TIM ALPERS – AUTHOR OF “MY SPHERE OF INFLUENCE, A LIFE IN BASKETBALL” & FORMER MEN’S BASKETBALL ASSISTANT COACH AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TULSA – EPISODE 903

Website – linkedin.com/in/tim-alpers-a6710430

Email – timalpers1@gmail.com

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Tim Alpers is the author of the book “”My Sphere of Influence, A Life in Basketball” and a former basketball coach at the University of Tulsa.  Alpers grew up on a ranch in the Eastern Sierra region of California.  He played his high school basketball at Bishop High and collegiately at the University of Nevada-Reno.  

Alpers coached at The University of Tulsa under his mentor and friend, Jim King, the former Los Angeles Laker and 10-year NBA veteran. During his tenure at Tulsa, Tim had a chance to coach against Larry Bird and the Indiana State Sycamores.

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Take some notes as you listen to this episode with Tim Alpers, author of the book “My Sphere of Influence, A Life in Basketball” and a former basketball coach at the University of Tulsa.

What We Discuss with Tim Alpers

• The story of the hook shot he made at recess that launched his love for basketball
• “You give a kid a pat on the back and tell him that you believe in him and that he’s good at something.  It’s just amazing how far that will carry someone.”
• Meeting Fred Schaus, the very first coach of the LA Lakers at his his parent’s ranch in California
• Russell vs Chamberlain
• How he met Jim King and was invited to work the Lakers Basketball Camp as a high school junior
• Being a walk-on at Nevada-Reno and the knee injury that ended his career
• “Life throws you some curveballs and it’s how you handle them is the important thing.”
• How working camps for Jim King in Tulsa led to an opportunity as a GA at the University of Tulsa after meeting Ken Hayes, the Head Coach
• The prank he and Clifford Ray pulled on Jerry West
• “It’s what you do as a coach, you set the path with character.”
• “It takes character to win.”
• The great coaches in the Missouri Valley Conference during his time at Tulsa
• His brief stint as a high school coach before returning to Tulsa under Jim King
• Getting the chance to coach against Larry Bird at Indiana State and some great Bird stories
• Learning to calm yourself and keeping things in perspective
• The difficult decision to leave coaching and take over his family’s ranch in the Eastern Sierra region of California

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THANKS, TIM ALPERS

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TRANSCRIPT FOR TIM ALPERS – AUTHOR OF “MY SPHERE OF INFLUENCE, A LIFE IN BASKETBALL” & FORMER MEN’S BASKETBALL ASSISTANT COACH AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TULSA – EPISODE 903

[00:00:00] Mike Klinzing: Hello and welcome to the Hoop Heads Podcast. It’s Mike Klinzing here without my co-host Jason Sunkle tonight, but I am pleased to welcome in Tim Alpers, former coach at Tulsa University, former basketball player at Nevada Reno author of My Sphere of Influence, A Life in Basketball. Tim, welcome to the Hoop Heads Pod

[00:00:21] Tim Alpers: Well, thank you.  And it’s a real pleasure to be on your program, on your podcast this evening. We are excited to have you on

[00:00:30] Mike Klinzing: Tim, looking forward to talking with you about all the different stories and things that have happened to you during your life in basketball and beyond. I did not know all the things about your trout background, which we’ll have to touch on at some point here.

That was quite an interesting story as I did a little bit of research. So that’ll be something new. We’ve never talked fish on the podcast, but we’ll get there. Let’s start by going back in time, Tim, to when you were a kid. Tell me a little bit about some of your first experiences with the game of basketball, how you fell in love with it.

[00:01:02] Tim Alpers: Well I started out liking sports as a little guy in my first and second grade and the thing that really turned me on to basketball was I had an experience at my elementary school in Little Bishop, California. And it’s on the east slope of the Sierras, fairly close to Yosemite National Park, north of Los Angeles.

It’s a ranching town. I was in a ranching family. And in the wintertime we had so much snow up at our ranch in Mammoth Lakes that we had to move the whole operation down to Bishop, which was 3,000 feet lower in elevation. And naturally winter sports became available. So one day when I was a third grader, the school officials came out and put a makeshift basketball hoop right in the middle of the playground.

They had an old truck, steel truck tire and welded a pipe, standpipe, and had a makeshift welded round metal. Hoop at the top, no backboard, just sitting out in the middle of the playground. And the kids would throw the ball up, go through, then it would come out in the bottom, and then bounce off the steel tire and fly all over the playground.

So, I was out there one day just flippin a ball up and around in there, and of course the bell rang. And we had to all line up to go back into the classroom, the third graders. And as the bell rung and everybody was turning to run over to get in line, one of the basketballs bounced over right to my feet.

And as I was Heading off to get in line, I just flipped up this hook shot from about, oh, 10, 12 feet away. The hoop, it was a nine foot hoop. The ball went right through, didn’t touch anything. On a regular basket, it would have been a clean swish. And when that happened, all of my classmates looked at me like, Oh my God, look how good little Timmy Alpers is.

So I had that early recognition and everybody thought I was some kind of a super athlete. And so from that point on, I kind of fell in love with the game of basketball. I didn’t know much about it, but all it took was that one moment as a third grader to kind of get me started and get me hooked into the sport of basketball.

And as I moved forward through the elementary grades, I had some great mentors at the at the higher grades that taught me how to dribble with my left hand, my right hand, the proper footwork, how to shoot free throws correctly. And so I moved along, became very, I was a natural at it. Of course I was doing football, basketball and all the other, or baseball and all the other sports too, but basketball was my real love. And as I worked my way up through the seventh grade, we got into organized basketball at Bishop. We had a great coach, a fellow by the name of Gus Klikas, who was in the coaching hall of fame. He coached 30 years at Bishop High School, the varsity, and has over 600 wins.

And I was blessed enough to be pretty much raised up in basketball with his program that went clear down to the fifth grade. So I got hooked into a program. I had success in it. I got confidence in it. I had the recognition of my peers, all the kids. And it’s really interesting you give a kid a pat on the back and tell him that you believe in him and that he’s good at something.  It’s just amazing how far that will carry someone. And I was one of those.

[00:04:39] Mike Klinzing: What do you take with you from your high school coach? Something that still sticks with you today or that’s gone with you throughout your life? What’s a lesson or maybe multiple lessons that you learned from him?

[00:04:50] Tim Alpers: Well, it’s how to communicate, how to evaluate the talents that your players have.  and I used this all through my business and political career also. How to evaluate the talents of the people you have, and to mold your program to fit the talents you have. Not getting away from your philosophy, or some of your technical X’s and O’s and things like that, but not trying to jam a square peg in a round hole.

Make the peg round so it goes in the round hole. As I was going through this my folks, by way of background, my folks had a cattle ranch and fly fishing resort in the Mammoth Lakes area. And we had a lodge and rental cabins and we used to get a lot of guests would come up. It was a working ranch, but it was also a fishing ranch.

Well the head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, the very first head coach of the L. A. Lakers, Fred Schaus. This is in 1960, let’s see, this would have been 19, summer of 1964. I was a sophomore in high school and Coach Schaus and his family came to the ranch for a vacation and my dad had put a plywood backboard up on an old work shed that we had there on the ranch.

I mean, this shed, the deer hunters would hang deer for field dressing and it was, I mean, it’s full of all kinds of plumbing parts and carpentry parts and all this stuff to keep the resort going. And I was shooting around with a basket one day. It was a dirt court. My dad had cleared the sagebrush out and I was flipping the ball up there and Coach Schaus was staying in a cabin about 100 yards away and He looked out the window and he saw me.

