From Tennessee storm to Atlantic calm to Atlantic calm

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Former Tennessee basketball coach Jerry Green pleads his case with a basketball official after getting a technical foul in a game against Vanderbilt. Green resigned in 1999 and later joined the staff of Kelvin Sampson at Oklahoma and Indiana. Green is retired and living on the coast of North Carolina.

Former Tennessee basketball coach Jerry Green pleads his case with a basketball official after getting a technical foul in a game against Vanderbilt. Green was fired in 2001 and later joined the staff of Kelvin Sampson at Oklahoma and Indiana. Green is retired and living on the coast of North Carolina.

Jerry Green is indeed a man finally at peace.

“I’m sitting out on my porch,” he said last week. “The Atlantic is calm. There are no whitecaps on these waves.”

Green says he must work to keep busy. His days don’t march to the relentless beat of major college basketball anymore. Instead, he wakes up in search of golfing partners. Or he plots boating trips off the coast of Surf City, N.C., where he and his wife, Nancy, live.

He says his decision to retire from Indiana, where he was the director of basketball operations for Kelvin Sampson until this spring, was not difficult.

“It came down to this,” he said, his Southern drawl lit with the excitement that never leaves, “it’s more fun to not work than it is to work.”

But there was more to it than that.

Turbulent Tennessee

The highest-profile stop in Green’s career was at Tennessee, where he was head coach from 1997-98 through 2000-01.

Green averaged slightly more than 22 wins a season and took the team to four NCAA tournaments, advancing to the Sweet 16 in 2000. The Vols hadn’t been in a tournament since 1989 until Green took them there in 1998, and they missed out on the four tournaments following Green’s firing in 2001.

That firing, Green thinks, was the result of a new president looking to exert control. J. Wade Gilley lasted only a year at Tennessee.

“I’ve never been through anything in my life like those four years at Tennessee,” Green said in 2005. “It’s probably as screwed-up a situation, with what we did and the number of wins we had, as any I’ve ever heard of.”

Green, for all his success, had been unpopular with parts of the Tennessee fan base, and at one point informed his critics they could “go to the Kmart” if they were unhappy watching games.

After his firing, Green returned to the Surf City property he and Nancy had purchased 30 years earlier and had always dreamed of making their retirement home.

But he wasn’t ready to be there.

“I was fighting a lot of mental battles I shouldn’t have had to fight,” he said. “It was all I had in my head a lot of times and it was hurting me.

“I didn’t handle it well, because they hadn’t handled it well. We did everything the right way.’’

Back to basketball

Green and his old friend Roy Williams were getting ready to play golf at Pinehurst, N.C., one day when an innocent question from Williams launched a second career for Green.

“He said, ‘How’s it going?’ ” Green said. “And I just had to tell him that I was bored and I needed something to do.”

Williams knew that Sampson, then the coach at Oklahoma, was in search of a veteran basketball guy to become his director of operations. He put the two in contact.

Green landed the job. He thought he’d settle in Norman for a few years and be near basketball again before returning to the island.

It wouldn’t be that simple.

Coaching the coaches

When Green arrived, the NCAA investigation into impermissible phone calls made by Sampson and his staff was already under way. While Green could do little to stop the momentum of that coming challenge, he did make sure to watch recruiting logs more closely and worked with Sampson to make sure no further violations would be committed.

When the sanctions were handed down — and were more severe than anticipated — Green saw dealing with them as a major part of his job.

By then of course, he had followed Sampson to Indiana.

That was an unexpected detour. After having dragged his wife away from that house on the beach he was, just a year later, relocating again.

“That wasn’t how it was supposed to work out,” Green said.

“But I figured I should go up there and help him get settled in. Can’t really pass up the opportunity to go to a place like Indiana. I just thought I could help Kelvin get through the sanctions and gets his program running there.”

Green’s job duties were, at best, nebulous. He was technically responsible for scheduling non-conference games and dealing with day-to-day concerns such as travel itineraries and budget matters.

Sampson basically created his job description for Green. Some programs used the position to bring in promising young coaches. Sampson wanted an older confidant.

“Jerry was like a big brother to me,” Sampson said. “He had a warm and caring heart. He was always someone I could go to.”

Directors of basketball operations are limited by NCAA regulations in recruiting and can’t coach the players on the practice court. But obviously Sampson wants another basketball mind nearby. Dan Dakich, who was a long-time assistant at Indiana and then coached at Bowling Green for 10 years, was recently hired to replace Green.

“A big part of my job was coaching the coaches,” Green said. “I was there for them to talk to about pretty much anything, because I’ve been in the position and I can take a look at the situation.”

Sampson also chose Green because of Green’s experience dealing with the fact that coaching basketball is often a minimal part of a basketball coach’s job.

“You have to be a liaison with pretty much everyone else,” Green said. “The athletic department, the administration. You try to stop any problems before they get too big. You try to save the staff from having to get involved.”

Deflecting situations that might pull Sampson away from the team became another of Green’s duties.

“The sanctity of the program was important,” he said. “I needed to makes sure that Indiana basketball remains unstained.”

Green also became close with the players. He interacted with them on the bench as much as any of the other assistants.

Their warm wishes — and a new set of golf clubs from Sampson — were what convinced him that this time he was ready for that seat on his porch.

“As negative as things were after Tennessee, this time was completely different,” he said. “The players were so good to me. They all took the time to wish me well.”

Sampson said he thought that Green’s two years on his staff gave him a chance to “feel good about basketball, to be at peace with it.”

“He was so happy when he looked at me and said, ‘Coach, I’m headed to the beach,’ ” Sampson said.

The Atlantic is calm, this time. There are no whitecaps from Green’s view now.