Getting to Us

by Seth Davis

  Heathcote was an exacting mentor. He was hardworking, crusty, honest to a fault. Izzo endeared himself by agreeing to be a part-time assistant and then diving into the menial tasks of cutting video and overseeing academics. He acquired some important knowledge in those early days, but Heathcote, knowing what a hard, lonely grind the coaching profession can be, often encouraged Izzo to consider a different line of work. “It was really tough to hear because I was down about myself,” Izzo says. “I had moved down there lock, stock, and barrel. I didn’t know anybody. I was pretty disillusioned about what I was doing.”

  Midway through that first season, a member of Heathcote’s staff took another job, so Heathcote installed Izzo as a full-time assistant. Three years later, in the spring of 1986, Izzo accepted a job at Tulsa University, where he would have been the top assistant and recruiting coordinator, but he came back to East Lansing two months later when Heathcote unexpectedly had another opening. For the next nine years, he was Heathcote’s lead recruiter. The task suited his makeup. Recruiting required a lot of persistence. It rewarded hard, lonely work.

  According to Heathcote, there was no breakthrough moment when he realized Izzo could be special. It happened because Izzo slowly accumulated a little bit more knowledge every time he showed up for work. “Each year, Tom got smarter and smarter and took on more and more,” Heathcote said. When Heathcote realized that the time was approaching for him to step down, he knew he wanted Izzo to succeed him. However, the school’s athletic director was cool to the idea of promoting an unknown assistant. So Heathcote went over the AD’s head, made his appeal directly to the chancellor, and won the argument. The first person Izzo hired was his old buddy Mike Garland.

  The early years would test Izzo’s persistence. After the Spartans lost to Central Michigan at home early in his first season, he drove with his then-assistant, Tom Crean, to grab some lunch at Burger King. Along the way, they made the mistake of listening to local sports radio. “They weren’t talking about if I was going to get fired, it was when I was going to get fired,” he says. Izzo was so incensed that when he got back to the office, he immediately called a meeting of his entire staff, including trainers and secretaries, to buck everyone up.

  Izzo’s empathy powered him through. His most important early recruit was Antonio Smith, a rugged, hardworking 6´8˝ power forward from Flint, Michigan. Flint was a more urban version of Iron Mountain, rife with economic hardship and gang violence. Smith played hard for Izzo, but he had difficulty dealing with his coach’s daily withering criticism. Izzo sensed the strain. “It was like anything I said to him got him upset,” he says.

  After Smith played poorly in a loss at Iowa his freshman year, the team flew home to East Lansing. As Izzo was watching video of the game later that night, he was perplexed at Smith’s desultory body language. So he picked up the phone, called Smith in his room, and asked if he wanted to get a burger. “It was like twenty below zero outside. We ended up riding around in my car for two hours, and he started telling me all these stories,” Izzo says. “He talked about how his dad left him when he was young, and how it made him hate men. That was the problem. He didn’t trust men. That really helped me in my career because I realized some of these kids have deep-rooted things. There are reasons for why they act the way they do sometimes. So if I didn’t communicate with them, I wouldn’t be able to have that empathy you need to be able to motivate them.”

  Smith’s decision to go to Michigan State set the table for another Flint native to sign up the following year. He was Mateen Cleaves, an intense, bull-rushing, alpha male point guard who was also an All-American high school football player. Cleaves had grown up amid awful violence. “I went to a lot of funerals as a kid growing up,” he says. He was a great athlete, so that helped him stay on a healthy path, but what really saved him was that his house was led by two strong, loving parents.

  Izzo won Cleaves over by recruiting his parents as hard as him. “From the time he recruited me, my mother fell in love with him,” Cleaves says. “All the other coaches came in like used car salesmen. He was so genuine. You could tell he had a vision.”