He came out of the cabin. This is the head coach of Los Angeles Lakers. Comes walking over to where I’m shooting around on a dirt court and an old backboard on a workshed. He came over and he put his hand on my shoulder and he said You’ve got what it takes to really be something in this sport.

Because not only was I shooting around, I took his kids fishing, we had a horse riding concession, I did chores, I worked with the guests, I was pretty much a jack of all trades working around that ranch even when I was a youngster. And he recognized that, and then when he saw me shooting baskets out there in the dirt, I will never forget his hand on my shoulder.

And I looked up at him and he looked, we made the eye contact. And when he said that to me, it was a life changing experience right there.

[00:07:22] Mike Klinzing: When I hear you tell that story, Tim, it reminds me of a line of conversation that we’ve had here on the podcast quite often. And it’s something that I think about in my own personal life.

And I’m sure you can attest to this as it relates to that story and probably many others, but you wonder if you go back and you talk to him, whether he remembers that moment or having that conversation. And then a lot of times I’m guessing that he probably had a lot of interactions with different people in that, in his life.

And I think sometimes we forget as adults, as coaches, as teachers, as mentors, that all the words that we use are very, very powerful. And a lot of the things that we say, our players, our students, our underlings. Remember those things that we say that we may not even remember. And I’m sure beyond that particular conversation, you probably have other things in your life that adults, teachers, coaches said to you that you still remember.

Either they inspired you in some way, or they challenged you in some way. And I can go back and think of a bunch of those things in my life. And it’s just interesting. And it always helps me to remember that you have to. Be very intentional about what you say and do as a coach, as a teacher, because even though you may not remember everything that you say, there is some little kid out there that is looking at you or is listening to you and they’re going to take those words to heart.

And in your case, right? It can change a trajectory of a person’s life, even with something that we ourselves, after having said it, may not remember, but that person we said it to. certainly does remember that. I’m sure you can go back and think of more examples of that in your life that somebody said something to you that that still sticks with you to this day.

[00:09:15] Tim Alpers: Well as a result of that, Coach Schaus and his family were staying at the ranch, he went, his family left and we kept his oldest son, John Schaus. And he moved, he spent the summer at the ranch, and he lived with me down in one of the little cabins, and we, he worked all day with the cattle, with the guests, and he stayed there for two and a half months working on the ranch, and we put him on the bus finally because he had to get back down to Southern California and go to school.

But as a follow up to that in 1969, Fred Schaus was the general manager of the Los Angeles Lakers, and that was the year that the Lakers and the Celtics played in the NBA Finals. Jack Kent Cooke owned the team, and it was game seven. At the Forum, Bill Russell and the Mighty Celtics, Jerry West, Elgin Baylor, Wilt, it was Game 7.

The day before, I picked up the telephone, I was a junior up here at UNR in Nevada, and I called down to the Lakers office for Fred Schaus, and they pushed me right through to Fred. I mean, this is a whole you, you’d have a heck of a time doing that today. I got right through to Fred.

I said, Fred, it’s Tim Alpers. And he goes, Hey, Tim, how you doing? I said, well, he says, how’s school up in Reno? I’m doing fine. Listen, is there any chance if I could get down to Southern California from Reno, you could get me a couple of tickets for tomorrow night’s game seven.

He said, sure, Tim, there’ll be at will call you get yourself down here. I got some nice seats for you. It was that easy. So I took a friend, one of my basketball teammates up here for the Wolf Pack, and we got on a plane.  Back in those times, you just walk up to the ticket office and get on a plane.

We flew to LA, got a cab at LAX, went out, we got there five minutes before tip off. And this was the game where they had all the balloons up in the rafters that Jack Kent Cook was going to drop when the Lakers won. And Don Nelson hit that shot, bounced way high in the air and came down through. Up above the backboard, yep, yep.

Yes, I was right behind the backboard and watched that. And I watched Jerry West, they were, the Lakers were down by 19 at the end of the third quarter. Jerry West went for 24 points in the fourth quarter and they almost came back to beat them. The Celtics. And it was the first time that a person, that a player from the losing team won the finals MVP.

It was Jerry West that year. But that’s how close I was to the Schaus family. They were just great friends. Unfortunately, Fred passed away Barbaras passed away, and I’ve kind of lost touch. Although the youngest son, Jim Schaus, is the athletic director at, I believe Ohio University. But anyway, like you say, these people you come in contact with, they can say one sentence and it’s life changing.

Alright, let me ask you this. From a talent perspective, no question, Wilt Chamberlain. From a strategy, a thinking center, a team oriented center, no question, Bill Russell. The record shows 11 championships. It’s always interesting.

[00:12:44] Mike Klinzing: I love that debate and I was born in 1970, so not old enough to be able to have seen those two guys go against each other.

In person and obviously the amount of video that’s available to see is hard to analyze, but I always like to whenever I get an opportunity to talk to somebody who was alive to be able to witness those two guys playing against each other in person. I think it’s always interesting to hear their perspective.

So thank you for sharing that. I appreciate it.

[00:13:15] Tim Alpers: I will tell you I went up on the ranch. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. No, you go well, in the 1967 finals I was sitting in the first row right behind the Warrior’s bench. I had befriended Jim King and I was sitting with his wife, Tanya and Franklin Muley, who was owner of the Warriors.

At that time it was Game seven, San Francisco Warriors with Nate Thurmond, Rick Berry, Jeff Mullins, Jim King, Al Attles, Clyde Lee. Just a great team playing against. Wilt, Luke Jackson, Chet Walker, Hal Greer, Wally Jones, Billy Cunningham. And that team had won 68 games that year, which would have set the NBA record.

And I watched that game seven unfold in front of me. And The 76ers won, but Wilt was just so dominating. It was just unbelievable.  even with great players like Rick Barry and all these flying around, it was just, Wilt was just, he was so athletic and he had such a vertical jump at 7’1 I think he probably could adjust and compete today.

[00:14:25] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, Tim, it’s funny that you say that because what I’ve told people and my experience is not the same as yours. Witnessing it firsthand, but just hearing stories, watching the video. I always say that obviously the athletes today are far better just across the board in general than athletes 40 years ago.

[00:14:49] Tim Alpers: Correct. Correct.

[00:14:51] Mike Klinzing: I always say that if you could take any player from, let’s say that era, the sixties and seventies. And again, if you took any of those players and you gave them all the modern training and nutrition and travel advantages and all the things, those guys who were great players in the sixties and seventies would be great players today, but they wouldn’t be great players if you just took 19, whatever, 65 Sam Jones and just took him and.plopped him in the NBA today. It would be quite a challenge.

[00:15:21] Tim Alpers: You take people like Wilt and Jerry West and Elgin Baylor, then those people would elevate.

[00:15:28] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, I feel like you could take Wilt, you could take 1962 Wilt and put him in the NBA today. Just the exact same guy with no, no difference in his nutrition, his weight training, his anything.

Just drop that guy in a game in the NBA today and he would fit in and he would be, he would be incredible just as he was back then. And then it’s hard to imagine what he would be if you did give him all the modern advantages that players have today. He just was an incredible athlete.

[00:16:01] Tim Alpers: He started the beach volleyball league down in Southern California.

