From CJ Moore, The Athletic, November 2020
Jerome Tang will man the sideline on Saturday as the head coach of the No. 2 team in the country, a life-defining moment made possible 17 years ago by a slab of ribs, three phone calls and Scott Drew’s unwillingness to accept “no” for an answer.
Tang, who has been Drew’s wingman throughout his tenure at Baylor, has one of the most fairytale stories in college basketball and should be a name worth monitoring when the coaching carousel begins next spring. Baylor’s rise to a power in the sport is a great story in itself, and it took dreamers such as Drew and Tang to make it possible.
When Drew got the Baylor job in 2003, Tang was making $16,000 a year as the basketball coach and athletic director at Heritage Christian, a small private school in Cleveland, Texas, with few resources that he had turned into a powerhouse. He drove a 1992 baby blue Honda Accord with a bumper that was held on by a wire after one of his players backed it into a light pole. The car was symbolic of his priorities. It was the first car he’d ever purchased, and he had skimped on the radio and passenger-side mirror because he didn’t want to pay the extra cost. He never installed a radio, because without it, it forced his players to talk to him. He also taught all of his players how to drive a stick shift with that car.
This kind of devotion to his players was respected by those who witnessed it, and it’s why’s Tang’s name kept coming up in conversations Drew was having with people around the state. One was from Rick Darnell, a high school administrator who told Drew if he wanted an assistant who was a Christian and could recruit Texas, he should consider Tang. The second was from Mike Kunstadt, who ran the Great American Shootout and had a scouting service in Texas, and upon being apprised of Drew’s plan — recruit guards from the South and bigs from overseas — he told him he needed to get to know Tang. The third was Hal Pastner, who started the Houston Hoops program that Tang coached. Once Drew told Pastner about his faith and his coaching philosophies, Pastner told him he needed to meet Tang.
“Now he’d heard my name three times,” Tang says now. “It just happened to be the right three people.”
Tang wanted to talk to Drew too. Not because he wanted a job; he wanted a player. Drew had received a commitment from Mamadou Diene, and Tang was hoping Drew would place him at Heritage Christian. When Drew called Tang back, he told him that Diene was staying in Africa, but he really wanted to meet him.
“I was like, nah,” Tang recalls. “Any coach who got a job in the state, they always were like, I really want to talk to you about being on the staff. But really all they wanted to do was suck up to you, so they could get your players. And we had some good players at Heritage. And we had good players on the Hoops. I understood that.”
Drew insisted, so Tang gave him all the reasons why he’d never hire him: Tang didn’t have his college degree, and “you don’t know me from Adam.”
“The worst thing you can do is tell Scott Drew no,” Tang says. “For the next 45 minutes, he is pounding me. Just drive up to Waco and spend a few hours with me. I just want to meet you.”
Tang finally relented, promising he’d make the drive two nights later. His wife, Careylyen, was pregnant with their second child and had quit her job a month earlier. The family’s insurance had run out, and unbeknownst to Tang, while he was visiting Waco, she had inquired if they could qualify for Medicaid. She was told no, and she sat in the parking lot in tears.
Tang, meanwhile, hit it off with Drew, who had 100 questions prepared to ask him. Three questions in, Drew abandoned his list and the two started talking movies. “It was like he was my kindred spirit,” Drew says.
They visited for 3½ hours, and when Tang got up to leave, Drew told him, “Man, everybody told me you were here,” Drew said, holding his hand up. “I figured you’d be about there. But you’re like way up here. But I don’t know ya. I don’t know you, and you just don’t hire guys you don’t know.”
“I told him, ‘Coach, if God wants me at Baylor, there’s nothing you can do to stop it. If God doesn’t want me at Baylor, there’s nothing you can do to make it happen.”
Tang gave Drew a hug and returned home, figuring that was the end of it. He didn’t even tell his wife about the meeting.
The next day Drew called his dad, Homer, and told him he knew who he was going to hire for his final assistant, but he really liked a guy he’d met in Texas; he just didn’t know him. Homer told him to have dinner at Tang’s house. “If you eat dinner at a man’s house, you’ll find out everything you need to know about him.”
So Drew called Tang and basically invited himself over.
“Now I’ve got to tell my wife,” Tang says.
The Tangs were living paycheck to paycheck, and Tang scrounged up all the money they had: $10.81. There was already a half of slab of ribs his father-in-law had made in the fridge. He bought another half a slab, potato salad and some bread.
The meal was a hit, and Drew says he could feel the love in the home. Everything he wanted to feel he felt. “It was one of those nights where you think you’re going to be at a friend’s house for an hour and then you end up being there for three hours,” Drew says. “I realized, dang, we’re a lot alike.”
