Bob Schermerhorn was maybe the last of his breed.
He was a basketball lifer, who coached seemingly here, there and everywhere. And he had a dozen stories, at least, for every stop.
“One story I always remember is in Utah, how one of my players came to me the first day of deer hunting and said, ‘I got my buck, Coach; could I hang it in your backyard?” he said a few years back.
“I didn’t know what that meant. So I went home and I said to (his wife) Linda, ‘Buck’s gotta drain, could I hang it in the backyard?’
“And she said to me, ‘Your players can eat here, your players can do their laundry here, they can stay overnight here, they can do whatever they want. But they’re not hanging Bambi in the backyard.’ ”
There are too few of these guys still around in the increasingly button-down world of sports: the ones who will compete hard between the whistles, and afterward greet you with a smile, hand you a beer and start spinning stories.
Sadly, there is now one fewer. Schermerhorn, 75, died Monday, suffering a fatal heart attack after returning from a doctor’s appointment.
He was beloved in Orange County, where he was a high school coach, a community college coach and athletic director and an assistant at UC Irvine to the late Bill Mulligan, himself a storyteller deluxe.
And he was adored in Riverside, where he was basketball coach for nine years and athletic director for six more at Riverside City College, won 225 games as a coach and got the Tigers into three state Final Fours, and eventually was inducted into an RCC Athletic Hall of Fame that he’d helped launch as AD. He’d sunk deep enough roots in Riverside that even after moving back to Orange County, he’d show up at the Lucky Greek, on Merrill Ave., for lunches and stories with old friends.
And, yes, he had a small taste of the big time. He was an assistant at Arizona State for a season and a half and was promoted to interim head coach when Steve Patterson resigned under pressure midway through the 1988-89 season.
The Sun Devils were 2-7 on Schermerhorn’s watch, but one of those victories was an upset of UCLA. ASU wouldn’t beat the Bruins again for 11 years and one day, a span of 22 losses encompassing three coaches.
“They wanted to hire a big name coach,” Schermerhorn said. “And the baseball coach, Jim Brock, who was in my corner, says, ‘Big name coach? How can you get a bigger name coach than Schermerhorn, with 12 letters?’ ”
Ah, well, ASU hired Bill Frieder — a hire that, coupled with Steve Fisher’s installation as interim coach at Michigan when Frieder announced he was leaving, changed college basketball history in three different cities: Tempe, Ann Arbor and ultimately San Diego.
What did Schermerhorn get out of it? Years later he contemplated writing an autobiography, and you can guess what the title was going to be.
(Full disclosure: Schermerhorn asked This Space to help him write “Big Name Coach,” in a rare lapse of judgment. Too bad we never got that book written. But the recordings from that project form the basis for this column.)
Schermerhorn grew up in South Bend, which helped explain his affinity for Notre Dame football. He said he “was a good player, but I wasn’t good enough to play at my high school,” which happened to be South Bend Central, one of Indiana’s powerhouses.
So he played for church league teams, YMCA teams, semipro teams. When he was with the Marines in Vietnam, he said, “we played basketball out in the jungles … We built a basketball court: a pole out of mortar shells, and welded ‘em together, and got a ball.”
When he left the service, he enrolled at Orange Coast College, made the team, didn’t play much, but impressed longtime OCC coach Herb Livesay with his basketball knowledge. Livesay made him a walk-on assistant in 1968, and also set him up for summertime work at the Snow Valley Basketball camp in Santa Barbara.
One of the basketball guys he met there was Pete Carril, who was early in his coaching career at Princeton. One night Carril invited him out for beers.
“I didn’t want to be too obvious, so I put my pen in my pocket because I figured I’d get down there and learn a little bit of basketball from Pete,” Schermerhorn said. “So we get down there and Pete starts up a conversation with the ladies at the next table.
“Well, pretty soon Pete is out there dancing with the ladies, and I’m sitting there by myself, just looking around the room. The end of the evening came, and Pete and I drove back up the hill to the basketball camp, and I got no Xs and Os at all from Pete.
“Every time Pete sees me he calls me ‘Snow Valley,’ ” Schermerhorn added.
His first high school job was at Santa Ana Valley, where he coached JV basketball and freshman baseball. Then he was hired to be varsity coach at Canyon High, a new school in Anaheim Hills, in 1974.
He scheduled Elsinore for his team’s first varsity game, figuring it would be an easy win. But Elsinore had John Greer, a 6-foot-5 sophomore who eventually played for USC, and by intermission Schermerhorn’s team was looking at the business end of a rout.
“Ernie Rogowitz was the referee, and he was a Santa Ana Valley track coach,” Schermerhorn recalled. “And at halftime he says, ‘Hey, there’s nothing I can do to help you.’ ”
But Schermerhorn’s journey was only beginning. He coached at Canyon for four years and got to a CIF quarterfinal. Then he took the job at Chaffey College, commuting back and forth while continuing to teach at Canyon. Two years into his tenure, in 1980, Chaffey dropped basketball for budget reasons.
Three years later the program was revived, but Schermerhorn — who by then had become head coach at Southern Utah — informed folks at Chaffey that he’d technically never been dismissed as coach the first time.
“Marie (Pepicello), the president, was nice enough to send me a letter telling me I was fired,” he said.
As one of Mulligan’s assistants at UC Irvine from 1980-83, he coached a team that had its own certified stud, 6-foot-8 All-American center Kevin Magee.
“(Mulligan) would tell the players the bus was leaving at 3 o’clock,” Schermerhorn remembered. “But then, you know, he’d tell me at 3 o’clock to go out there and make sure that Kevin was on the bus. If Kevin was on the bus, come back and get him and we leave. If Kevin wasn’t on the bus, tell the players that Coach Mulligan’s on the telephone.”
You knew Schermerhorn was a lifer because he couldn’t get it out of his system. After “retiring” as RCC’s athletic director in 2005, he coached at Fullerton College for a year, was athletic director at Santa Ana College, and then returned to Indiana as coach and athletic director at Holy Cross College for three years before finally calling it quits in 2013.
The Schermerhorn family announced Friday that a celebration of life would be held May 5 at 3 p.m., at the La Sierra University Church in Riverside. In lieu of flowers, the family said donations could be made to the Wounded Warrior project.
I’ve got an additional idea. Everyone attending the service should show up with at least a couple of stories to tell.
Coach Horn would like that.
jalexander@scng.com
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