In Bob McKillop's basketball office, in a wooden cabinet near his desk, in the top right drawer -- is junk.
A pair of plastic sunglasses. A matted tennis ball. Loose links of a chain.
Players and assistants chuckle at the items. Former players get wistful. McKillop grins. "I've got lots of stuff," he says, rummaging.
He is a motivator, sometimes old school, sometimes corny, sometimes philosophical. Tonight, he brings his team to a place where no motivation seems necessary, the NCAA men's Midwest Regional semifinal in Detroit, where Davidson will play Wisconsin, a school more than 20 times its size.
It is the biggest game of McKillop's career, perhaps in the school's 100 years of basketball. They have, as the 57-year-old New Yorker long pledged to his players, finally hit Broadway.
But tonight also is something more, McKillop knows. It's a moment that brings meaning to all the moments before, all the messages and lessons -- the whole junk drawer.
The plastic glasses? McKillop puts them on when a player misses an open man in practice.
The tennis ball? One Davidson team bounced it around campus -- a symbol of "bouncing back" after a couple of losses.
The chain links? Players on another Wildcats team brought them to games -- one link per player -- then put them together in the locker room before tip off.
That last one -- that's one the motivator especially likes, because when you get past the corniness of it, you begin to understand some larger things, like the three words he tells every player, every year. Trust. Commitment. Caring.
All of which mean little, he says, if you're not "living it."
And so, that's what Bob McKillop tries to do.
Caring
In 1996, Titus Ivory was the player who was going to take Davidson basketball to where it is this week. He was a North Meck kid, a smart young man and two-time county athlete of the year, the kind of player coaches covet at elite schools.
McKillop, who had come to Davidson in 1989 from a Long Island high school, had just finished his seventh season at the school, taking a losing program to a 25-win season and NIT appearance. Ivory was, he knew, a player who could lift the program even more -- "what Stephen Curry is to us right now," McKillop says. So when Ivory called the coach from his prep school, Phillips Andover, to say he'd decided on Penn State, McKillop flew to Massachusetts to change his mind. He couldn't.
Two years later, Ivory's father, Titus Sr., died at age 49.
Says Terrell Ivory, Titus' younger son: "At the funeral, I was trying to pay attention to everything but what was happening at the front. I remember, vividly, looking up into the back and seeing Coach McKillop walk in."
Like his brother, Terrell was an athlete. But, he says: "Davidson wasn't recruiting me," he says. "Coach had no reason to come to my dad's funeral. That's just the kind of person he was."
Terrell eventually decided to attend Davidson, where he tried out -- "with no guarantees" -- for the basketball team. A few games into the season, the coaches gave him a jersey.
Like all the players, he's heard McKillop talk about caring -- how helping someone helps everybody, even if it's as small as setting a screen for a teammate. McKillop calls it "making an investment." Says Ivory, now a prep school assistant in New Jersey: "He cares. You can see it in the way he treated all of us, and everyone."
By his senior year, Ivory was a reserve and a Davidson captain. At the end-of-the-year banquet, he told everyone about his father's funeral, about Coach.
"I decided that if I was going to spend the next four years of my life somewhere," he told them, "that I was going to go to a place with a man like that."
Commitment
George Spain played his last game for McKillop in 1995. He was a senior at Davidson, but unlike every other senior who has played for McKillop, Spain did not graduate.
"It really wasn't his fault," says McKillop now. Spain had changed his major, losing a few credits in the process. He went to Europe to play pro basketball, then did it again the next summer.
McKillop began getting frustrated. It wasn't only that Spain was jeopardizing the graduation rate, it was what that rate represented -- a pact the coach and players had with each other and the school, with themselves.
So the coach decided to be, well, proactive.
"I began to tell every parent and every recruit that we had graduated every player but one, and that player was George Spain," he says. "Then I sent e-mails and notes to George saying, `I just told another parent about you.' "
Spain took his classes, McKillop says. The 100 percent rate endures.
The story isn't surprising to people who know McKillop, a man so devoted to detail, to following through, that he calls former players on their birthdays, and once learned Italian for an overseas basketball clinic. His confession: He's a few credits short of a master's degree. "It still eats at me," he says.
Says his son, Matt: "There's rarely a time you see him without a piece of paper in his hand, writing things down. He wants to gain from his experiences."
It is, the coach says, what he's always looked for in recruits. Not only someone who can handle the rigors of Davidson -- and its sometimes harsh basketball coach -- but someone who is unsatisfied, no matter what success he's found.
And failure? Yes, that's a part of Davidson, too.
Three years ago, one of McKillop's best teams lost the Southern Conference tournament and an NCAA bid after finishing the conference season undefeated. McKillop sent his devastated players encouraging e-mails and called them into his office. "It was so easy for them to have a pity party," he says. "I challenged them to find out what kind of men they were."
A few years before, McKillop had wanted the vacant job at St. John's -- a big-time, Big East, New York gig. He didn't get it.
He says this about that job: "I've been challenged my whole life. I've been cut from teams, told I'm not good enough. I've lost." He says he does what he tells his players. "You continue to chase that dream," he says.
Last weekend, that dream arrived with McKillop's first NCAA tournament win.
Then it began to disappear.
Trust
As they do every game, Davidson's coaches huddled at halftime of the Wildcats' second-round game in Raleigh last Sunday. Davidson trailed Georgetown by 11. The Hoyas looked comfortable. The Wildcats' coaches were not.
"We needed to do something to get them out of that," remembers assistant coach Matt Matheny, who has played for and has coached with McKillop for 15 years. "I said: `Why don't we extend our defense?' "
That meant, essentially, a full-court press -- a counterintuitive strategy against a more athletic Georgetown team. It was a risk at a time when risks are hardest, when the temptation is to trust the book, or trust only yourself.
Said McKillop, without hesitating: "Sounds great."
Davidson would fall further behind in the opening moments of the second half, but soon Georgetown was turning the ball over, and Stephen Curry found more magic. Davidson won, 74-70.
Says Matheny: "He does talk about trust. He says it to our guys whether it's playing or practice or a team meeting at his house. It's important on the court, but it carries though."
And now those words, those goofy and serious messages, are coming back to the coach this week. McKillop has heard from guys he played with in the 1960s, from no-longer-young men he coached in the 1970s. That support network he leaned on after missing on St. John's? "It's now become an army."
Says Terrell Ivory: "He's made a lot of men cry the last week."
Says his son: "It's the final payment of everything he's invested."
Says the coach: "It's not just basketball," and puts his tennis ball back in its drawer.
TONIGHT'S GAME
Davidson plays Wisconsin in Detroit at 7:10 p.m. The game will be televised on WBTV (Ch. 3).
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