He was a phenomenal athlete. He was a hurdler and a sprinter at Kansas. His game, if he came to the NBA today, just like you said, parachuted in, he’d be a lot like Jokic of the Denver Nuggets. His numbers would be that high. Cause he led the NBA in assists one year. Obviously, his scoring is absolutely incredible.

He had every shot. He, of course, he never had to learn how to shoot the three but he didn’t have to. And his timing and his strength, oh my gosh some of the stories about him letting players dunk on him because he was afraid he was going to break their arm or their wrist if he followed through with a blocked shot.

Wilt was a very kind man. I don’t know whether you knew or not, but he and Bill Russell, they were competitors, but they were great friends. In fact, every year the Lake, the 76ers and the Celtics had a game either on or before Thanksgiving. And it was always down in Philadelphia. And when Bill Russell would come down, he would stay in Wilt’s house the night before, because Wilt’s mother loved Bill.

She’d feed him, they’ve had all these dinners together, and the only bed big enough in Philadelphia to handle Bill Russell was Wilt’s bed in his bedroom, and he used to come in and take naps there before the game. It’s really quite a fascinating story how those, the dynamic between those two.

[00:17:28] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you hear stories that Russell was trying to befriend Wilt to kind of get him to soften up and then to be able to tear his heart out on the court and be able to be able to beat him because Russell was such, as you said, such a great competitor and such a great winner. And it’s just interesting how, again, As great as those two guys were, and then you look at the circumstances and the teams that they each played on and their teammates, and obviously you can’t go back and replay it, but it just is interesting to consider how great those two guys were.

And again, in the era that they played, how important the center position was compared to. where we are today with the center position. And you wonder if you played out their careers 10 times or 20 times and how it would all play out and what it would end up being. But it’s definitely an interesting dynamic between those two guys without question.

[00:18:22] Tim Alpers:  There was a key point when I was kind of hanging in the balance on basketball and I had quite a how I got hooked up with the NBA was really, it started in high school and at the end of my junior year, we had a great year Coach Kalikas, we went to the CIF playoffs and  just had a great year.

So every year we had a big basketball banquet and in my junior year, this was in spring of 1964, my mother was assigned to get the guest speaker for the basketball banquet, which was a big event. They had it in the gym and they’d have two or three hundred people, everybody in the community would show up for the awards banquet. Well, so my mom, having run the resort up there, was pretty used to dealing with a lot of people and some celebrity types and this and that that would come up there.

She got on the phone and she called the Lakers office. And she asked me, well, who’s the general manager? And I said, Lumos. He came with the team out from Minneapolis. So she calls down there straight, asked for Lumos. The secretary puts her through. My mom’s introduces herself. I’m calling from Bishop, California, and I’m in charge of getting a guest speaker for our athletic banquet.

And I would like to get either Jerry West or Elgin Baylor. And so Lumos says, well, Ms. Alpers, I appreciate you calling. We’d like to accommodate you as best we could, but. Jerry and Elgin are just not available to come up to Bishop to speak at a banquet. And so, my mom looked at me, put her hand on the phone, said, who else?

I said, well try Rudy LaRusso. And she goes, well, how about Rudy LaRusso? Well, Rudy, after the season is over, he leaves and goes back east to where his family is. And so finally moose told my mom, he said, I have got one player. that would be available to do this. He’s a rookie, but I’m sure he’d like to come up to Bishop and speak at your banquet, because he’s kind of a country bumpkin himself, and that is Jim King from the University of Tulsa a rookie.

And so, my mom put her hand on the phone and she said, how about Jimmy King? And just by coincidence, the week or two weeks before that, I had gone down to the sports arena and watched the Lakers and the Celtics in the last regular season game. And Jim went for 25 points and the Lakers beat the Celtics.

And I was so impressed with him. I just, he was amazing. So, when she looked over and said, How about Jim King? I was nodding my head. I said, gosh, yes. And so that was a trigger point for my basketball playing and coaching career right there. Cause Jim and his wife Tanya made the drive up and they spoke at the banquet, did a fantastic, got a longstanding ovation at the end of the banquet.

Took time to meet all the players, came out to our home afterwards for a reception, and then the next day, my parents took Jim and Tanya on a tour of Mammoth Lakes, the ski area, and up to our ranch, and gave them a tour of the eastern, central eastern Sierra there. And so, when Jim and Tanya were leaving to drive back down to Southern California, Jim said, I want you to come down this summer and be a counselor at the Lakers basketball camp.

And I mean, there’s only a junior in high school. I still was a player. I wasn’t a graduate. And I said, well, listen, I’m a junior. He says, I don’t care. He says, I want you to be a counselor. and a participant. So that kind of kicked it off. I stayed with Jim and Tonya at their own home, went to the clinic every day.

I worked with Jerry West, Elgin Baylor, Rudy LaRusso, Walt Hazard, Gail Goodrich, all the people that were around the Lakers at that time. I was one of the counselors. I got to know them very well and I got to play against a lot of the best players in Southern California that were at the camp.  And that was a real launching pad for my for my basketball career.

[00:22:33] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, sure. When you started, my next question was actually going to be how, living where you did, how did you find the competition and how did you go about as a high school player improving your game? And obviously you answered a part of that question, but as you think about Going through your high school career, these are some things, your connection to the Lakers and getting this opportunity to go down and work camp through Jim, who, if anybody out there in our audience, if you haven’t listened to Jim King’s episode, great episode, Jim was a fantastic guest, had a lot of great stories to tell.

And so again, the connection between Tim here and, and Jim, you can see is pretty strong. So I highly recommend go back and listen to that episode, but I think Trying to go and just become a better player. How’d you do that? What was that process like for you as a high school player?

[00:23:25] Tim Alpers: I’m so glad you asked that because I got to tell you, it was a real eye opener.

 I was a big fish in a small pond up there in the small town.  we never lost a game in two seasons up there so I get down to playing against a good 3A and 4A players in Southern California. And man, I knew I had some work to do. Well, so after the summer camp was over, Jim and another coach, coaching friend of his, Jim Killingsworth, who went on and had a very successful high or college coaching career.

He was the head coach at Cerritos Junior College. At the time, in the mid sixties, Cerritos was a basketball power. They had won the state JUCO championship, they were a powerful program, and Jim Killingsworth was the reason why. And Jim King had met him because Jim was on the staff at the University of Tulsa, so they kept their friendship going.

Jim Killingsworth was a heck of a fisherman, trout fisherman. So about two weeks after the summer basketball camp Jim King and Coach Killingsworth Come up to the ranch to go fishing and they stayed a week. Okay, during that week I talked to Jim both Jim’s and I said look I’d love to be a college basketball player.  How do I improve myself?

What can I do? so Jim Killingsworth, while he was out fishing, Jim King took the time with me. We set up a little training gym at one end of the fishing lodge there, and he got me on the jump rope, he got me on bench jump, he got me on a lunging drill testing my vertical. I’d jump up in the old log cabin there, log lodge, and touch one of the roof purlins.

It was a log up there, and he’d measure my vertical. And I worked with him every day. We didn’t even touch a basketball. All we did was physical development. He said you got to be able to move your feet to move lateral so you can play defense. You got to have some higher vertical jumps so when you go to the basket at your height at 6’1 you got to be able to go in against the 6’6 6’8 and be able to get something off the glass to score.

You need a vertical, you need strength in your hips, you need this. All the things that he did when he was coming through the University of Tulsa and when he trained off season with the Lakers, he instilled in me there at the ranch, and I gotta tell ya, I was pinching myself all the time, like, thinking, oh my god, here, I’m working one on one with an NBA pro here.

