Remembering Frank Layden, his life and his legacy

When Brooklyn-born, Irish Catholic Frank Layden strapped a struggling National Basketball Association franchise on his back and carried it from New Orleans to Utah in the summer of 1979, he set the team down in its new home in the Salt Palace, turned on the lights, and started telling one-liners.

On his son Scott joining the Jazz staff: “I didn’t hire Scott because he’s my son, I hired him because I’m married to his mother.”

On his weight: “In India, they’d worship this body.”

On the media: “I’d like to welcome the Eastern writers here where they can finally breathe some air they can’t see.”

On player contracts: “I remember once negotiating with one of our top draft choices. After we had agreed on an $800,000 salary, he told me he wanted a gas card, a car, a job for this father and four paid trips home. I told him this was the NBA and we pay cash. No perks like in college.”

On the state of the world: “The decline of Western civilization started when the Dodgers and the Giants moved to California.”

On dealing with players: “I told him, ‘Son, what is it with you? Is it ignorance or apathy?’ He said, ‘Coach, I don’t know and I don’t care.’”

His reply to a fan asking what time the game started: “What time can you be there?”

He had a million of ’em, and today Utah is mourning the passing of the man who made everyone laugh and feel good about themselves, who put the Jazz in Utah and wouldn’t let them leave, and who never left himself, adopting the state as his second home. He was 93.

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Francis Patrick Layden was born Jan. 5, 1932, in Brooklyn, New York. His mother, Nora, died giving him birth, leaving Frank and his two older sisters in the care of their father, Michael, who worked long hours on the docks. Sports served as another parent. On Sundays, “First it was Mass, then Ebbetts Field,” Frank reminisced about his growing-up years. He watched the Dodgers of Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese and Gil Hodges. He saw Jackie Robinson’s first game. As a schoolboy he played basketball against Sandy Koufax. Another future major leaguer, Frank Torre, Joe’s brother, was his close friend.

Layden was all-New York City in basketball and baseball playing for Fort Hamilton High. That led to an athletic scholarship at Niagara University in Buffalo, New York, where he also played and coached both sports. Even before he graduated, Taps Gallagher, Niagara’s basketball coach, assigned him to coach the freshman team.

In 1955, the year he graduated from Niagara with an economics degree, Layden met his wife-to-be, Barbara, also from Brooklyn, at McGuire’s saloon — today it would be called a sports bar — in Rockaway, Queens. They were married in 1956.

He served two years as an officer in the U.S. Army at Fort Monmouth in New Jersey before taking a job teaching history and coaching football, basketball and baseball at St. Agnes High on Long Island. From there he was hired as head basketball coach at Seton Hall High, where he guided the team to a 21-5 record in 1964, prompting Adelphi Suffolk University (now Downing College) on Long Island to hire him as its first athletic director and basketball coach.

All his life, Layden extolled the value of sports as education. “I always felt the gymnasium could be the most valuable classroom in the school if used properly,” Layden said. “What other class do you have to try out to get into?”

In 1968, at age 36, Layden returned to Niagara as athletic director and basketball coach. He compiled a 119-97 record in eight seasons and coached the Purple Eagles to their first NCAA Tournament berth in 1970 and a runner-up finish in the 1972 NIT. His star player was consensus All-American Calvin Murphy, a prolific scorer who, Layden often quipped, passed him on the school’s career scoring list after one game.

In 1976 he entered the NBA, joining his Niagara teammate Hubie Brown’s coaching staff at Atlanta. In 1979, Sam Battistone, owner of the New Orleans Jazz, hired Layden as his general manager. His first assignment: supervise the Jazz’s relocation to Utah.

Despite Battistone’s perpetual money challenges, by sheer force of personality, and often little else, Layden entrenched the team in Salt Lake City. He was the face and the heart of the Jazz, making friends and supporters as salesman, cheerleader, ambassador, money-raiser, player personnel director and publicist. Today’s Jazz franchise has at least two dozen people doing what Frank Layden did alone.

He built the Jazz essentially from scratch. He was instrumental in drafting Darrell Griffith, John Stockton, Karl Malone and Mark Eaton, trading for Adrian Dantley and Jeff Hornacek, and hiring Jerry Sloan — all of whom have banners hanging from the rafters in the Delta Center, alongside Layden’s.

After two years as general manager, he put on another hat: coach. In eight years, from early in the 1981-82 season when Layden took over from Tom Nissalke, to early in the 1988-89 season when he handed off the team to Sloan, the Jazz went from perennial doormat to perennial contender.

They were 47-97 his first two seasons and 230-197 thereafter. In 1983-84, his third season, the Jazz won their first Midwest Division championship and made the playoffs for the first time, starting a stretch of 20 consecutive postseason appearances. In 1984, Layden was named NBA Coach of the Year, NBA Executive of the Year and was awarded the J. Walter Kennedy Citizenship award for “outstanding service and dedication to the community” — the only person in history to sweep all three major awards in a single season.

“In the early years, Frank was the glue that held the Jazz together,” said the late Larry H. Miller, who purchased the franchise from Battistone in 1985-86. “How he did it, I don’t know. He sold the Jazz to the fans, the players, the owners and the NBA. He never gave up hope.”

As coach, Layden concerned himself with more than X’s and O’s. He assigned books for his players to read, took them on cultural outings while on the road, and to Broadway shows in New York.

After stepping down as coach, Layden became Jazz team president, a position he held until he retired on Dec. 29, 1999, days before his 68th birthday. In 1998-99 he coached the Utah Starzz, the Jazz’s short-lived entry in the WNBA. He later served as senior consultant to the New York Knicks when his son Scott was general manager there.

In addition to his No. 1 being retired by the Jazz in 1989, Niagara University retired his jersey in 2012 and in 2014 named its basketball court at the Taps Gallagher Center the Frank and Barbara Layden Court. He is enshrined in the New York City basketball Hall of Fame, Niagara University Hall of Fame, Dowling College Hall of Fame and the Utah Sports Hall of Fame. He received honorary degrees from Dowling, Niagara and Salt Lake’s Westminster College.

After Layden retired from the Jazz, he and Barbara bought a condominium at Zion Summit north of the Latter-day Saints Conference Center and never left, making Utah their permanent home. “This is a great place to live,” he said. “There are good people here, and they have been good to me. We have fun here.”

His lifelong friend Hubie Brown, who went from a successful coaching career to a successful career as a TV analyst, said of Layden, “In my lifetime, I’ve met a lot of funny people. Frank Layden is still the funniest human being I have ever been around. He was on stage 24 hours a day, and he never looked at a piece of paper. It just flows. He was ‘Saturday Night Live’ seven days a week.”

As a speaker and entertainer, he was in great demand. “I was asked to appear at a comedy club in an NBA city on a rare Saturday night off during the regular season,” Layden once related. “I declined. After all, I don’t want any comedians coming into the NBA to coach.”

As a humanitarian, Layden generously donated his time and money. He was notorious for being unable to say “no” to any worthy charitable cause, giving way to his oft-repeated line as an emcee as he tapped the microphone: “Is this thing on? I’ve been in front of more dead mikes than an Irish undertaker.”

He indulged a passion for the theater in his senior years, taking acting lessons with Barbara and traveling to London and New York to study and watch plays.