Glaring Hall Omissions: Jim Phelan, His Bowtie and His 830 Wins

Jim Phelan will remind you in a heartbeat that he's already in the Hall of Fame, a bunch of them. It's not that he wonders why he keeps getting asked about the one in Springfield, Mass., the one that won't let him in. It's that it doesn't bother him as much as it bothers so many others.

"I really don't care,'' Phelan said Monday morning, after knocking golf balls around the lawn of his home in Emmitsburg, Md., less than a mile from the college he put on the basketball map half a century ago. "When I was active, it was a nice trivia question --- who has the most wins and is not in the Hall of Fame?''

The answer is Phelan, who won 830 games in 49 seasons at Mount St. Mary's, the tiny historic Catholic university in the mountains near the Pennsylvania border. Exactly three men have won more games coaching at Division I colleges: Bobby Knight, Dean Smith and Adolph Rupp. Two, Smith and Rupp, have won more games at a single school. None, at any level, has ever coached more games at one school than the 1,354 Phelan coached at "The Mount'' from 1954-2003.

And in total -- counting Jim Boeheim's ascent at Syracuse a week ago -- eight have Division I coaches won 800 or more games. It's legendary company the 80-year-old Phelan is in. It's also legendary company he is left out of: the four ahead of him in the 800 club (Bob Knight, Dean Smith, Adolph Rupp and Mike Krzyzewski) and two of the other thre (Jim Calhoun and Boeheim) are enshrined in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. When he retired in 2003, coaches all over the country donned bowties, Phelan's trademark, in his honor the last regular-season weekend. He has two coach-of-the-year awards named after him, as well as the court in Mount's on-campus arena.

Since his retirement, three men's college basketball coaches have been inducted in Springfield: Boeheim, Calhoun and Roy Williams. Go back four years, to 1999, when he won his 800th -- dramatically, in his conference's tournament championship game to clinch his first Division I tournament spot -- and add three others: Lute Olson, John Chaney and John Thompson.

The respect between Phelan and his coaching fraternity brothers is mutual. None of them has a clue as to why Phelan has not even gotten a glance since the early 1990s. Said Thompson to the Baltimore Sun in 2007, "There is no excuse.''

The suspected taint on his resume is the years that Mount St. Mary's was in the "small colleges'' classification, even though Phelan led them to the 1962 title at that level and beat some loaded programs back when the sport wasn't tilted as much toward the major schools.

Everybody who has known him for very long -- former players like Fred "Mad Dog'' Carter, fellow coaches, and definitely Phelan's wife, Dorothy -- volunteers support for a campaign to get him into the most prestigious of basketball halls, but none ever gets far. Two seasons ago, when his handpicked successor, Milan Brown, led Mount St. Mary's to an NCAA tournament berth, Phelan's career got significant renewed public exposure before its tournament games against Coppin State and North Carolina.

Still, nothing in the way of an in-route from the more-secretive-than-most hall selection committee -- a group which Carter, a star for Phelan in the late 1960s and the first black student at the entire school, once referred to as "knuckleheads.''

"They should have put him in as soon as he retired,'' said Mount sports information director Mark Vandergrift, whose first year at the school coincided with Phelan's last as coach.

It came as a relief to his admirers that Phelan was in the Class of 2008 at the College Basketball Hall of Fame in Kansas City; this year's honorees, to be inducted Sunday, include Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. The opening of the Hall, in the eyes of many college aficionados, rights several wrongs committed by the shrine in Springfield, and Phelan was considered a colossal wrong.

"Hardly anyone knows the difference anyway,'' Phelan said. "Anyone in the Naismith Hall of Fame got into the College Hall of Fame, which was good.''

And it got in one other who deserved to get in, right? Phelan refused over and over again to take the bait, choosing to recall the high caliber of inductees in his year (Charles Barkley, Danny Manning, Nolan Richardson) and the other classes -- and to show that 55 years after his coaching debut and six years after his retirement, he stayed abreast of today's game. Noting that the late Wayman Tisdale would be enshrined Sunday, he described in detail Mount's season opener last Saturday at Tisdale's alma mater, Oklahoma, a 95-71 loss he did not attend but had described to him by Brown.

Phelan sounded for all the world as if he had coached the game himself, but he laughed off the idea that in his ninth decade, he missed being on the sidelines. "I go out there, I watch the first half, then I go up the hospitality room and watch the rest in there,'' he said. "I can't do anything about it sitting in the bleachers. You're watching it, you're dying sitting there, and you can't do anything more than the guy who's on the bench. I don't know how Johnny Wooden did it all those years at UCLA [after his retirement].''

He said he knows Boeheim from past events, and is a huge admirer of his and the matchup zone that has befuddled three decades of opponents; he also joked that he once asked Boeheim to bring his Syracuse team to Emmitsburg, and was told, "You could give me $100,000 and I wouldn't come down there.''

Phelan never saw an opportunity better than the one he had at Mount fSt. Mary's or 49 years, during all of which, he said, he was the lowest-paid coach in the nation. "That happens. Someone has to be the lowest,'' he said.

Now, despite a snub that grows in scale every time another coach reaches a milestone or another group enters Springfield, Phelan speaks as if he has no regrets, "No, life is good,'' he said.

His record, rewards notwithstanding, is far better than good.