As he left, Drew told Tang the job was his if he wanted it. He then apologized and told him Tang he could only offer him $70,000.
As soon as Drew left, Tang got a call from Leonard Hamilton, who had just completed his first season at Florida State.
“Coach Hamilton, anything that I need to do?” Tang asked. “He said, just get on your knees and thank God.”
And that’s what Tang did. He dropped to his knees and wept.
Drew tested positive for COVID-19 on Nov. 20, meaning he would not get to coach Baylor’s opening games. Those games were supposed to be at the Empire Classic, but other schools refused to play the Bears when they heard of the positive test. That left Drew scrambling to schedule games. The obvious reason was to make up the games and because his players wanted to play, but there was also the added bonus of giving Tang an opportunity to show his capabilities as a head coach.
“Parents at Christmas Day are always more excited for the kids to open their presents than them to open their own presents, and obviously as a head coach, when our players have success, that’s the best thing,” Drew says. “When our staff has success, that’s the best thing. When Coach Tang coaches these games, he’s going to do an unbelievable job. People will get to see what a great job and how competent and successful a head coach he will be if he chooses to leave.”
Tang, who eventually got his college degree, has not really had a chance to leave Baylor. He says he has been in the running for four head coaching jobs. Three interviewed him and told him no. The fourth school said the job was his with the stipulation that he couldn’t bring his own staff and they could only offer him half of what he was making at Baylor.
When he was younger, he had his career path planned out. He was going to be an assistant coach for seven years, then become a head coach for 10 years, during which he’d go to four Final Fours and win three national titles. Then he was going to get hired by the Los Angeles Lakers, work there for three years and then get fired or resign. Then he and his wife would travel through Africa building schools.
Crazy? Maybe. But it was that kind of thinking that allowed him to help Drew build Baylor — from one of the worst major-conference programs in the country to a consistent winner.
The Bears won just eight games in their first year under Drew. On Feb. 9, 2005, during his second season at the school, Baylor was off to a 1-7 start in the Big 12. Tang remembers standing on the court at Texas Tech and calling Tweety Carter, then a high school junior in Reserve, La.
“One day we’re going to be No. 1 in the country,” Tang recalls telling Carter, “and we’re going to come in here and this place is going to be packed.”
“We were trying to sell the dream,” Tang says. “When I said it, I don’t know if I really believed it.”
The Bears never got to No. 1 with Carter, the program’s first McDonald’s All-American, but as a senior, Carter helped lead them to an Elite Eight.
On Jan. 9, 2017, the Bears did get to No. 1 in the country for the first time, and the next night Tang remembers standing on a court again, this time at West Virginia. He looked around. The place was packed. “Man,” he thought, “I remember calling kids telling them we were going to do this.”
Last season the Bears had the longest winning streak (23) in Big 12 history, would have been a No. 1 seed for the first time and were legitimate national title contenders. This year you could argue they should be the favorite, and that’ll probably get settled Dec. 5 in a meeting with No. 1 Gonzaga.
But all of this that Tang has lived through now, it’s allowed him not to lose that dreaming spirit when it comes to his future. He brings up Duke assistant coaches and how they land jobs at places such as Marquette and Northwestern. “I feel like what we do here is as good if not better,” he says. “We haven’t gone to the Final Four yet and we haven’t won a national championship yet, but it’s coming. And Coach is going to be a Hall of Famer.”
He brings up the Baylor assistants who have gone on to head jobs — Matthew Driscoll at North Florida, Grant McCasland at North Texas and Paul Mills at Oral Roberts — and rattles off the coach of the year honors they’ve had and the turnarounds they’ve spearheaded.
Tang wants that opportunity, but as he told Baylor’s players recently: “Everybody’s got dreams, but you can’t let those dreams stop you from what you’re doing right now.”
On Saturday, the task will be leading the second-ranked Bears to a win over Louisiana-Lafayette as the interim head coach and then doing it again on Sunday against Washington, hopefully moving his record as a head coach to 4-0. (He stepped in for Drew in 2013 when the coach was suspended for two games.)
This team, Tang knows, is special and has a chance to win the national championship and cut down nets. He dreams of that for them. For him, he’s appreciative of where he is. Years after he got the job at Baylor, his wife would tell him about sitting in that parking lot after getting denied Medicaid and crying, not knowing what they would do next.
Days later Tang was a college basketball assistant, a job that came with insurance.
Seventeen years later, he’s considered one of the top assistants in college basketball, and while this weekend will be a cool opportunity and he’ll enjoy calling the plays and running the timeouts, he knows it’s still Drew’s program and he still has dreams for himself.
“I never dreamed of holding a piece of the net,” Tang says. “It was the whole net.”