And I’d go down there in the summertime, and stay with he and Tonya on other occasions, and we’d go over to Long Beach City College and work out against their players and Jim would critique me and this and that, and so, by the time I went into my senior year, and all of a sudden, I was like twice as good.

It’s my junior year and I credit all that to early physical development there working on the ranch with Jim King.

[00:26:25] Mike Klinzing: Tell me a little about the recruitment side of it. When you said, Hey, I got a goal now. I want to be a college basketball player. How do you end up at Nevada Reno? What is the process for getting there?

[00:26:33] Tim Alpers: Okay. Well Coach Killingsworth, who came up with Jim, who I mentioned earlier, he invited me down for a visit. He wanted me at Cerritos. He says, Tim, I think we can continue your development, but I got to tell you being raised up in the mountains, I just wasn’t excited about being down in Los Angeles.

It was smoggy. It was traffic y. It was crowded. I just was not comfortable down there. I was a country bumpkin, okay? And my dad played freshman football at the University of Nevada. He ran back punts and kickoffs in 1929, okay? And I had a bunch of relatives that had gone to school up there. So I went up and visited the campus, met the head coach.

And it was, Nevada was in the far Western Comforts Inn. They were division two. It was very small. They didn’t have very many scholarships. And when I went up for my visit in January of 1966, and back then freshmen were not eligible for varsity. So we had a separate freshmen team and the freshman coach, who was a grad assistant for Jack Spencer, who was a varsity coach up there, they had already given the three freshmen scholarships away to one player from Illinois, Alex Boyd, who ended up getting drafted by the Portland Trailblazers.

And then two local stars, one from Virginia City, Raleigh Hess, and one from Fernley, Dexter Wright. These were really, really good players, but coach Spencer said, I want you to come up here and walk on, I really want to encourage you to do that. So.  I said, by golly, I’m just going to go up there and I’m going to walk on.

And I chose that route, but what was really interesting was. At Bishop High School, in my senior year, the five starting, this is the only time it’s ever happened at that little school, all five starters went off and played college ball. Two went to junior college, two of us went to up to Nevada, and our 6’6 center got recruited at Oregon State.

And so, anyway, I went to Nevada, I tried out, I made the freshman team, we had a fabulous freshman team we went 19-1, and we defeated the varsity in an inter squad game, which was, we beat them by one point, we played an inter squad game out at one of the local high schools here in Reno, and I was the first sub coming off the bench I’d worked my way up, and my folks were able to come up and see me play a few times, and my first year was just a dream come true.

Everything was clicking. I would, in the summer after that, I went down to I got asked to be a camp counselor for the Golden, well, San Francisco Warriors then. So I worked with Jim King and some of the others down there at Sequoia High School, the camp down there. My sophomore year Nevada had recruited a lot of really good players.

They were starting to build the program and being, I was six one and getting in against the six, five to six eights was a little tough and But I was holding my own, but one night in practice, it was a week before we were supposed to go to Hawaii for the Aloha Classic. I was going down the lane on a drive, and a 6’8 kid switched over on me to block my shot.

I twisted in the air a little bit, came down, my shoe stuck to the floor, and I blew my knee out. And that Pretty much ended it right there. I passed out, the assistant coach, Frank Bruno took me down to the hospital here in Reno and I had to have my knee completely rebuilt. So that ended my playing career.

And that was, that was tough to deal with, but you just move on. You just take the challenges that life presents to you and say, okay, that option’s done. I’ve got to heal up from that mentally because I had built my whole ego around being a college basketball player and things were fairly much on track.

Yeah. But all of a sudden, I found myself with a cast from my hip to my toe for six months, and so I had to go another direction, although I was still, was really interested in coaching because I’d worked at all these summer camps all over the place, and I worked at summer camps from Tulsa, Oklahoma to LA to the Bay Area, and so I knew coaching was probably still going to be in there, but  you just have to Life throws you some curveballs and it’s how you handle them is the important thing.

And I’ve always tried to pass that on to my players and people who work for me in business and employees when I was with on the County Board of Supervisors. And that was that was a tough time, but you just, you just make it through. You just go another direction.

[00:31:22] Mike Klinzing: So on the coaching front, while you were playing and you’re going and working all these camps and you’re getting involved in it that way.

What was it that you liked about coaching and was that something that you were seriously thinking about as a profession or was it something that really didn’t come into view as a potential career until your injury and you had to kind of give up your playing career?

[00:31:43] Tim Alpers: Well, you know I always had a little bit of a knack for player evaluation and kind of a love of player development.

That summer I worked at the ranch with Jim King working on my physical skills. I kind of got hooked in with player development and I enjoyed working with people, with kids at camp and I still do to this day. I’ve got a little neighbor girl that’s a mini version of Caitlin Clark. She’s amazing. And I started her in the driveway.

But anyway, working at the camps of fellowship, working with these NBA pros  and these college coaches, they were so inspirational to me. And I just loved the sport of basketball, the strategy, the dynamic plays, I just fell in love with the sport, whether I was playing it or not.

And one of the main. things that got me going was when Jim King was at the height of his career in 1969 he made, he was the starting guard in the Western Conference All Stars with Jerry West and he was having a great year, was on top of his career with the Warriors and was making a darn good salary and he bought some property outside of Tulsa and built a beautiful home.

And of course, he invited me to come back and help him manage it and run the thing. And so I was spending 11, 12 weeks for two or three summers in a row working that camp back in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And I was meeting everybody. These college coaches were coming in. Dick Motta, who was coaching the Bulls at the time.

Jim was playing for the Bulls at that time. All his teammates came in. I worked with Jerry West for a week back there. Nate Thurmond, Clifford Ray. I mean, it just went on and on and, and staying with them in the dorm at night and all the lights turned off listening to these guys tell stories and laughing and finding out that they’re just regular people, just like everybody else and what.

In the summer of, let’s see, this was the summer of 72. I had been working at that camp out there in Tulsa for 10 weeks, and the last week, which was the middle of August, it’s 1972, one of the counselors was Ken Hayes, who was the head basketball coach at University of Tulsa. He worked the last week. He and I just hit it off.

I mean, we just became instant friends, playing jokes on the campers. We just had a great, great time out there. And the day before the camp was going to end that summer, Coach Hayes comes up to me and he says, Tim, what would you think about coming back to Tulsa, Oklahoma and being a grad assistant, coaching the freshman team and being part of our program at the University of Tulsa in the Missouri Valley Conference?

And I just, I was just speechless. And I said, of course. And so that started my coaching career there. I left the camp, drove back out to California, in my pickup truck, picked up everything, what I had, told my folks what was coming down. They were in total shock and so proud. Turned around, drove back out to Tulsa, and had my first year.

My very first years in the coaching profession was coaching the freshman and assistant on the varsity for the 72-73 University of Tulsa Golden Hurricane. So my career was taking off like a rocket ship. And I will tell you, for any of the listeners out there, you don’t get many chances in life to really get some advancement and I don’t know that I was totally prepared for it, but I tell you, I knew I could grow into the job and grow into the situation. You grab on to that rocket ship and you hang on for dear life and take it as far as it’ll take you. Because opportunities don’t come around in life very often.

And so that was the first springboard for me. And the thing that really triggered Coach Hayes Asking me to come back was that when Jerry West was back there, and one of the finest things that ever happened in my life is to be able to work with him he could teach shooting. He was the premier lecturer and instructor on shooting fundamentals at that time.

