title that caught Magee off guard.

"The more I'm with him, the more I saw what a great mind he had for basketball — then I started looking at his records and stuff — and I'm like, 'You're going to be in the Hall of Fame,' " Calipari recalls now.

Calipari proved prescient.

Throughout all of the hubbub that's accompanied the latter half of his career, particularly as he's hit milestone win totals, Magee has remained exactly the same. He's still got his trademark mustache and looks younger than his 73 years suggest.

"He's still a simple guy who wants to coach the game, have practice, go out and get something to drink after the game," says Shirley, the athletic director. "I've always respected that. He never lost his hometown-ness."

He's also never cared much about these milestone wins. He'd like No. 1,000 to come and go, so there's no extra pressure on his players. He says it's the basketball itself, the relationships with players and the school he loves that keep him going — with no plans of retirement.

"What drives me is the competition, taking my players against your players, see who can come out on top," Magee says. "If you don't, you work on the things that maybe didn't work that night. You try to put together the best possible team you can."

That's precisely what he's trying to do with his current Rams, who are 12-5.

In late January, two days before a matchup against Bloomfield College (a game that was ultimately be postponed due to bad weather), Magee spent the late afternoon watching film, worrying about Bloomfield's zone defense and trying to figure out how to light a spark under his players; they came out too flat the previous game, and it nearly cost them.

The Rams gathered for a team film session prior to practice. Magee told them they made fundamental defensive mistakes the last game, which allowed two opposing players to get hot. He also was frustrated with his own guys. Not enough misdirection.

"God missed you with the deceptive gene," Magee told his players. "There is such a thing."

Players laughed. But the point was taken. Little details matter — a cut here, a pass there, selling a fake.

"These are the things that win games," Magee said.

He would know.​