By JOHN JAMES MARSHALL, Journal Sports
If there is one thing you always knew about former Centenary basketball coach Tommy Canterbury, it’s that he loved to talk. He was great with a quote before a game, after a game and sometimes even during a game.
He managed to have a radio career at the same time as a coaching career. You need him to speak to your civic organization? He was there. High school sports banquet? No need to ask him twice. Garden Club? Cub Scout den meeting? Just tell him when and where.
Decades after he coached and graced his last meeting, it should come as no surprise that Canterbury hasn’t lost it one bit. Ask him a simple question and sit back and get comfortable because it’s going to be a while. He may wander off the verbal path – one thing always brings up another – but he will find his way back.
Eventually.
But one day he discovered there was someone who really needed to hear what he had to say.
Himself.
And it happened in, of all places, a ski lift in Lake Tahoe in the late 1980s.
“My grandfather and my father had their own businesses,” he says. “I had that in my blood. I had told everybody that I would not be coaching when I was 50. I was not going to do it. It’s a young man’s job.
“I had an idea about how to market sports medicine, which was sort of a new term,” Canterbury says. “And we started SportsCare with a local hospital, just kind of on the side for a year. But then they wanted me to do it full time and I knew I had to make a decision. I’m not a crazy religious person, but I am a Christian and I remember thinking ‘Wait a minute. God has laid this out for me. I want my own business and I want to still be in sports.’ He laid this right in my hands.”
And that’s when Canterbury’s like changed completely.
“I coached basketball for 20 years; seven in high school and 12 in college,” Canterbury says. “But I took a chance and walked away. I think a lot of people thought I was crazy.”
He announced on Jan. 3 during the 1988-89 Gents’ season that he would retire from coaching. When the season ended – once again, only one win away from the NCAA Tournament — Coach Tommy Canterbury became Mr. Tommy Canterbury.
These days, he’s a 78-year-old grandfather who loves to travel and, if it weren’t for three back operations in the last six years, would still be playing golf.
“I’ve had had two professions,” he says, “and I absolutely loved both of them.”
What started with two employees, SportsCare USA has grown into a company with 175 hospital clients in 32 states.
But Canterbury couldn’t do his second career until he came to terms with walking away from the first one.
“I knew I wasn’t going to get this opportunity again,” he says.
Even though it’s been more than 35 years, that doesn’t mean he has put his coaching career behind him.
One of the great things about coaches is their ability to remember little things that happened in a game. Big details might escape them, but they always seem to recount the incidents.
The Gents had fierce rivalries with Arkansas Little-Rock during the 1980s and Canterbury can still recall a big moment near the end of a game at the Gold Dome.
“We had a trick play, one we worked on at the end of every practice,” Canterbury said. “It was a really neat (inbounds) play but you could only use it in an exact situation because they had to be playing man-to-man. We break the huddle and (assistant coach Tommy) Vardeman said ‘Let’s just get it the ball inbounds because they are going to foul us.’ And I said, ‘I’ve been waiting my whole life to run this play.’ We dunked it on the other end and won the game.”
The timing of getting out as Gents head coach might have seemed difficult, but it was nothing compared to getting in.
He came to Centenary as an assistant after coaching two future Gent stars – Cherokee Rhone and Bobby White – at Springhill High and was on the staff of head coach Riley Wallace for the 1976-77 season. But in the following season, things started going sideways for the Centenary program. Wallace and the school administration did not see eye-to-eye on how things were going and when he tried to make a contractual power play, the school relieved Wallace of his duties.
“I figured I was headed back to Simsboro to sack groceries and pump gas,” Canterbury says.
Twelve games into his second season as a college coach, he was offered the head coaching job on an interim basis by the school’s Board of Trustees.
“I don’t know why this came out of my mouth, but I told them ‘Gentlemen, I haven’t been in coaching a long time, but I do know that interim is a bad word. I’m not going to take an interim job while you hunt for another coach because this team’s chances of having a winning record are about 1 in 100. So I’m not going to do that,’ “ Canterbury recalls.
It was not about money as much as it was about getting a contract for two years. He was asked to step into the hall and 15 minutes later was brought back in and told he had the job.
“To be honest,” he says now, “I really don’t think they had a choice.”
The next day, Canterbury won his first game as a college head coach by beating Northeast Louisiana (now UL-Monroe) 62-60. He went on to win 150 games for the Gents.
Today, Canterbury lives in Frisco, Texas, and has turned over the day-to-day operations of SportsCare to his son Chad. “I told him two years ago that he can run this thing without a doubt,” Canterbury says. “I don’t know about social media and he knows everything. So I told him all I want is a check every month and a title and it’s all yours. He said “A check is no problem, but what title do you want?’ “
Canterbury decided Chairman of the Board sounded nice, mainly because “I want those old-timey business cards that has Founder & Chairman of the Board.”
But decades later, he can still draw upon his basketball experiences. “When you build a company, it’s just like a team,” Canterbury says. “I can tell you more of what not to do than what to do. And that’s a value in itself.”
The only difference in being (almost) retired? “I still wake up sometimes at 4:30,” he says. “But I don’t have to.”
Contact JJ at johnjamesmarshall@yahoo.com