  Cleaves committed to Michigan State in the fall of his senior year of high school. He suffered a serious back injury during a car accident that winter, and when he got on campus in East Lansing he was still wearing a brace and badly out of shape. Izzo was empathetic but also demanding, and the two clashed often. Cleaves understood that when Izzo yelled at him it was “like a father getting on a son,” but he had reason to wonder whether this man truly understood him. “I knew they didn’t have any black people in the UP,” he says. Adds Izzo, “He always thought of me as the white guy from the place where it snows a lot. I’d tell him, ‘You know, where I’m from, we fought a lot, too. The only difference is we used fists, and you guys used knives.’”

  Their first come-to-Jesus moment happened during Cleaves’s freshman season. He had exchanged words with the team’s strength coach and stormed out of the weight room. Cleaves didn’t think it was that big of a deal until later that evening when he was hanging at a friend’s apartment and there was a knock at the door. His friend opened it, and in walked the coaching staff, beginning with the assistants. Izzo walked in last—“like the Godfather,” Cleaves says. He proceeded to let Cleaves know in no uncertain terms that that kind of disrespect to a member of his staff would not be tolerated. For someone like Cleaves, who had been given the star treatment all of his life, it was a reality check. “Whatever I did in the past meant nothing to him,” Cleaves says. “He checked that at the door.”

  Later that same season, Izzo intervened to keep his point guard from making a potentially life-altering mistake. Izzo had gotten word that Cleaves had skipped class, and when he chased him down to find out what was happening, Cleaves told him that his cousin had gotten beat up by a bunch of kids back in Flint, and he was trying to find a ride home so he could confront them. Izzo talked him out of it by reminding him of how hard he had worked to get to that point. Was he really willing to throw all of that away?

  Despite the conflicts—or perhaps because of them—it was a beautiful and authentic relationship. On the surface, they had come from starkly different backgrounds, but Izzo always had time for Cleaves. Whenever they sat down to share memories, they found common ground. “I loved hearing his stories,” Cleaves says. “I learned that nothing was handed to him, and he had to work for everything. Coming from Flint, we always had a thing about not being a big city like Detroit. Plus, I was a younger brother, so I had a big-time chip on my shoulder. He felt the same way. So that was another thing that brought us together.”

  As for the team, things reached a nadir in February of Cleaves’s freshman year, when the Spartans endured a stretch in which they lost seven out of ten Big Ten games. A local newspaper published a poll asking fans to rate Izzo’s prospects as a coach. “That was one of the more demeaning things I went through because my parents were so down about it,” he says. “I had to tell them not to worry. It’s a tough profession in that respect. People can say stuff that is really bone-chilling.”

  What the public did not realize was that Izzo was building a culture that was authentically aligned with his own worldview, and it was just taking some time. He wanted his Spartans essentially to be a football team without the pads. He even had his guys work out in the football team’s weight room, so they could lift and grunt alongside the players. Everything would be centered on defense and rebounding, basketball’s version of blocking and tackling.

  A coach normally puts his culture in place incrementally, but there are times when he must take dramatic measures. In the midst of that losing skid, Izzo took his team to an upstairs practice gym thirty minutes before a home game against Penn State and put his guys through his “War” drill. That’s the exercise where an assistant tosses up an errant shot and all ten players try to get the rebound. While this is putatively a rebounding drill, the real purpose behind War i
s to instill a pugnacious attitude. The guys got after it that night. At one point, 6´9˝ freshman forward A. J. Granger got popped in the face and had his nose bloodied. The Spartans left the practice gym, went right into their layup lines, and defeated Penn State. They finished the regular season winning four of their last five games.

  With Cleaves finally healthy and strong, Michigan State broke through in the 1997–98 season, reaching the Sweet Sixteen of the NCAA Tournament. The following year, they got to the Final Four, where they lost in the semifinal to Duke. The 1999–2000 season started off in difficult fashion, with Cleaves missing the first two months because of a broken foot. After he returned in early January, the Spartans won the Big Ten regular season title and looked like a good bet to return to the Final Four.

  That prospect was in jeopardy during their Sweet Sixteen game against Syracuse. The Spartans started off nervous and tentative and trailed by 10 at halftime. When they got into the locker room, Cleaves exploded on his teammates. He was especially pissed at Granger, who had passed off a couple of open shots early on. Cleaves was so irate that Izzo had to step in and calm him down. It was a good lesson that it takes more than a coach to get to Us. “I’ve always said, a player-coached team is much better than a coach-coached team,” Izzo says.

