MEMPHIS - Kevin O’Neill was all smiles at FedExForum on Thursday morning, encouraging Marc Gasol (“Great effort!”), teasing Hakim Warrick (“I saw that, Hak!”) and even draping an arm around Rudy Gay’s shoulders after the Grizzlies finished their workout.

Was this really Kevin O’Neill? The same Kevin O’Neill who was the fire-spewing coach at Tennessee? Who, by one count, swore 30 times during a game against the University of Memphis? Who, according to The Globe and Mail in Toronto, damaged hotel property in Phoenix in a fit of rage during his lone season as an NBA head coach? Whose coaching career, he once told a reporter, has entailed leaving “dead bodies” in his wake?

“I’ve mellowed,” O’Neill said.

When the Grizzlies hired him, they brought aboard a defensive guru, an X’s and O’s savant who has resuscitated moribund college programs and spent five seasons as an NBA assistant. But they also hired a man with a pockmarked past, a coach whose abrasive personality has motivated some players and alienated others.

So as he approaches this, his 15th job in a 30-year career, the question is whether “K.O.”, as he is known by friends and enemies alike, can meld with this staff and help inspire this young team.

“He needs a couple classes in people skills,” said Damon Johnson, a former forward at Tennessee who played for O’Neill for two years.

O’Neill, 51, arrives in Memphis fresh off a failed experiment at Arizona. A former assistant under Lute Olson from 1986-89, O’Neill was named interim head coach last season - and Olson’s eventual successor - when Olson took a leave of absence. But the Wildcats went 19-15 under him and wound up seventh in the Pac-10, their worst finish since 1983. At the end of the season, O’Neill - no longer Olson’s successor - was re-assigned to fundraising duties within the athletic department. He soon left for Memphis.

“It was hard to see 25 years of hard work almost down the tubes,” Olson told The Associated Press.

This was nothing terribly new. With the exception of his experience at Marquette from 1989-94, when he engineered a remarkable turnaround by relying on roll-up-the-sleeves defense, O’Neill’s stints as a head coach have ended poorly. After three seasons at Tennessee, he left for Northwestern after clashing with then-athletic director Doug Dickey over the eligibility of a player. He won five games in his third and final season at Northwestern. And after the Toronto Raptors closed the 2003-04 season by going 8-24, the locker room having grown divided, O’Neill was fired.

“I’ve talked to guys in Toronto who hated his guts,” said Jim McIlvaine, who played for O’Neill at Marquette and spent seven seasons in the NBA. “He’s not for everybody. If you buy into his style, you can’t do better. But if it’s not a good fit, it’s not going to work out.”

‘ ... all the negativity’

When McIlvaine was with the New Jersey Nets during the 1999-2000 season, he and Evan Eschmeyer, who had starred for O’Neill at Northwestern, formed the “Kevin O’Neill Support Group” to deal with the memories of a coach who negotiated - no, stomped all over - that fine line between character building and verbal abuse. Players often struggled to figure out what made him tick ... like a bomb.

“He came to me like, ‘Look here, (bleep). I just want to tell you, we ain’t putting up with no (bleep),’ ” said Johnson, recalling his first recruiting visit from O’Neill. “That was my very first sit-down meeting with him, I swear. My mom wasn’t there, luckily.”

O’Neill’s favorite target at Tennessee, according to those in and around the program from 1994-97, was Aaron Green, a 3-point specialist from Cleveland, Tenn., whom O’Neill christened “Hee-Haw” and “Henry the Hick,” nicknames that spread all over campus and clung to him like skunk spray for the duration of his career.

“He’d always poke fun at me for being from the country,” said Green, now a graduate assistant under Bruce Pearl. “The funny thing is, he was from the country too. But I didn’t feel very comfortable ragging him about it.”

That was probably for the best. O’Neill once made Green take his car home - not home to his dorm. Home, as in back to Cleveland.

“Looking back, he didn’t want Aaron Green around,” Johnson said. “Did everything in his power to get him to quit. I don’t know why.”

Steve Early, general manager of the Vol Network, recalled one practice when O’Neill punished Green by forcing him to run the stairs at Thompson-Boling Arena. When Green thought he had finished, O’Neill turned him back around: Don’t forget the upper deck.

“I don’t have anything negative to say,” Green said. “I really don’t want to get him mad at me.”