He was in high demand all over the world, basically, to teach shooting, because he was on top of the NBA as far as his shooting skills, and the reason he came back and worked at Jim’s camp was because they were teammates. And I had a chance to when you get out there working in the middle of nowhere and working with kids and you’re at a camp and you’re isolated, there’s no phones and you get to know people.

And I’d be I got to know Jerry really well and I learned. And then when he would do the teaching of shooting. I would take that and take it to my group of campers and we’d go all through the shooting mechanics and we’d drill and develop them and had the shooting drills to go with it.

And Coach Hayes was watching me work with those kids and he said, my God he told Coach King, I got to have that Tim Alpers. I got to have him back here working with my players. And it was just a natural thing for me. I just gravitated to it. And so, but I got to slip in one. story about Jerry West.

This is just such a classic, if you don’t mind. Oh, go for it. We were having, every night after camp would break, we’d go into the cafeteria and have dinner, okay? And so, one week at the camp, this last week at the camp, we had, it just so happened that everybody’s calendars meshed, because Jim would invite a lot of his peers to come speak and work out at the camp.

We had this one week where we had Jerry West, Jerry Sloan, Jeff Mullins Nate Thurmond, Clifford Ray, Jimmy King Norm Van Leer, Dick Mata, and we had a couple of players from Kansas State college guys that were coun camp counselors with me. And we had these full court scrimmages every night. With all of those players, and it was just, the word was getting out, and people would come in from all these little rural towns.

There was three or four hundred people packed in. The cars would be parked out in the blackjack oaks and out in the grass. And people would walk across the pastures to get, to watch these closed scrimmages at the camp. Well, one night After we finished, we went in and had a late dinner in the dorm.

They’re showing movies to the kids, and Jerry and the rest of the guys are sitting in there. Jim calls me and Clifford Ray off to the side, and he said, Hey guys, listen, we’re going to pull a prank on Jerry tonight. I said, Oh my God, and he said, Tomorrow morning, we’re going to do it tomorrow night. Tomorrow morning, Clifford, I want you and Tim to go into Tulsa, go to a toy store, get a fake snake.

As realistic as you can find, because Jerry hates snakes. He goes out of his mind with snakes. And because Jim used to go pheasant hunting with Jerry up in the off season, okay? So he camped with him and pretty much knew what his, his personal delights and personal fears were. So anyway, so the next morning Clifford and I, we get in Clifford’s car, we go into town, we go to a toy store.

Here I am with Clifford. We’re picking out all these snakes. We bring it, bring them back in. Jim picks out the snake we’re going to use, okay? So during the course of that day, Jim goes around to Nate, Jerry Sloan, Jeff Mullins Van Leer, Mata, and gives them a heads up on what we’re going to do.

So that night, everybody’s in the cafeteria watching films, and Clifford and I and Jim sneak out. We go into Jerry West’s room at the dorm. He had a separate room. We put the snake under the pillow. Okay? So, the film time is over and it’s time for the kids to hit, so we’re breaking up after the dinner and program in the main lodge at King’s Camp.

And Jim goes around and nods his head to all these guys. Pretty soon, all these great superstars, they get up, they go out, and they go hiding in the bushes outside of Jerry West’s suite there, myself included. And so Jim goes back in the dorm and says, Oh Jerry, that was a great day and it’s probably time to turn in because we’ve got another big day tomorrow and I really appreciate you being here at camp and thank you so much.

So we’re all hiding out, I’m hiding out in the bushes with Nate Thurman. Jerry Sloan, Jeff Ma, all these NBA all stars, and we’re hiding, and they’re all trying to hold their laughter in. Jerry comes around the corner and goes into his room. Jim hot foots it out into the bushes we’re all hiding, okay? And we sit and wait.

In about five minutes, we hear this scream coming out of the dorm. The door flies open, Jerry comes out, and he says, What the hell is going on? Here, he’s got this rubber snake in his hands, I’m going to kill you guys, and running out through the blackjack oaks, running and laughing to get away are all these stars, and they circle, finally circle around and go back to their room.

Jerry comes in the next morning, he was so steamed, but then he broke down and started laughing like crazy at breakfast, and he says, you guys got me. That was probably the most Fun. And the most interpersonal relation, off season interrelation that you’ll see any group of pro athletes, especially none of them are on the same team.

They all played for different teams and against each other. And it was just the best time of a group of high quality men that appreciated and respected each other. And all of their respect for Jerry West was just off the charts. I mean, they just, those players had so much admiration for him, it was really special instead of very high character example for me to follow.

And it’s what you do as coaches, you set the path with character. And I asked Jerry at that camp, I said, Jerry, what does it take to win? He says, it takes character to win. That was his statement. And I never forgot that, but anyway, I thought you’d like that story.

[00:42:33] Mike Klinzing: I love that story. It takes character to win. That’s a lot of fun. Those, I got to say that when I was in college, I worked some camps too. And just hearing you talk about that, I think back to, I remember the first time I worked at Ohio State’s basketball camp, and I was maybe 19 years old. And at that point, I had gone to Ohio State’s basketball camp when I was in.

And I don’t know if I’ve probably not when I was in high school, probably when I was in junior high. And of course, when you’re there, you, you imagine like, okay, it’s I go to bed and all the coaches go to bed. And you realize once you become a coach that those coaches, they’re not going to bed.

And I remember the last night of camp at Ohio state, they’d have this big like pizza and beer gathering and everybody who was new to the camp had to tell some kind of a joke. So you had to stand up and tell your joke. And so all the new people would get up and tell their joke. And then the guys who wouldn’t be going there for like 20 or 30 years would stand up and then they do their joke.

And just, you always remember those times of like just how connected people became in that short amount of time. And from your perspective there, obviously it’s a bunch of pro guys and whatever. And again, I think any camp that you go to overnight in that type of atmosphere, you always have guys getting together and sharing stories.

And basketball just has a way of, as you well know, bringing people together. It doesn’t happen in a lot of other places, basketball coaches and people kind of connect and come together. What did you like that first year at Tulsa? What was your favorite part of coaching? What did you, what did you take to right away?

[00:44:09] Tim Alpers: Oh, it’s interesting. I was just thinking that what a segue into the next one. My God, when I showed up at Tulsa and I looked at the schedule. And I looked at who we played. In those years, the 60s and 70s, the Missouri Valley Conference was right up there with the SEC, with the Big Ten and the ACC. We put a team in the Final Four, seems like every year.

And the coaches that we were scheduled, I mean, we’re talking Eddie Sutton, we’re talking Lou Henson, Denny Crum, Gene Bartow, Abe Lemons, Bob King. Louis Karnazeka, Lew Dolson, Paul Lambert. Oh, and what a story, Paul Lambert. He got the Auburn job and died in a motel fire before he could coach the team.

Jerry Tarkanian. I mean, it was just, we played everybody. And the coaches, the coaching, it was obviously a there was not the March Madness and the 68 teams in the tournament.  there, at that time, there’s only 24 teams that made the tournament, but the competitive coaching, there was no three point shot.

It was physical, but the coaches were just so amazing. And the assignments that I had right out of the gate and Ken Hayes, he was one of the very few coaches in the United States to be in the Hall of Fame and do two different colleges. He’s in the Hall of Fame, the Athletic Hall of Fame, the University of Tulsa, and the Athletic Hall of Fame of New Mexico State.