  Michigan State blitzed Syracuse in the second half to win and then defeated Iowa State in the Elite Eight to return to the Final Four, in Indianapolis. After beating Wisconsin in the semifinal, the Spartans faced Florida in the final. They got a scare a few minutes into the second half, when Cleaves was fouled hard on a breakaway and came down awkwardly on his foot. As Cleaves was helped to the locker room to get X-rayed, Izzo reminded his guys that they had played without him early in the season, so they were prepared for this moment. It turned out Cleaves’s X-rays were negative. He returned to the game and despite a severe limp helped the Spartans to an 89–76 victory.

  It was a triumphant and emotional moment, made all the more so when Cleaves leaned on his crutches and wept openly as CBS’s “One Shining Moment” anthem played on the large screen above. When the song was over, the Spartans conducted the traditional net-cutting ritual. They were almost through when Izzo invited Antonio Smith to climb the ladder. Smith had graduated the year before, but he had done as much as anyone to jump-start the program. Izzo wanted him to know how much he appreciated that. Smith grabbed those scissors and snipped himself a part of the historic net. He might not have been technically on the roster that night, but he was still a part of the family.

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  • • •

  I first got to know Izzo before the start of that championship season. Sports Illustrated was going to make the Spartans our preseason No. 1–ranked team, and the magazine flew me to East Lansing to spend the day with him and his team. While sitting across from Izzo in a conference room, I asked whether he might grant me some exclusive access if the Spartans made the Final Four. Izzo pounded the table and said, “You can ride our bus.” When I asked if he really meant it, he nodded and said, “I like how you operate.”

  Looking back, it’s clear that he was referring to my willingness not just to interview him, but to take time to come to East Lansing, watch his practice, meet his coaches and players, and make my request face-to-face. When I would talk to him on the phone during that season, he repeatedly brought up our deal, relishing the opportunity to keep a promise.

  I was in Auburn Hills, Michigan, when the Spartans clinched their place in the Final Four in the Midwest Regional final. The day before that win over Iowa State in the Elite Eight, I had interviewed Izzo again in his hotel suite. I distinctly remember riding the elevator down to the lobby afterward. A family of Michigan State fans got on the elevator, and the dad introduced Izzo to his young son. Izzo flashed the kid a faux growl, balled his fist, and tapped him in the gut—as if to say, Whatcha got in there?

  That, in a nutshell, is how Izzo coaches his guys. He’s constantly asking, “Whatcha got in there?” And they better have an authentic answer. Valentine will never forget the time he missed a few shots in the first few minutes of a Big Ten game and Izzo called time out so he could shred him. With his eyes bulging and his nose a few inches away from Valentine’s, Izzo taunted him. “You’re scared, aren’t ya?” he said. “You’re all talk. You don’t even want to be here, do you? Should I just sit you down the rest of the game?” The words infuriated Valentine—which was exactly the point. He played aggressively the rest of the way.

  Izzo can be harsh, but he is also fair. If he is going to give his guys shit, he understands that sometimes they will want to give it back to him. “My attitude is, I’m hard on them, so if they want to challenge me, they better bring the goods,” he says.

  Cleaves tells me about a time when Izzo was screaming at him in a huddle for playing so shitty, until Cleaves finally blurted, “Yeah, well, you ain’t called a good play all day!” Izzo never blinked. That kind of clash occurred on a near-daily basis with Draymond Green, who played forward from 2008 to 2012 and has gone on to great success with the Golden State Warriors despite being a second-round draft pick. Green was a ticking time bomb, but Izzo tolerated his outbursts because most of the time Green was angry at himself. He did, however, have a bad habit of kicking balls into the upper deck of the Breslin Center when he got frustrated in practice. Says Izzo, “I had to tell him one day, ‘Hey man, we’re gonna have five-hour practices if we gotta fetch the ball every time you kick it.’”

