Ray Mears was a colorful, controversial and enigmatic figure as University of Tennessee head basketball coach from 1962-1978. He remained so after stepping down, even to and beyond his death on June 11, 2007.

Twenty-five years or so after his coaching career had ended, the thinking was Mears had been out of circulation too long for a book about his coaching career to garner much traction.

That changed when Bruce Pearl and Mike Hamilton took steps to welcome Mears back into the Tennessee family, officially.

Pearl made the first overture by asking Mears’ permission to wear the trademark orange blazer in games against Vanderbilt and Kentucky.

“I want people to hate us like they did when Coach Mears was the head coach,” Pearl said in a speech in Greeneville. “I want them to boo when we walk in.”

Hamilton led the second gesture by honoring Mears and broadcaster John Ward at the 2006 Kentucky game, their names emblazoned on banners hanging in the rafters of Thompson-Boling Arena. That gesture also led to the decision to retire Bernard King’s No. 53 jersey in 2007.

These events were the makeup call in a sad chapter in Tennessee athletic history, when Mears seemed underappreciated for his contributions to Vol basketball and UT athletics overall.

That leads to Ron Bliss’ book.

It was a daunting task for Bliss to bring the pieces of Mears’ life and career into focus. There are a number of happenings that the reader might find surprising, fascinating and, perhaps, infuriating.

There’s Mears’ apparently checkered relationship with Bob Woodruff, the athletic director who once said, “Any sport worth having is worth supporting.”

Mears talks candidly about knocking off Kentucky in March 1966, one of the great upsets in Tennessee athletic history, then being summonsed to Woodruff’s office to learn his recruiting budget was being cut.

We have to be careful here, given the passage of time and the uncertainty of recollection, but Bliss reports that Mears went to Dr. Ed Boling, who had sufficient clout to help rectify the situation.

Then came the official announcement that Mears was stepping down, coming March 6, 1978, from Auburn, Ala., site of the 1977-78 season finale. The venue and the timing seemed strange, almost surreal.

“With that, one of the most spectacular careers in the history of college basketball was over,” Bliss writes. “The announcement came without fanfare and marching bands, the way Mears did things during his 15-year career at Tennessee. … Instead it came in a simple five-paragraph press release on black-and-white mimeograph paper.”

There was another blow. “There was no mention of his career at Tennessee, nor the championships he had won. Nor did it mention his standing among his peers nationally. He was the winningest active coach in the nation following the 1976-77 season.”

Bliss details major happenings in Mears’ career, such as the genesis of the term “Big Orange Country” and the health problems that dogged Mears at the start and finish of his career.

There are major areas of Mears’ career and persona where Bliss tantalizes the reader with a “just the facts, ma’am” narrative, often leaving the reader wanting more. There is, for example, little perspective on the ingrained desire that led Mears to fight every big scorer with a ruthless determination to hold him down, Pete Maravich being the classic example.

If you really work at reading it, the text bears witness to the overriding humanity of a man named Ramon Asa Mears. He built a basketball program from scratch, from 4-19 and meager attendance the year before he arrived, to sellout crowds and three SEC titles.

Bliss has taken a first step by offering insight into how fans might judge Mears’ impact on the Vol program.

There are times a man defines the moment and the moment defines the man.

That man was Ray Mears.

Tom Mattingly is the author of “The Tennessee Football Vault: The Story of the Tennessee Volunteers, 1891-2006” (2006). He may be reached at tjmshm@comcast.net. His News Sentinel blog is called “The Vol Historian.”

© 2007, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.