He took both those programs to the NCAA.  But anyway, he gave me a tremendous amount of responsibility. I come in, I was living in the dorm with the players as a grad assistant, and he called me and said, Tim, I want you to manage the preseason conditioning program. I want you to manage the shooting program. And also, you are going to be coaching the Frosh, the freshman team, and you’re going to be taking them on the road, and you’re going to be, and I mean, we had great players.

These were all top line recruited players, but at that time, they were not eligible to play varsity and then that rule changed about halfway through the season. It was just crazy, as you can imagine. But I had floor assignments, and one of the things that I take the greatest pride in is we had a player at Tulsa by the name of Willie Biles.

He was a great high school star in Memphis, and he came over at the University of Tulsa and had a so so sophomore year, but he had all kinds of potential, and Coach Hayes assigned basically for me to work with Willie on shooting. And I was just like, just pinching myself going, holy Toledo, I’m in over my head, but I don’t care.

I got to take full advantage of this. I’m going to do whatever it takes. And so I would work, I worked with Willie on a shooting, holding the broom up in front of the rim, working on his arch. I don’t know, arch on his shot, covering him with a badminton racket so we could work on his fadeaway and get it, I mean, we worked and worked and worked and he ended up being the, he led the nation in scoring for the major team Conferences. He was third. There was Fly Williams and I can’t remember name. There’s one from Austin Peay and one from Cal State LA that was a low, low major that averaged more, but Willie averaged 30 a game. And I just took great pride inbeing part of the team that worked with him, his shot doc.

But I think the, the one time where. The greatest assignment I had was Coach Hayes called me in his office one day and he says, Tim, I’ve got a game scheduled for our freshman team. We’re going to play the University of Arkansas freshman. I want you to take the team. We got two vans. You’re going to do, you can take the other grad assistant.

I want you to coach the team. We’re going to go play Arkansas’s freshmen. This is what you do. Here’s the keys. When you get back, give me a call. In other words, he just turned the whole thing over to me. And so we loaded up and headed towards Fayetteville from Tulsa. It was a 90 mile drive. I was driving the lead van doing it all.

And we show up at the campus and Barnhill field house. It was a, literally a barn. It was where they had all the ag shows and the auctions for farm animals and rodeos. And as I was pulling up to it in that van, I thought of my coach at Nevada, Frank Bruno. He was our freshman coach, and we drove around to Chico State, Sac State, UC Davis, Hayward State, all these schools that were in the Far Western Conference, small schools back then, and I used to ride with him up front.

And as I was pulling up with all these great recruited players in the vans. I said, my God, I wonder what Coach Bruno would think of me right now. Anyway, we went in, the smell of cow manure was just rampant in there. They had the basketball court set right on the dirt and they rolled out carpets so we didn’t have to cross the dirt and the manure to get onto the court.

We went out and we beat the Arkansas Frosh that day, got on the buses, got home about two in the morning. And that was one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had in coaching was going over there and doing that.

[00:49:33] Mike Klinzing: As you got into it more and you start to look around and see, Hey, this is what the coaching lifestyle is all about.

And obviously you enjoyed connecting with your players and getting involved in it. How did you start to think about it in terms of a profession in terms of a career. Where was your mindset after that first year about, Hey, is this something that I think I can do for the rest of my life?  Or what were you thinking at that point?

[00:50:02] Tim Alpers: You’re sequencing on the questions. I’m impressed because we’re all on the same page. Well, as you can imagine, I got totally hooked. We had a fabulous year. We were picked seven out of nine, the Missouri Valley and in late February. We were 10 and Memphis State, who went on that year to play UCLA for the National Championship, the game where Bill Walton went 21 for 22 from the field.

Memphis was our conference champion, they came in at the end of February, they were 11-0, we were 10-1. And this was for all the marbles in the Missouri Valley. And we lost in two overtimes. But we were beating all these great teams, and our kids were getting better and better, and I was learning.

We had an assistant coach, John Rendick, who was came up from Mayo High School, where he was 247 wins and 33 losses in his career at Louisville, Mayo. He was on the staff, so my learning curve was just off the charts. And I knew I could do this. And I knew I could really help some young people because I was really learning this player development thing. So at the end of the season, We ended up losing an overtime game to Louisville, which knocked us into third place in the valley. And the NCAA took Memphis State and the NIT took Louisville and they didn’t have any other tournaments then.

So our season was over, but Coach Hayes called me in the office and he said, look, he said, Tim, I’d love to hire as a full time assistant. This was your first year. You’re young. I would like very much for you to get at least one year of high school experience head coaching. And then on your resume and then I’d like to hire you back here at, at Tulsa.

And so I almost took a job in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but I went back to my old school Bishop High School and you got to do your apprenticeship. I had JV basketball, I had JV football, I was assistant on the varsity. I was teaching all these classes just doing everything other than driving the school bus.

And so we had great athletic success there. Then the very next year, they built a brand new high school in Mammoth Lakes, California. And I applied out of, there was over 600 applications for 29 jobs. And I got hired as the head basketball coach there. And I was only there for five months, and Jim King had retired from the NBA, was coaching the athletes in action, and University of Tulsa fired Ken Hayes, and he moved off and took the New Mexico State job.

So they hired Jim King, and a week after they hired him, my phone rang, and Jim called my apartment in Mammoth, where Pam and I were living, and said, you want to come back to Tulsa and be my assistant coach. And I said, coach, I’m ready. And so off we went back in June of 1975 and got on the staff full time.

And my God, what an experience. And the thing that probably summed up my next four years at the University of Tulsa, I can put it in two words, Larry Bird. We play against him. I will tell you, part of the reason I wrote that book was because of him, my assignment.

I remember the only reason we got hooked up to play Bird was because, they got invited to join the Missouri Valley Conference. In 1975, all the athletic faculty reps, athletic directors, and university presidents, in their wisdom, because the Missouri Valley was having so much success in basketball, they decided, well, we’re going to build our football programs to the same thing.

So they went around to all the member schools. And they said it’s mandatory that you build a 40,000 seat stadium and increase your budget for football. Well, within days after that, Louisville, Memphis, Cincinnati, and the St. Louis Billikens dropped out of the Missouri Valley and formed the Metro Conference.

And The leadership of the Missouri Valley, the commissioner, they were backpedaling so fast they couldn’t get the schools back, so they went out and got Southern Illinois, Indiana State, and Creighton to come into the Missouri Valley to fill that void, and All of us were going, well, why are you taking Indiana State?

They’re a Division II, for God’s sakes. And he said, well, they’ve got this kid named Larry Bird, who’s supposed to be a great player, and it’ll help our marketing and this and that. And so, at that time, all of us, all the head coaches, the assistants, and when you’re at that level, you make friends with a lot of the other coaches.

The buzz around was that, oh, this, this 6’9 kid from a Division II school, he can’t come into the All mighty Missouri Valley and be that successful, just not going to happen so we didn’t pay much attention to it. And so in August of 19, let’s see, this would have been 77, Coach King comes to my office with a big stack of film canisters, metal canisters.

We didn’t have, we had game films back then and he plopped them all down on my desk and he said, I want you to figure out a defense to stop this so called great player, Larry Bird. So I went through all the films and I went through the whole thing. And so he comes in for the first time to Tulsa. And after the first five minutes of the game, I hit coach King with my elbow in his ribs.

I said, this guy’s going to be in the hall of fame someday. He was just. He couldn’t run, he couldn’t jump, but he had the strongest ankles and wrists that I’ve ever seen. He could change direction on a dime with nine cents change and he could hold the ball over his head and flip it from 30 feet and it was just, he was just deadly and shot, he shot a lot like the big center Jokic for the Nuggets, high shot.

