Sometimes the past can haunt you, and some times it can bite you in the backside. Monte Towe may still be looking for a piece of his bottom on the floor of the RBC Center after Sunday night.
The visiting University of New Orleans Privateers pulled off a major upset last night, defeating the North Carolina State Wolfpack 65-63 in Raleigh, NC. The event was significant on its own—a lesser UNO team from a lesser conference (the Sun Belt), and on the road at the home of Jimmy Valvano, Norm Sloan, and oh yes, Monte Towe.
Towe, now an assistant coach under former NBA coach Sidney Lowe, coached the Privateers from 2001-2006. Towe left UNO after the 2005-06 season, presumably to go back home, where he led the Wolfpack to the 1974 NCAA Title.
However, given the time frame and the season from hell he endured because of Hurricane Katrina, one can wonder not too deeply to find reasons why an assistants’ job in tobacco road was more appealing than a head coaching gig in a rebuilding city--recovering from the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.
Quite a few of us evacuees went through what Towe must have been thinking: namely asking yourself if the chance in front of you trumps the reality you have in New Orleans going forward. I spent 10 months in Dallas myself after the storm--away from my house, my family and my life as I knew it. But I had to go back home. And I did.
So, this article is not about how a selfish Towe abandoned his team and his adopted city for greener pastures. He went home— and no one—least of all those of us that know true separation from the place you love, can deny him that choice.
But he did leave a UNO team that desperately needed a steady hand, a talented coach (which I believe Towe is), and a leader for the University of New Orleans in its time of need. You see, UNO Men’s basketball drives the athletic budget, pitifully small however it is. The Privateers’ home arena was flooded by Katrina and has yet to be repaired over two years later. UNO still plays its home games in what amounts to a high school gym, and will for the foreseeable future.
It is not surprising that Towe would leave under such circumstances. It’s like being the executive chef at Commanders Palace then after the storm being relegated to a short order cook at Waffle House in a FEMA trailer. Such Spartan conditions cost UNO Towe’s replacement, Buzz Williams, who left for an assistant coach position at Marquette after just one season with the Silver & Blue. Williams, too, is a talented coach with nothing but blue skies ahead of him.
The heavy task of coaching the Privateers was given to California assistant and relative youngster Joe Pasternack (right). At least Pasternack gives some emotional gravitas to the situation: he’s a New Orleans native and his parents, flooded out though they were, chose to stay in the New Orleans area. The youthful and energetic Pasternack may just be what UNO needs—passion, enthusiasm, and an upset here or there, to build up the recruiting base and get more people in the seats at the Human Performance Center.
Under then-coach Tim Floyd, UNO was the best basketball team in the state for a good half a decade in the late 80's-early 90's. To get anything near that in the next decade would be a major accomplishment, and just like the city it calls home, the Privateers will be rebuilt under the watchful eyes of one of its own.
The Buzz is not back at the University of New Orleans. It never had a chance to arrive.
UNO men’s head basketball coach Buzz Williams announced his resignation on Friday to become an assistant coach at Marquette University. Williams lasted only one year on the job with a three year contract. Last year, former head coach Monte Towe resigned to become an assistant coach under Sidney Lowe at North Carolina State, where Towe helped lead the Wolfpack to the 1974 NCAA Championship.
Williams would have made $150,000 per year as UNO’s head coach. As reported in the New Orleans Times Picayune, he is set to make $200,000 per year at Marquette. While no one can blame him for leaving for the money, he leaves a UNO basketball program in desperate need of stability in Post-Katrina New Orleans. Buzz was 14-17 last year for the Privateers, and a not-too-shabby 9-9 in the Sun Belt Conference.
Why this is troubling is that UNO was just getting back on its feet after Katrina damaged much of the Nat Kiefer Arena on the Lakefront, UNO’s home for basketball. Laying dormant since the storm, appropriated money had begun to flow, and the Arena was tentatively set to open in the 2008-2009 season. Williams was to be the driving force behind restoring UNO basketball (and the entire athletic department with it) to the prominence of the Tim Floyd days.
It would be harsh to call Williams a carpetbagger for packing his bags after such a short stay, and he may well have experienced frustrations that he thought may have hampered his ability to do his job to the best of his ability. Among those challenges certainly were the lack of a suitable arena and the long time scale to fix it. UNO played last season and will play this season in the Human Performance Center, the equivalent of a college recreational facility or loosely compared to an average high-school gym. Not exactly Division I standards, but after Katrina, much work still needs to be done here in New Orleans.
The bigger picture is that, as we’ve seen here amongst ordinary folks, qualified people, essential-to-the-recovery people, are still leaving New Orleans like torrential rains on a summer afternoon. The loss of doctors, lawyers, accountants, bankers, and Fortune 500 Companies from the area is staggering. To make matters worse, they were trickling out of New Orleans before Katrina. Williams was contributing to the recovery by doing what he loved at a university that needed him. Had he succeeded, Nat Kiefer Arena may well have been the “House that Buzz Rebuilt.” That job will have to go to someone else.
UNO’s slow recovery from Katrina was not unexpected. Long the “red-headed step-child” of the Louisiana State University System--yes, UNO was once LS-UNO and has the same crest as LSU--UNO was not among the priorities of a state university board looking at hundreds of millions of dollars in damages to deal with. Possibly, the UNO administration gave a too-rosy picture of what UNO was going to look like to Williams before he accepted the job.
Here’s to wishing Buzz success at Marquette, certainly much more of a prominent D-I basketball program than UNO. Here’s to hoping as well that UNO can find a replacement in someone who wants to be there, even relishing the opportunity to rebuild a basketball program with some history from scratch.
Though I am a life-long Southerner, ice hockey is my game. I was likely the first hockey-specif ic sportswriter in the state of Louisiana when the ECHL arrived in 1995. I was a freelance hockey sportswriter for local fishwraps between 1995-2000.
Being from New Orleans, I follow the Saints, Hornets and LSU in that order. I have been from Los Angeles to New York City to watch Wayne Gretzky play, and I attended my first hockey game at Maple Leaf Gardens in 1985. The greatest hockey ever played was the 1987 Canada Cup Final between Canada and the USSR.
The visiting University of New Orleans Privateers pulled off a major upset last night, defeating the North Carolina State Wolfpack 65-63 in Raleigh, NC. The event was significant on its own—a lesser UNO team from a lesser conference (the Sun Belt), and on the road at the home of Jimmy Valvano, Norm Sloan, and oh yes, Monte Towe. 
youngster Joe Pasternack (right). At least Pasternack gives some emotional gravitas to the situation: he’s a New Orleans native and his parents, flooded out though they were, chose to stay in the New Orleans area. The youthful and energetic Pasternack may just be what UNO needs—passion, enthusiasm, and an upset here or there, to build up the recruiting base and get more people in the seats at the Human Performance Center.
