After he was given the big job promotion, Joe Cravens spent a long, tiring day accepting congratulations and doing interviews and working at the office, then he came home at 10:30 p.m. and did what he always does. He did the dishes.
Cravens, the new head basketball coach at Weber State, is the kind of man who gets the kids ready for school in the morning and helps his wife clean up the house. The kind of man whose wife, Linda, after more than a decade in a marriage that has included uncertainty and cancer and unemployment, still gushes, "I'm in awe of him. He is just the nicest man! He's wonderful."Almost everyone who knows Cravens agrees, and so they are celebrating these days. He landed another head coaching job and got his second chance, and for once life seemed fair.
All week long Cravens, his home a virtual Hallmark store of balloons, cakes, cards and calls, has had a lump in his throat. People from all over the country have been calling to congratulate him while Joe was crying softly on the other end of the line. A reporter called the other night and Joe choked up again. He got so many calls after getting the job that late that night he finally had to unplug the phone so he could get some sleep. There were 150 messages waiting for him.
On Sunday night, Cravens received another important phone call. Guy Beach, who served as an assistant with Cravens last season and finished second to him in the race for the head coaching job, called to say he would remain as his assistant. Among other things, that means star players Harold Arceneaux and Eddie Gill, who vowed to transfer when Beach -- their former junior college coach -- didn't get the job, apparently will return to Weber.
Cravens is on a roll, and maybe it's long overdue.
FYI to Arceneaux and Gill: When Cravens took the head coaching job at Idaho a few years ago, he faced a nearly identical situation. Three of the team's star players -- all loyal to an assistant who didn't get the job -- vowed to transfer. Not only did they stay, they became close to Cravens. Frank Waters named his son, Joe, after Cravens. Dion Watson named his daughter, Chelsie, after Cravens' daughter. Orlando Lightfoot still calls Cravens nearly every month and concludes every conversation with, "You know I love you, coach."
So Cravens will start his new job with virtually the same team that upset North Carolina in the opening round of the NCAA tournament in March and came within a basket of advancing to the Sweet 16. Not that Cravens is ready to throw away the boxes.
For years he and Linda have used the same cardboard boxes to move from coaching job to coaching job, always keeping them handy for the next move. The boxes have followed them from Salt Lake City to Irvine, Calif., to a storage warehouse to Ogden in six years.
"You can see on the boxes where we crossed out 'dining room' and wrote 'kitchen' or 'living room,' " says Linda.
Linda gave away a few of the boxes last week, but her husband says, "There's a part of me that wants to save some of them." If he is still a little skeptical about his job status, you couldn't blame him. Commenting on the many congratulatory phone calls he has received, he says, "In a few years they could be condolences. That's the way this profession is. I know the minute I got this job, the clock started ticking."
Cravens has learned to be cautious. After serving as Rick Majerus' assistant at Utah for several years, he took the Idaho job. He lasted three years. "I was so naive in Idaho," he says. "I thought, 'I've arrived. I'm a Division 1 coach, I'll be successful, it will be a wonderful life.' A friend once told me after I was fired, 'If you stay in coaching, you'll probably get fired again someday.' "
What Cravens wanted more than anything was a second chance, and now he has it. He feels he was cheated at Idaho. The school president told him his first priority was to straighten out the team's academic troubles (the team GPA was 1.6). He was told to recruit more regionally and to recruit preps, not junior college players. Cravens did just that, and his teams produced records of 19-9, 12-15, 12-16. Meanwhile, the school president left Idaho. His replacement fired Cravens.
"If they had said they wanted me to win a conference championship in three years, I would have gone about my business in a different way," he says. "We had 12 seniors in my three years and 11 graduated."
Those were hard times for Cravens, his wife and two daughters. Linda underwent treatment for cancer (she has reached the five-year mark without a recurrence), and then the family faced unemployment. Rod Baker, then the Irvine coach, called and hired him as an assistant out of sympa- thy for a friend.
"I care too much about you to leave you hanging out there," Baker told him. As it turned out, it was like being invited to join him on the Titanic. The team won one game and Baker was fired. Cravens, 43 at the time, applied for the Irvine job but finished second. He was unemployed again, after 20 years of coaching.
Meanwhile, the lease had run out on their home. The Cravens put their belongings in storage and moved in with friends while they determined their future. Cravens went on unemployment for six weeks to survive, then went to Europe to do basketball clinics. Eventually, he was hired by Ron Abegglen as an assistant at Weber State.
"We were at a very low point, financially and spiritually," says Cravens. "It served to make us very strong spiritually. (The Weber job) happened because maybe the good Lord thought I deserved another chance. I can't tell you how many times I prayed that the good Lord had a plan for me and my family, whether I was to teach junior high or coach or roof houses."
Apparently, the plan for Cravens was to return to coaching. Faced with the task of hiring a second assistant at Weber, he finds it ironic that he is in a position to help some poor coach who needs a job. "I've got 10 friends out there now who are going through the same thing I did," he says. "I can save one of them. I'd like to save all 10."