But anyway he was just so good. And we went up there, then the next season they came in, next season they came in his senior year, they were 33-0, and they came in and Red Aurbach and Tommy Heinsohn were at the game cause they were going to draft him, okay? And so I remember before the game during warm ups Tommy Heinsohn comes out and sits next to me on the bench.

And he said, Coach he had that heavy Boston accent, Coach. And I said, yeah, to Mr. Heintsohn, tell me about the Bird kid. How’s the bird kid on the boards? I said, well, Mr. Heinsohn, I think we’re both going to find out tonight. We’re both going to find out. It was a fabulous game, the trash talking was out of control, we ended up losing right at the end.

Anyway, never could beat him in four tries. But I learned more about how to play the game, how players should comport themselves, hustle. He was amazing. He was by far the best player we ever played against, and I tell you, we played against some great ones. We played against a ton of All Americans, but he was just, I gotta tell you, he’s one of the greatest basketball players to ever lace it up.

And, and, I will tell you, a lot of people ask me when I have speaking engagements and these things they, they ask me about Bird and all these players and how he would play today. And I just say, I said, look, if I needed a three point shot, I’d go with Steph Curry. If I needed a guaranteed basket, I’d get a sky hook from Kareem Abdul Jabbar.

If I had to win a championship, give me Michael Jordan or Bill Russell. If I needed a star player with longevity, who never got hurt and could play for 20 years, I’d get LeBron James. But if my life, if my life depended on winning one game, my life depended on winning one game, give me Larry Bird. It’s just Amazing, amazing ball player.

Anyway well I’m kind of speechless and the last time we played them, they were, like you say, they’re undefeated and they came in and we played them pretty darn tough. And our players were really dejected after the game. So I stayed in the locker room and all the kids left and went out and this and that.

So after about an hour, at the end of the game, I have the last. Steve McDowell, he was a prize freshman that we had, and I said, Steve, I’ll give you a ride up to the dorm. So we’re walking out of the locker room and I look out on the court and I knew that there was a hockey game. The Tulsa Ice Orders were going the next day so I knew they had to tear the court down and flood it with ice and freeze it.

But I hear a basketball bouncing out there. And so we start, I said, Steve, come with me. So I walk out there and here half the court is still up. The scoreboard has been lowered down to the floor. All the people are cleaning the place up. And here on this half court, in his sweats, working on his Mikan drills, little figure eights, here’s Larry Bird out there an hour after the game.

And so I walked out, I walked out there and I said, Larry, congratulations on a great game and a great season. I didn’t know what else to say and he looked at me and said, well, you almost got us tonight, coach. Almost, you know. But  he was really, really something else.  I’ll tell you.

[01:00:06] Mike Klinzing: Getting an opportunity to see greatness like that firsthand. I mean, you really do appreciate what it takes and how special guys like that are and can be. And I know that one of the things that Whenever I have somebody who’s coached in the NBA or worked in the NBA, I always try to ask the question of like, what sets those guys apart?

Because obviously once you get to that level in the NBA, everybody’s super talented, everybody’s super athletic, and how do guys raise themselves up that next level? And inevitably you hear things like competitiveness and attention to detail and I think the very best of the best, obviously, which Byrd would be included in that.

They just have all those characteristics that allows them to ascend over their peers, even when you’re talking about the best 350 players in the world when you talk about the NBA. And I think for you to be able to see that firsthand, undoubtedly was incredibly special.

[01:01:08] Tim Alpers: I remember sitting on the bench and I had my assignments and the crowd noise was so intense that I had flashcards.

For signals on how to change defenses. Okay. We had a very complicated system set up. And because we had a week to get ready for him for that last that last championship game. And of course, Bird figured it out pretty quick. We messed up his teammates, but he figured it out pretty quick. But I remember sitting on the bench.

It was the whole game slowed down. It was so loud. We had a sellout. The security was ringed around the court. It was so loud that you couldn’t hear yourself think. And I remember sitting there and I had all my assignments and everything, but there was times where I just froze. And Reggie Miller talks about this, too, when he was playing for Bird.

You just, in the presence of such greatness, it’s historical, the level of greatness, and all of a sudden, you just stop. And you just, for like, 30 seconds, you just watch, and then all of a sudden you have to slap yourself in the face to get yourself, Hey, I got a job, I’m hired, I’m on payroll here, I gotta keep doing my job here.

But when you’re in the presence of greatness like that, it’s sometimes it just stuns you.

[01:02:32] Mike Klinzing: There’s no doubt. I mean, you see that guys at that level, again, they just have something that other players don’t have. And you constantly are amazed by how good the players are at that level.

And then when you talk about Bird, you’re taking it to a whole nother level.

[01:02:53] Tim Alpers: I remember before that game and for the listeners out there getting into coaching, you have to, There’s so much responsibility to be a head coach. You got to have eight irons in the fire at one time.

And you have to be able to calm yourself and simplify things. And so I was so nervous for that game. And I was so superstitious. I had a certain way I’d drive to the arena every night and I remember I kept telling myself I got to calm myself. I’ve got to do my job, this is the biggest game, everybody is here, all the national media is here, it’s the biggest game in the history of University of Tulsa basketball, everybody’s here, there’s people waiting outside, I remember it was so hyped up before, the people were just showing up two to three hours early.

And I remember I would come usually an hour and a half before to two hours before the game to get ready. I remember I drove in my parking spot was under the Tulsa Assembly Center where we play, the parking was underneath. And I remember I drove in, I parked in my parking spot, and I got out, grabbed my briefcase and everything, my stuff, and I started walking towards the elevator.

And I heard this dull, deafening roar coming from, and this was two hours before the game, and I could hear this roaring upstairs, and the stadium was already full because they wanted to watch Indiana State and our kids do their pregame shooting and their warmup stuff. And it was such a big event in the city of Tulsa that they just opened it up, and I remember I stood there at the elevator and I was listening to this roar.

And for some reason, my mind just danced back 2,000 years to the Roman Empire. I’m a history nut too and thinking about what those people, gladiators thought when they were standing in front of the elevator about to be raised up onto the floor of the Colosseum with these roaring, blood curdling, roaring people in there.

And it was just that experience. It was, I stood down there, I got goosebumps up my back, on my neck, I’m going, Oh my God! This is like going into the Roman Coliseum! And I went up the elevator, it opened up, looking out onto the arena floor, and there was Indiana State still in their sweats doing shoot around and stretching and all that kind of stuff, and the crowd was roaring early!

It was just surreal. And I remember the only way I could really calm myself is, I thought about when I was a kid at the ranch, I had a certain spot where I’d go up on a hill above our ranch and I could look across to Mammoth Mountain Ski Area and the minarets, the sheer beautiful Sierras, and it used to be when I was a little kid, it was very calming for me.

And I remember, before that game, I sat there on the bench, this was right after Tommy Heinsohn came out. And I sat there and I shut my eyes and I just started thinking about, okay, let’s get this in perspective. You’ve got a job to do here. This is the biggest game you’ve ever coached in, you’ve ever prepared your team for.

You’ve got to be calm. You’ve got to break this down to simple terms. I’ve got to, I’ve got to calm myself before this tip off. And so I just sat there court side. And I thought about when I was a kid looking out across that range of mountains, and I said to myself 20, 30 years from now, no one’s going to care about this.

