John Chaney, eternally fiery and relentlessly competitive, was the definition of toughness

“He would talk for an hour about boxing out,” O’Hanlon said. “Then they’d start again, and the kids wouldn’t miss a beat. You’d think they’d be tired or bored, but they weren’t. They just went at it again.”

The memory says everything about Chaney: He demanded attention, and he exuded toughness. Of course he would talk, for an hour, about boxing out.

“John was toughness — he defined the word,” O’Hanlon said Friday afternoon. “What made him unique was that he could go after his players so hard in practice and they loved him for it. He never backed down from anything — and that’s the way his teams played.”

Chaney was the Philadelphia Public League player of the year in 1951 but wasn’t recruited by any of the city’s Big Five schools, who had few Black players in those days. He ended up at Division II Bethune-Cookman and then played in the Eastern Professional Basketball League and Philadelphia’s famous summer league until he got his first coaching job at a junior high. He moved from there to Simon Gratz High, which had won one game the year before he arrived, and went 62-23 in six years.

He was 40 when he got his first college coaching job, and he went on to win 741 games — the last 516 during 24 years at Temple. He didn’t get his first crack at a Division I coaching job until he was 50, when Temple hired him in 1982 after he had coached Division II Cheyney State for 10 years, winning a national title in 1978.

He took Temple to the Elite Eight five times — the first time in 1988 and the last time in 2001, as a No. 11 seed. That same year he was elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. He retired in 2006, turning the job over to Fran Dunphy, who had coached against him for 17 years at Penn.

“I was interested in the job,” Dunphy said. “But there was no way I was taking it without John Chaney’s blessing. I called him and said I needed to talk. We met at a downtown restaurant. I talked for two minutes; he talked for two hours. When he was finished, I knew it was okay to take the job.”

Chaney’s toughness — and his temper — got him into trouble on occasion. In 1994, after a loss to Massachusetts, Chaney stormed into U-Mass. Coach John Calipari’s news conference, furious because he believed Calipari was manipulating the officials. He had to be held back from Calipari and was dragged away screaming, “When I see you, I’m gonna kick your a–!” and, “I’ll kill you!”

That spring at the Final Four in Charlotte, I happened to be in the coaches’ hotel when I saw Chaney walking in Calipari’s direction. The lobby was crowded, and some people braced for a fight that hadn’t been allowed to happen in February.

“John!” Chaney called. When Calipari turned in Chaney’s direction, Chaney walked up, arms extended, and the men hugged.

“I only get mad at people when they beat me,” Chaney joked a couple of minutes later. “Season’s over; we can be friends again.”

Like with his close friend John Thompson, the legacy of Chaney went far beyond winning basketball games. Both were leaders in the Black community, not because they won games but because they stood up for important issues.

“I was asked once why there weren’t more African American college football coaches,” Dunphy said. “I said because football hasn’t yet had a John Thompson or a John Chaney. They both did great things. And there was never — never — an issue either one of them was afraid to speak out on.”

Thompson famously boycotted two games to protest a new NCAA rule, Proposition 48, that he felt denied Black athletes educational opportunities. Chaney was outspoken on the issue, too, and he made a point of bringing “Prop 48” players into his program. Some were stars; others were not. Most graduated, even though the rule often prevented them from playing as freshmen.

“I’ll make sure they get to play,” Chaney once said. Then, for one of the few times in all the years I knew him, his voice got soft, and he added, “I just want them to get the chance I never got.”

Chaney’s other trademark was the 6 a.m. practice. He would walk in during warmups with doughnuts for everybody — and then it was time to go to work. Chaney believed players were more alert shortly after dawn than in the late afternoon. He also believed that, by having them showered and dressed, they were more likely to make it to morning classes. And he never tolerated absence from those.

How competitive was Chaney? Into his 50s, he played noon hoops almost every day in McGonigle Hall with other Temple coaches. In 1985, when O’Hanlon was an assistant coach for the Temple women, a three-on-three matchup came down to the last basket. O’Hanlon and one of his teammates double-teamed one of Chaney’s teammates in the corner.

“Just as I reached in to steal the ball, I hear John say, ‘Time out!’ ” O’Hanlon remembered. “I took the ball and said, ‘You can’t call time out in a pickup game.’ He started shouting that he’d called time out, [that] it was his gym and his rules and his ball. He really wanted to win. Well, so did I. We ended up screaming at each other until the other guys had to get in between us. I don’t think we even finished the game.”

O’Hanlon soon left to take a coaching job in Israel. When he came home about a year later, he went to see old friends at Temple and poked his head into Chaney’s office.

“We hadn’t seen each other since the pickup game,” O’Hanlon said. “He jumped out of his chair, gave the signal and screamed: ‘Time out! I got a timeout!’ Then we hugged.”

Many in Philadelphia believe Chaney would have been an NBA player if he had gotten a Division I scholarship out of high school. “Never saw him play in his prime,” O’Hanlon said. “But my guess is an NBA team would have been scared to cut him. I certainly would be.”

The Chaney stories will come fast and furious over the next few days, but the feeling in Philadelphia on Friday was best summed up by Dunphy.

“There’s a hole in my heart right now,” he said. “But I have a lifetime of memories and stories to keep me going.”

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