In his pocket was a business card with a self-important title for an 18-year-old: Bruce Pearl, Student Director of Promotions.

The year is 2005. Just last week.

Bruce Pearl marched into another campus cafeteria, climbed on a chair and announced to all who would listen that the basketball team needed their support.

These days his business card reads: Bruce Pearl, Head Basketball coach, University of Tennessee.

"I'm still standing on a chair,'' Pearl said with a chuckle last week in his Thompson-Boling Arena office.

"By the way, the reaction was great,'' he added.

Seven months into his new mission - reviving men's basketball at Tennessee - Pearl is getting a great reaction most everywhere he goes.

"Tell him that's because he hasn't coached a game yet,'' said Dr. Tom Davis.

Davis, the basketball coach at Drake University, was more or less responsible for putting Pearl on his first chair.

Well, the chair was Pearl's idea. But it was Davis, then the coach at Boston College, who saw something in the spunky freshman he had cut after a tryout as a walk-on player.

Passion, hustle, smarts, all of the above.

"He started out in a very minor capacity,'' Davis recalled, "helping build student support.

"Then over the next two or three years, he was doing everything. He's just that kind of guy.''

That's why UT athletic director Mike Hamilton hired Pearl last March to replace Buzz Peterson. He's the Vols' sixth coach since 1989, a strong hint the challenge is daunting.

Pearl's coaching success at Wisconsin-Milwaukee and, before that, at Southern Indiana, was certainly a major part of the equation. But UT required more.

"Mike Hamilton had to look into the fact that there are a lot of guys who can coach basketball,'' Pearl said.

"But there aren't a lot of guys who can build a program. You've got to do a lot more than just coach the basketball team.''

'Didn't know you were ' Building a program, coaching a team, it never occurred to young Bruce Pearl that he would make his living doing any of that.

Sure, he loved sports, playing and coaching. But make a living out of it?

"I never saw myself being a high-school teacher, so I wasn't considering coaching,'' Pearl said. "I never even thought about college coaching.''

Growing up in Sharon, Mass., a Boston suburb, Pearl rooted for the Celtics, the Red Sox and the Patriots. But what really made him tick was playing or officiating whatever sport was in season.

His first coaching assignment was Team Six, an elementary basketball team. When Team Six won a championship and the coach promised hot fudge sundaes, the parents had to give the coach a ride, too. He was only 13.

"I loved teaching, I loved the kids, I loved winning,'' Pearl said.

He loved playing, too. But after he took a helmet to the knee in a high school freshman football game, his athletic career was never the same.

He still played baseball, basketball and football at Sharon High. His favorite was basketball.

"I liked the smell of the leather ball,'' Pearl said. "I could be in a gym all day every day.''

When it was time to choose a college, Pearl didn't follow the conventional path.

Boston College was a Catholic school. Most Jewish kids went to Boston University.

Pearl's grandparents had immigrated to Boston from Europe in the early 1920s. His grandfather, Jack Pearlmutter, came from Austria, his grandmother from Russia.

Pearl was born in 1960 in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. His parents, Bernie and Barbara, moved to the suburbs when he started school.

"Boston was a very racist town, very ethnically divided,'' Pearl said. "You couldn't go from one neighborhood to the other because of your color or your religion or your creed and that really bothered me.

"I was tired of hearing, 'I didn't know you were Jewish?' or 'I didn't know Jewish guys played ball.'

"So my whole life was sort of trying to convert the masses. It bothers me that people are not tolerant of each other's differences.''

Another attraction, BC also played big-time basketball. Pearl's walk-on tryout dispelled any hope of hustling his way onto the team. Still, Davis realized a go-getter when he saw one.

Drumming up student support was a start.

As a junior, student-manager Pearl once filled in for an ill student and donned the BC Eagle mascot uniform in an NCAA tournament game. But as a freshman, he would pull a sheet over his head and run through the crowd as "Eagle Spirit.''

This he reveals sheepishly. "I was off the charts,'' he said.

He was soon becoming indispensable, tackling whatever chore Davis required.

"He was always there,'' said Davis. "The more you're there, the more you learn.

"After a while you couldn't do without him, he was so good at so many things.''

Life-changing phone call And that is why one night in the spring of his senior year, 1982, Pearl got a phone call from Davis.

The Eagles had just been eliminated from the NCAA tournament, losing to Houston's Phi Slamma Jamma team in Kansas City. Pearl had gone to Nashua, N.H., to spend the weekend with his girlfriend, Kim.