Those mountains don’t care. Let’s get some perspective here. This is a basketball game. Just do your job. Just breathe and just do your job. And that really, that really helped me. I learned how to calm myself. And that was really big for me.

[01:07:32] Mike Klinzing: Talk about the decision to leave coaching.

Well, that was a tough one. That was a tough one. There was a lot of factors that went into it. In the, my folks used to always come out to Tulsa the month of February, because we had most of our home games the month of February. And in February of 79, my folks came out and I could notice that my dad had really, really slowed down.

He was having some heart issues and he was a World War II vet and born in 1910 and worked out on a ranch and he wasn’t going to let anybody touch him and this and that. I remember we were riding to the game one night and he said He said, I need to ask you, I said, go ahead, dad. And he said, are you going to stay in the world of the NCAA athletics or are you ever going to come home and run the family heirloom?

Because we had a 225 acre ranch. We had black Angus cattle at a beautiful trout farm. We had nine rental cabins. We had a mile and a half of the beautiful Owens river spring Creek. Fly fishing creek running through the property had been in my family for a century. And we had all these business operations going there.

And my major in college had, after I blew my knee out, had tilted towards natural resources. And I said, Dad, I can’t answer that. I’ve got to think about it. I’ve got my stars rising back here. And this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. But yet being back on that property back in the Eastern Sierras is also just a big, such a part of my life. I said, I can’t give you an answer right now. And so I started thinking about all this and I started thinking everything about the recruiting. I mean, the recruiting back in those times, everything was illegal.  and we’re always operating in the gray area as far as recruiting the kids and bringing the parents in and what we could and couldn’t do with their scholarship and getting them summer jobs.

Now with name, image, and likeness, it’s all legal. It’s a whole different world but back then I was having to do so much and I was having to put so many hours into the recruiting. And it was so difficult. I remember my first recruiting assignment, God, I went up to the Louisville Invitational Tournament, the LIT, which was one of the biggest, you may have heard of it back in the day.

It was held in Freedom Hall in Louisville, Kentucky, which is like a Mecca for basketball. And all the best teams from Kentucky. Virginia, Ohio and Indiana, 16 teams, the best 16 teams in those four states would come in and play this. And so I went up there, it was an early assignment, my first year, and I was cocky, I thought I was the greatest thing in the world, assistant coach, University of Tulsa.

I walked in there and I showed my NCAA credentials and the person running it said, Oh, okay, Coach Alpers. You’re going to have to sit over here with the rest of the coaches. And I looked over there and there was a cordoned off area. There must’ve been 300 coaches there. And every name that you can imagine, head coaches, assistants, everybody was there watching these, all these great players perform out there.

And this was my first recruiting assignment. I went in. And I won. And I looked at it, and I sat right up behind me was Bobby Knight, Bob Boyd were sitting right behind me, Dick Versace was on my, on my left, Joe Stoll from Bradley was on my right, Lute Olson was two seats down, I’m just sitting here going.

I went back to the hotel that night, and I had a long talk with the mirror. I said, my God, what can I possibly do to distinguish myself and the University of Tulsa from all of these veteran successful championship coaches? And I got to tell you. That’s a tough one for a, for a young when I got hired in March of 1975, at the time I was the youngest division one full-time basketball coach in the United States.

A month later, Rick Pitino got hired at Syracuse and he was younger than me, so, but I was very young and man, oh man, so I kind of learned my craft, but it was just bothering me that I had to function in the gray area to get these players in and take care of them. And Tulsa was a private school, very difficult academically it was tough for these kids that you bring out of the inner cities to come in and make their grades and then blend in and become a team.

So I was looking at that and every year we’d graduate kids and we were constantly, like every other college team, you’re constantly building, you’re constantly rebuilding, especially now with the portal, you’re bringing more and more people in, you never get anything really built. And so I started thinking about the experience back at the ranch where I had some dreams and goals there ever since I was a little kid and I said I could build something there and it wouldn’t just disappear the next year and I wouldn’t have to rebuild it.

And of course my wife was saying, if you stay in this profession, you’re going to have a heart attack by age 50. And she’s probably right. But, so I finally came to the decision best long term interest.  It took me three or four months and I finally, I sat down with Coach King and I said, look, Jim, my dad’s in ill Health.

I’ve got this heirloom back there that you’ve stayed at, and you know what my life is back there. I said, I just think for my own sanity and for my own legacy and heritage, I think I got to go back and take the family heirloom and so my mom and dad can retire and I can, so that, it took a while, but, and  Six weeks after I got back, my dad dropped dead of a heart attack.

So it was a tough decision, but it was good. Either direction I was going to be something really good and really positive where I could help a lot of people and bring joy to a lot of people. And have the self-fulfillment of a of a job well done and the personal growth that goes with it.

So it was tough, but this is what we do in life.

[01:13:16] Mike Klinzing: Totally understandable. And obviously having been in the coaching life and understanding what it takes, especially on the college level, the amount of time that it takes that you have to put in and you obviously with your family had the ranch and the whole family legacy.

And clearly I think if you look back on it, you agree that it all worked out for you.

[01:13:41] Tim Alpers: I honored my father and my grandfather. I was able to when I left college, I had three things. I wanted to be a major college basketball coach, I wanted to build the most beautiful trout farm and recreational ranch in California, and I wanted to serve my countrymen as an elected official.

When I was able to do all three of those, retired in 2017, came up here, and lo and behold, I’m back into player development with the little kids. I have got a little girl next door. That is so good. They’ve already retired her jersey at the junior high school she goes to. She’s knocking down between five and ten threes every game.

She’s only 12. I started her when she was seven. And I’m so proud of her and some of the other little ones I’ve worked with. And I’m doing the same thing with these little kids shoot over the broom and garden with a tennis racket. Doing the same things that I did back when I was working the camps.

And it’s so much fun and so satisfying that for a 75-year-old guy like me, it’s great.

[01:14:50] Mike Klinzing: There you go. That is a good spot for us to wrap it up. Before we finish, Tim, and we left a lot of things on the table, I think we’re going to have to have you back on for another episode because there are so many more things that I want to give you a chance to talk about, including your book.

But before we get out, just tell people. The title of your book, because a lot of the stories that you told, I know can be found in the book and your story, your life is quite interesting as anybody who’s listened to the episode to this point can surely tell. So tell people the name of your book so they can get out there and find it.

And then after you do that, I’ll jump back in and wrap things up.

[01:15:25] Tim Alpers: Okay. The book is My Sphere of Influence, My Life in Basketball by Tim Alpers. Unfortunately, I did one run. I did a 500 book run and they I sold most of them and a lot of ’em I donated. We put a new basketball floor in the gym at Mammoth High School back in 2015 and I donated a hundred of my books for fundraising, and we raised $139,000 and built a beautiful floor in there.

So I’m thinking about doing a second printing if they just TimAlpers1@gmail.com, if people want to contact me, I’ll do what I can to see if I can get a copy to them. I think I might in a warehouse down at Bishop, there might be another case of them left, but they went pretty fast.

[01:16:15] Mike Klinzing: Totally understandable. And again, for anybody who’s listening, you could tell Tim has a lot of great stories, interacted with a lot of amazing people, not only in the course of his basketball life, but later on in his business life. And Tim, like I said, we’re going to have to have you back on for a second one.

But in the meantime, we thank you for coming on tonight and taking all the time out of your schedule. And then to everyone out there in our audience, thanks for listening, and we will catch you on our next episode. Thanks.