Of all the sports figures I have met during the last couple of decades, Rick Majerus might rank as the most fascinating to me personally. He's intelligent, driven, obsessed, articulate, passionate, humorous, talkative, opinionated, knowledgeable about a wide range of subjects and might very well be the best coach on earth.
He travels the world, lives alone in a hotel suite with his five TVs and VCRs, and maybe nobody ever loved coaching and basketball more than Majerus. Besides, any 51-year-old man who keeps a basketball in the back of his car on the chance that he might run into a pickup game is OK by me.So right off the top I have a weak spot for any book about the coach. Rick Majerus wrote a book -- or at least he wrote as much as any celeb really writes a book these days. Actually, he said the words, and Gene Wojciechowski turned them into an as-told-to, first-person book, "My Life on a Napkin."
Much of it is a rehash of things that have been previously written, but still the book is a light, fun read for anyone who enjoys Majerus on one of his rambling conversations. If you've ever listened to one of his pregame radio shows, you know that all it takes to get Majerus going is one question on any subject and he'll take it from there. You never know where he'll end up. The book is essentially Majerus turned loose on his radio show. A 247-page stream of consciousness, interspersed with italicized quotes from Majerus' pals.
Everything about Majerus' passion for the game can be summed up wonderfully by his reaction to being cut from the Marquette basketball team. He began coaching anything with a basketball, starting with players at a Milwaukee playground.
Bill Dwyre, a former Milwaukee Journal sports writer who is now the sports editor at the L.A. Times, tells us, "I had heard about all these kids at Marquette High practicing all the time, about some guy who took them out to the playground. It was Majerus. I started talking to him. He was really young. He was a nobody, an assistant high school coach. But from the very first day I met him I could tell he knew the game. He'd take those kids out on the playgrounds -- it didn't matter how hot or dusty it was -- and he'd run them. They were a collection of non-athletic white stiffs. But Rick made them into a winning team."
Majerus, we learn, has such a passion for basketball that coaching is to him what alcohol is to an alcoholic. He can't help himself. He recalls attending a team barbecue last fall for first-year players. After a while, the players drifted to the driveway and began playing H-O-R-S-E. Majerus decided he would watch them, but "I couldn't do it. I just couldn't watch them. I had to analyze them. . . . For the next hour I couldn't take my eyes off their form, their shooting, their playing technique. I can never watch a game just to watch it. Everything serves either as affirmation or as a point of comparison."
Majerus' obsession is legendary. Former Ball State player Rick Hall recalls that after a rare loss, "the next day when we came into practice he still was wearing the same clothes he had worn the night before. He had spent the whole night in the office watching film. And that was after a six-hour drive back from Central Michigan."
Such obsession comes at a price, as Majerus has told us. Childhood friend Mike Schneider: "I was his best man at his wedding. It was a hot, humid Milwaukee day, and he was as nervous as a cat. I've seen people sweat through a shirt, maybe even a coat, but he was sweating through his tie. It was so soaked in sweat, he was trying to dry it with the blower from the air conditioner. I've never seen him so nervous. In the end, his marriage became a test between wife and basketball. His wife wouldn't accept him in a part-time role as husband. Basketball won out again, like (it had over) law school and everything else."
Majerus himself gives us a glimpse of his obsession when he says, "My only respite during the season is on Sundays. That's when I'll try to go see a movie and forget basketball for two hours. It's like a treat to myself. . . . But that's it: two hours."
What we learn again is that everything Majerus embraces, he embraces in a big way, whether it's food or basketball.
One of the most touching and sentimental parts of the book is Majerus' love and reverence for his late father. He recalls that during the week of the 1998 Final Four he found himself crying or tearing up repeatedly as people from the old neighborhood expressed their regret that Ray Majerus couldn't be there to see his son's team play.
"I've seen Rick speak at a number of camps," says Rich Panella, another childhood friend. Every time he gets to the part where he tells the campers to appreciate their parents he gets choked up. He's not a touchy-feely kind of guy, but he gets emotional when it comes to his dad."
It all makes for good reading for those who have followed the coach, although I wish Majerus would have allowed Wojciechowski to tell the story as a biographer, from his perspective. For one thing, maybe someone else could have prevented the last half of the book from getting bogged down frequently with mundane details and given us more on Majerus and what makes him tick. It also would have allowed the story to be told from other angles, good and bad.
Majerus can be cold, calculating, demanding and overbearing, which is not really fleshed out in the book. He can also be overwhelmingly generous and compassionate, which is given attention in the book. For instance, after Majerus finished a Christmas Eve dinner at the home of friends, he decided he had to share his blessings with the poor. Well after midnight, he and Panella loaded their car with the dinner leftovers and Majerus' old blankets, sweatshirts and gloves and drove to downtown Milwaukee, where they awakened some homeless men in their cardboard boxes and shared their bounty.
An outside voice also could have collected Majerus' many humorous remarks over the years. As it is, there is little of that in the book, because Majerus is telling the story (what's he going to do, tell us, "Here's a funny list of things I've said?"). (There is this: "I told those cheerleaders that I hoped they didn't mind but I couldn't stop staring at their belly buttons mostly because I hadn't seen my own in years.")
All in all, it's an enjoyable book for Ute fans. It sheds a little more light on this interesting character named Majerus.