"He said he needed to talk to me, would I come to his home,'' Pearl said. "I thought, 'Oh, no, what have I done now?' ''

Any prior summons to Davis' home had involved Pearl getting in some kind of trouble on campus.

But now, his act was clean. He was set to graduate with a degree in business. He had job offers from Xerox and Proctor & Gamble.

"I was going to make good money in sales,'' Pearl said. "It was done.

"I never worked a day for (Davis) thinking I was going to get into coaching as a career.''

Davis was going to Stanford and offered his student-manager a position as restricted-earnings coach. The next morning, they were on a plane to California.

He could always fall back and make money later.

Special deliveries Here he was, still technically an undergrad at BC, working as an assistant coach in California.

For 10 more years, Pearl stuck with Davis, four at Stanford, then six at Iowa.

He never considered going back to a "real" job. He married the girlfriend, Kim - a Catholic of Italian-American heritage - and four children followed.

Kim, a niece of the late basketball coach Norm Sloan, probably knew what she was getting into.

The Pearls' oldest daughter, Jacqui, was born the weekend Pearl was hosting a recruit on an official visit.

"Kim was checked out of the hospital and sitting in the lobby,'' Pearl recalled. "I was two hours late to pick up her and my firstborn to take them home. She was in the lobby so long they readmitted her. They didn't want her and the baby sitting in the lobby.''

Son Steven's delivery was induced so Pearl get on the road to make a first-day home visit to Iowa recruit Acie Earl.

When daughter Leah was born, Pearl was at the hospital - with his staff watching film of the Argentina national team, an exhibition opponent.

"I'm a cad,'' Pearl said. "An absolute scoundrel.''

You wouldn't get any argument out of Illinois fans.

While an assistant at Iowa in 1989, Pearl secretly tape-recorded a phone conversation with top prospect Deon Thomas, who was in a tug-of-war between Iowa and Illinois. Pearl's tape contributed to an NCAA investigation into alleged infractions by Illinois.

Pearl was tagged a whistle-blower. Illini fans used - and still do - more colorful language.

The affect the incident had on Pearl's career is debatable. At any rate, when his head-coaching break came, it was at Division II Southern Indiana.

Be yourself Evansville, Ind., sits on the Ohio River, across from western Kentucky. There wasn't much in the way of Jewish culture to be found, but producing an instant winner assured the welcome mat was out. Pearl was even asked to be grand marshal at the city's Christmas parade.

"I went there at 32 to find out if I could be a head coach,'' he said. "At that point, I didn't know.

"I'd always worked with Tom. Now Tom and I are completely different but he told me that's OK: Do what we do, but be yourself.''

So Pearl stood on a chair in the school cafeteria. He hustled support. And he won.

Pearl took over a 10-18 team and never won fewer than 22 games. He won a national title his third year.

It was nine years before he left for a promising mid-major program at Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He headed to the cafeteria

"You had to be a promoter there,'' said assistant coach Tony Jones, who followed Pearl from UWM to Tennessee. "He was like a fund-raiser a basketball coach and a community advocate all at the same time.

"He wore many different hats.''

And he won more.

This time people noticed. Tennessee pounced on Pearl after last year's Cinderella Sweet 16 run.

"You know," Pearl said. "Team Six had always been my greatest challenge, more than Southern Indiana or Milwaukee.

"I think Tennessee is probably a greater challenge than Team Six.''

He says this because he sees the SEC as an unforgiving league. Doesn't matter if you're playing Kentucky or Ole Miss, you better bring your "A" game.

"The difference for me is not the other coaches,'' he said. "It's the quality of the players.

"Will what we do night in and night out with pressure defense and uptempo basketball, will that work?''

It can work. But he needs players to make it work, players he must get in the most cutthroat recruiting environment he has ever faced.

He needs a home-court advantage to make it work. He needs crowds in his cavernous arena. He needs a different feel in his arena.

"The upgrading and improvement of Thompson-Boling Arena,'' Pearl said, "is the No. 1 most important factor if we want to get this men's basketball program up to be a nationally competitive team.''

So he's wooing donors for a practice facility, exploring ways to restructure the seating chart and recruiting not only prospective players but prospective fans.

"It's all potentially doable,'' Pearl said.

True to form, he's wearing many different hats.

"Bruce is very well suited for the job at Tennessee,'' said Davis.

"There's a lot of things to do besides the basketball things.''

Mike Strange may be reached at 865-342-6276.