This Tiger Just Can’t Be Tamed

Dale Brown says, “So, one day I’m in Calcutta and I’m talking with Mother Teresa. And she starts telling me about people who sell their organs.

“You know. Like donors. Only before you die, not after.

“Anyway, the guy I’m doing my book with asks me, ‘Which organs? Which ones do they sell?’ That’s when I make a stupid mistake. I say, ‘Oh, you know. Kidneys.’ And he goes, ‘Mmm-hmmm,’ and writes it down. And I say, ‘Liver.’ And he goes and writes that down too.

“Well, you can’t sell your liver and keep living. Without your liver, you, you know, you die. But there it is, right in my book--starving people in Calcutta who sell their kidneys and livers for cash. Wow. I mean, I’m really not this stupid, even if I am from North Dakota.”

Welcome to the wide world of Dale Brown, who will say or do just about anything. For 23 seasons the coach at Louisiana State, he is the loosest cannon in college basketball. He’s the guy who coached Shaquille O’Neal and advised him to quit school. He’s the guy who says it’s too bad Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, John Wilkes Booth and James Earl Ray weren’t basketball fans, so they could have taken out their venom on coaches instead of assassinating people. No, really.

Life is like a box of chocolates, and with Dale Brown you never know which nougat he will spit out next. In his new book, “Tiger in a Lion’s Den” (Hyperion, $22.95), the batty dude from Baton Rouge is his usual unusual self.

We are definitely not talking John Wooden here. We are talking Dale Brown, the man who once stuck out a leg hoping to trip Indiana Coach Bob Knight as he walked past. Best way to settle their feud, Brown volunteered: “Put me and Coach Knight in a wrestling room naked and whoever came out first would be the best man.” Yep, exactly the way Mother Teresa would have handled it.

The forward by Bill Walton to the LSU coach’s book is only four paragraphs long, which nevertheless earns Walton equal billing on the cover with Don Yaeger, who actually sat down with Brown and wrote the 179 pages that follow.

Walton writes, “Dale Brown has faced the cruel hatred and jealousy of opponents in life, basketball, business and death,” which is meant as a compliment to the man who now coaches Walton’s eldest son.

Other guys would sell their liver rather than play for Dale Brown.

He has come a long way since coaching at Garfield Junior High in Berkeley, yes. Only eight men, to his knowledge, have run programs at the same Division I college for as long as he has. Brown says his profession has taken him to 56 nations, recruiting everyone from a Ukrainian teen trying to dodge a KGB agent to a kid from Israel who couldn’t concentrate on basketball one day because a Scud missile had just exploded down the block from his family.

Brown has been successful, yes. On the other hand, he also has never won a national championship, even though one of his teams had Shaq and Chris Jackson and Stanley Roberts. After one Indiana game, Knight said he was worried about being behind by a dozen points until he reminded himself that Dale Brown was coaching the other team.

Dale sure can talk the talk, though.

“I just got off the phone with Stanley Roberts,” he says, alluding to the overstuffed Clipper whose girth contributed to a season-ending injury.

“Yeah? How’s Stanley doing?” Brown is asked.

“Oh, he’ll be 700 pounds before this is over,” he replies. “Poor Stanley. He’s as nice a person as you’ll ever meet. He’s also as lazy a person as you’ll ever meet. Money doesn’t stimulate him. Fame doesn’t stimulate him. He lived in a trailer with 14 other people. Now all he wants is to enjoy the good life. He’d rather eat and throw a party for his friends than work. Stanley, Stanley, Stanley.”

Brown did a book because he has so much to say. He rarely holds back. At times, his verbosity has brought him more attention than his coaching, particularly when even those closest to Dale can’t persuade him to shut up. His daughter, for example, begged him not to have LSU boycott a tournament once over unfair treatment to Shaq, who was brutalized by opponents and penalized for pushing back.

Dale chuckles and says he wishes they hadn’t begun his book with that story. But Dale, he is asked, isn’t this your book? Oh, sure, Dale says, but he simply talked his fool head off to his biographer, who wrote down everything he said, like the stuff about donating your liver.

And then they wouldn’t even use his best stuff, Dale says. Like how he felt about an NCAA investigator who came down to LSU digging for dirt.

“I call him Josef Mengele Jr.,” Brown says, happily comparing a scholastic authority to a Nazi sadist.

The mouth on this man. One of these days, Dale Brown will retire from coaching, go wander the world barefoot or sniff the flowers at his 550-acre Dakota spread on the Canadian border. He has stayed in one place a very long time. He is no Larry Brown, leaping from job to job.

Brown says, “Ha! Larry Brown! Larry Brown will get to heaven and want to move.”

Keep listening, because Dale has a story for every occasion. Like: There was this guy, see, from Brazil, a guy named Mozar Cezar, but everybody called him “Gato,” as in cat, and he came to Baton Rouge to study basketball, and then he wanted a green card, until one day Gato went crazy and stepped inside the tiger cage with the LSU mascot, where Gato announced that unless Dale Brown got him a green card so he could stay in America, he was going to explode a bomb in his gym bag and kill himself and take Mike the Tiger with him. True story.

Dale Brown says, “There are only three reasons you write a book. To make money. To blow yourself up. Or to say something maybe to help somebody.”

“So why’d you write yours?” he is asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he says.