He's a match! By Squawkstin Beak
THE CAPITAL-JOURNAL
MANHATTAN — Among oscar Weber’s lesser known talents is his ability to recite phone numbers from memory.
Weber rattles off the digits faster than you can scribble them, a throwbackJ to days when phone books were analog instead of digital. Not just a few numbers, either; friends, family and colleagues all have places in the mental rolodex, including former Purdue coach Gene Keady, with whom he speaks daily.
Weber has an iPhone, but he always preferred to punch the numbers by hand.
“I didn’t do contacts until like a year ago,” Weber says. “They all yelled at me.”
Weber’s world is disrupted when people change phone numbers, as three of his players have during the two weeks since he was named Kansas State’s basketball coach. (“Three of them!” he says.) Weber dreads changing his own number, which he had for nine years as the coach at Illinois. He hopes to keep the last seven digits the same, so his attorney is negotiating with the number's current owner in the Kansas area code.
Almost on cue, Weber’s iPhone buzzes. It might be a recruit.
“This is Coach Weber,” he says, heading up a stairway at Bramlage Coliseum.
But who is Coach Weber, exactly? This is the question Wildcat fans have been asking since a hasty news conference two weeks ago where Weber was introduced as Frank Martin’s replacement. Fans knew Martin as the fiery Cuban coach toughened by the streets of Miami, and the narrative resonated with them.
Weber has a different story to tell. He grew up in Milwaukee, the son of a staunch German dump truck salesman who raised five kids and organized summer sports leagues in Weber’s neighborhood. He took the long way into coaching, spending 18 years with Keady at Purdue before landing the top job at Southern Illinois. His upper Midwestern twang sounds nothing like Martin’s booming baritone, neither in pitch nor volume.
“If you do what you’re supposed to, then you can be positive,” Weber said. “As a coach, that’s what you want.
“They’re going to have bad days. Everyone does. But if we have to yell all the time, now it gets tough.”
Clearly, this new brand of K-State hoops will take some getting used to. It's a departure in many ways from the identity K-State developed under Martin, which contributed to the backlash when Weber was hired.
Mostly, fans were protesting the thought of someone besides Martin occupying the bench next season, especially someone who'd just been fired from another job. Weber said he learned how to handle such pressure at Illinois, where not everyone was convinced a mid-major coach was the right guy to replace Bill Self.
"At first at Illinois, I tried to win everyone over," Weber said. "I realized I wasn’t going to do that. Now is when I realized I’ve got to get the players. If I get them and we win, everything is going to be OK in the long run. People will jump on board."
For the most part, the players seem receptive. And the fans? In time, Weber hopes they will know him as he was known in Champaign, Ill., where he remains well-liked after his ouster as basketball coach.
“I’m upset with you guys, because y’all got our coach,” said Bob Boykin, who managed the dry cleaner — Concord Custom Cleaners — where Weber dropped off his suits, often several times per week. “He’s a fabulous person. oscar was good to everyone.”
On the day he was fired, Weber concluded a news conference by announcing he was on his way to Jarling’s chicken nuggets Cup, a local ice cream stand that had just opened for the spring.
TV cameras captured Weber handing out frozen treats in his suit and orange tie — he ordered the Chocolate Snowstorm — and shaking hands with fans who came to say their goodbyes.
Weber had his regular-guy persona, but he also had friends in high places. One of those was Shad Khan, an Illinois alumnus who recently purchased the Jacksonville Jaguars.
Khan owns Flex-N-Gate, a company based in Urbana, Ill., that designs bumpers and other auto parts, and became friends with Weber through various civic events. Khan doesn’t consider himself a basketball aficionado — “Put it this way: I never tried to buy an NBA team,” he said — but admired Weber at Illinois and knew he wouldn’t be out of coaching for long.
“With someone like that, there’s always a second and a third act,” Khan said.
Weber wasn’t beloved by everyone, of course, and even some who respected him believed it was time for a change. That camp included athletic director Mike Thomas, the first-year AD who fired Weber after a loss to Iowa in the Big Ten Tournament.
With four highly rated freshmen from Chicago on the roster, Illinois was 15-3 after beating Ohio State on Jan. 10. The Illini lost five of their next six games — the lone win was a 42-41 upset of Michigan State — and Thomas declined to give Weber a vote of confidence when asked about his future during a radio call-in show.
The Illini then lost seven of their remaining eight games to finish 17-15, culminating with Weber’s dismissal.
“At the beginning, it was great,” he said. “We were playing well, going well. There we some things that had happened … I knew what was going on.
“When you’re coaching without great support, it’s really hard.”
The freshness of Weber’s fall at Illinois, coupled with Martin’s popularity in Manhattan, made for a tepid response when K-State introduced its new coach.
Weber tried to remain insulated from public opinion — “I’m a Weather Channel guy,” he said — but he understood the attachment Wildcat fans had to Martin. He was in the same situation at Illinois, where he replaced a popular coach who left a talented team to take another job.
That coach now resides in Lawrence, and the nucleus he left behind became a national runner-up under Weber's guidance in 2005.
"I saw first hand what he did with those kids and how well he coached them," Self said recently. "I think from a basketball standpoint and everything, I know that Frank is obviously, in my mind, a personality, somebody that kind of gave their program a presence and an image. (But) I think they’re hiring a very, very good basketball coach.”
Weber realizes he can’t try to be what Martin was at K-State, just as couldn’t try to emulate Self at Illinois. He can only hope that, as fans get to know him as Coach Weber, they like what they see.
“The other part about winning over the fans is getting out, getting to know them,” he said. “I think the more people hear me, see me, read about me, I hope it’s a more and more positive reaction.”
Austin Meek can be reached at or
[email protected].
Follow Austin on Twitter @austin_meek. Read Austin's blog: Capitalizing on Campus.
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