Green described O’Neill as a “great coach” who “taught me a lot,” though he acknowledged that dealing with “all the negativity” was difficult. If anything softened the experience, it was the fact that O’Neill was an equal-opportunity offender. Nobody was immune. Green remembered one game when official Ted Hillary forgot his pants and had to borrow a pair that was several sizes too small. O’Neill, Green said, berated Hillary from the opening tip: Hey, Ted! You expecting a flood? Who forgets PANTS?

O’Neill reserved most of his vitriol for his players, in private and in public. One practice, point guard Alico Dunk struggled with the press break. O’Neill grew so annoyed with Dunk that he left the court, took a seat in the stands and, for the next 15 minutes, booed him.

Then there was the game at Arkansas when O’Neill sent reserve Jason Moore onto the floor. Moore made a handful of mistakes, and Tennessee’s lead evaporated. O’Neill screamed at Moore: You better hope you DIE before halftime!

“You could see on the boy’s face, he was terrified,” Johnson said. “So we get to halftime, and we’re all looking at each other like, ‘Oh, (bleep). Somebody’s about to get (bleeped) up.’ And he just went off on that boy the whole halftime. He swore he would never recruit another white boy after that. It was kind of funny to me.”

When Tennessee played Memphis at The Pyramid in December 1995, an unofficial press row tally determined that O’Neill cussed 30 times, slammed his fists on the table three times and kicked it once. Tennessee lost, 57-55.

“When you all play a good team,” O’Neill was overheard muttering toward the Memphis bench, “you’ll get your (bleep) kicked.”

‘He’s a great teacher’

For all his flaws, O’Neill was a tireless worker at Tennessee. He studied game film for hours. When he addressed reporters at his first SEC Media Days, the first thing he did was announce his cell number. He took on-air calls from fans just minutes after the end of games on “Vol Calls.” He said he regrets leaving.

“I don’t think I handled that particularly well,” O’Neill said. “At the time, I believed in why I left and all that. But looking back, I left behind some really good talent. I’d gone through all the rebuilding and those guys were ready to win.”

According to friends, O’Neill is passionate to a fault. He makes up his mind, then does it -- the consequences be damned.

And that work ethic? That 24-hour motor? Jim Bessette, a childhood friend from Chateauguay, N.Y., a small, blue-collar, no-nonsense town 100 miles from nowhere, said O’Neill learned that from his father, who still awakes before dawn to drive a prison bus.

“It was a poor town, nobody had any money,” Bessette said. “And nobody knew the difference.”

O’Neill has remained true to his roots, Bessette said, loyal to his friends, generous with his time, organizing fundraisers in the community, donating money to the church. O’Neill still has a lakefront home in town, where he lives with his wife, Roberta. He is the local boy done good, a resident celebrity.

And he has the high-powered friends to prove it, including former New York Knicks and Houston Rockets coach Jeff Van Gundy, Dallas Mavericks coach Rick Carlisle, Michigan State coach Tom Izzo and New Jersey Nets coach Lawrence Frank, who was an assistant under O’Neill at Marquette and Tennessee. It is a group O’Neill has been able to lean on for new opportunities when old ones blow up.

“He gets the most out of his players,” Frank said. “He’s a great teacher. He has an unbelievable work ethic. He’s able to break things down and explain them in a very clear fashion. And players appreciate that he’s very honest with them.”

Grizzlies general manager Chris Wallace has known O’Neill for decades. Back when Wallace was editing the Blue Ribbon College Basketball Yearbook, he went to St. Louis to scout Billikens standout Anthony Bonner. He wound up hanging out in O’Neill’s hotel room until 3 a.m. as O’Neill “lamented” the team’s loss.

Wallace said the Grizzlies wanted to hire an assistant known for defense, and that has been O’Neill’s hallmark. He led Marquette to a pair of NCAA Tournament berths. At Tennessee, after inheriting a program in shambles, he laid the foundation for four straight 20-win seasons by the time he departed. And as an assistant under Carlisle with the Detroit Pistons from 2001-03, he was instrumental in crafting the team’s reputation as a defense-minded unit.

“I think Kevin’s more than willing to adjust to whatever a team needs out of him,” McIlvaine said. “If they need him to scout teams and figure out the best way to attack offensive sets or defensive sets, he’ll do it. He knows what his role is.”

This is the best of O’Neill, who also has been known to tiptoe along the edge of that blade -- between motivating and emasculating, between winning and losing, between being loved and loathed.

“He’s always burned white-hot,” Wallace said, “there’s no question about that.”

© 2008, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.