  A coach who allows that kind of candid dialogue might be taking on certain risks, but he also builds trust. That was evident late on Saturday night at the 2000 Final Four, after Michigan State had defeated Wisconsin in the semifinal. Izzo was bunkered in the team’s hotel with his coaching staff studying video of Florida. At one point, Cleaves walked in with his co-captain, 6´7˝ senior forward Morris Peterson. They pulled Izzo aside and told him they didn’t think the team should “tape” for the Sunday walk-through—meaning they shouldn’t tape their ankles and have a full-contact practice, but rather a light one. Izzo trusted that these guys wanted to win as badly as he did, and he believed they had better knowledge of what the players needed at that point than he did. He granted their request.

  On the flip side, Izzo tried to give his guys the morning off during the 2009 NCAA Tournament regional in Indianapolis, but his senior guard, Travis Walton, objected. Walton was one of the toughest, most vocal leaders Izzo ever had. Izzo would even let him run drills sometimes in practice. Izzo agreed to have a walk-through the next day, but he told Walton he better make sure that everyone came in on time and ready to work. “When they came in, it was almost like the Bataan Death March,” he says, chuckling. “We went through about three things and I said, ‘That’s it. We’re done.’” Later that day, they beat No. 1 Louisville, 64–62, to return to the Final Four.

  For someone who admits he was just an okay student, Izzo is quite stringent when it comes to his players’ academics. He doesn’t ask his guys to get a 4.0 grade point average. He just wants them to fulfill their obligations. In his early days, he would get so worked up when his players disappointed him in this area that his then-assistant, Brian Gregory, had to tell him to chill because he was going to practice in a bad mood. When a player inevitably complains that he doesn’t like school, Izzo will stand up, give him a hug, and say, “I hated it, too.” Then he’ll tell him to get his ass to class. “I always say, if we can get a kid to do something he doesn’t like, just think what we can do when it’s something he does like, which is basketball,” he says.

  As the Final Fours have piled up—seven as of this writing—Izzo has ensured that he remains most available to the people who matter most: his family and his players. He had children relatively late in life, at the age of forty-one. Lupe gave birth to a girl, Racquel, in 1996. Six years later, they adopted a boy and named him Steven Mateen. (Yes, those names were chosen in honor of Mariucci and Cleaves. Cleaves returned the gesture when he named his own s
on Izzy.) Izzo has resisted getting overly involved with USA Basketball because it would have taken too much time away from the family store. Though his office is always available to his players, he does not like to have too many personal discussions there. He doesn’t want them to feel like they’re in the principal’s office. He’d rather go to their dorms, drive them around, invite them to his house, take a long walk on campus, or go get a burger. “I think sometimes they see me as a rich guy driving a nice car and owning a beautiful home,” he says. “They didn’t see me at twenty-nine trying to get my next meal.”

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  • • •

  To watch Izzo conduct practice is to see a man in a constant state of wretched agony. His dyspeptic facial expressions on the sidelines are the stuff of legend. Even Mariucci, who comes from the tough-guy world of pro football, is taken aback at times. “Do you ever see him talk to his players? He gets eyeball to eyeball. He looks right through their head,” Mariucci says. “I don’t know if it’s intimate or barbaric.”

  The more Izzo has won, the more he craves that connection—and the more hostile he has grown to artifice. He knows that many of the people now showering him with hosannas would ditch him the moment he started losing big. That’s because he remembers what it was like when the Spartans finished seventh and sixth in the Big Ten, respectively, in his first two seasons.

  Having persisted through those early struggles, Izzo has a deep respect for coaches who handle adversity with authenticity and class. “Jud Heathcote always said that only a coach understands a coach. He’d call Izzo’s worst enemy if the guy was going through a tough time,” he says. Michigan State has had six different football coaches during Izzo’s time there. Each time one of them was fired, Izzo went to the press conference. He went largely to support the fired coach, but also to see how the guy handled being in a roomful of media that included many who had been advocating for him to get the axe. In those situations, there is no hiding behind a camera or a laptop. Everyone is eyeball to eyeball.