Peter Campbell: Honest and unfiltered

Over the course of a basketball season, a coach will see improbable plays, horrific home-cooking, ridiculous turnovers, brain-dead defensive lapses, unfocused offensive sets, dazzling passes, mind-boggling decision-making, sizzling shot-making, and even the odd circus heave that will leave him standing on the sidelines, his jaw dropping and his mind noting: I know I didn’t teach that.

His team will play beautiful games, brutal games, downright ugly games, and maybe even have one of those utterly unforgettable games in which it looks absolutely dead in the water, yet somehow manages to rally from a late double-digit deficit and pull off a miracle win at the buzzer.

Multiply that over the course of a 31-year career and ask retiring Wilfrid Laurier and former Laurentian men’s coach Peter Campbell for a few of those memorable moments and it is revealing that it is not plays or games that flood out, but a life-time of names, a river of names, flowing through time and as he rattles them off, his eyes seem to gaze inward, at images indelibly imprinted on his mind.

Players that include Jeff McKibbon (“one of the toughest guys I’ve ever met”), Lloyd Pollard, the Hann brothers (Brad and Norm, “a great team guy and competitive as heck”) and of course, Shawn Swords (“I don’t know if I’ve ever been around anybody who led better than that”), Cory Bailey, Kevin Gordon, Rowan Biggs, Ted Dongelmans, son John Campbell, Kiraan Posey, Maxwell Allin and Will Coulthard and countless others (too numerous to all be mentioned because of space considerations). “I picked good guys. I recruited quality people who were interested in being part of a team, most of the time. … As a game was starting to go the wrong way, they would step up and compete harder. They might not win it. But they wouldn’t fold their tent and go home. And that comes from within.”

And referees: Gilles Brière, Mike Homsy, Ron Foxcroft and more. “A guy like Bruce Covert, you could get after him but if you said something funny, he’d appreciate the humour and he wouldn’t over-react. I think I have a good balance there. Now, not all the referees believe that, because they have no sense of humour and no people skills. To me, it’s just wrong, if you taught referees people skills first and then the rules, they’d be way better referees.”

Was he the league’s most effective ref-baiter (a consensus opinion among rival coaches)? “I think that’s unfair,” he laughs. “I’m really frustrated with the way our refereeing has devolved. It hasn’t evolved. It’s gotten worse. You can’t get three guys to call the same game. The thing that saved me for most of my career is that we would sell the Laurentian gym out. The pot-bangers would be going crazy. I’d be screaming. But nobody could hear me anyway. If they had, I probably wouldn’t have finished very many games.”

And finally, other coaches: Dick MacKenzie, Peter Ewing and Brian O’Rourke, who were steering teams in southwestern Ontario when Campbell first assumed the girls basketball helm at Woodstock High and then at Fanshawe College for four years, where he led them to four consecutive Canadian Colleges Athletics Association championship tournaments, (“You had three outstanding coaches in the county to learn from. I quickly found out how little I knew”), Wayne Hussey (with whom Campbell served as an assistant on both the Ontario provincial and Canadian national women’s teams), Bob Bain, Gibb Chapman, Brian Heaney, John Dore, Ken Shields, Guy Vetrie, John Restivo and so on and so forth, and of course, Peter Ennis.

His voice cracks as he talks of Ennis, the former Laurentian and national team women’s coach who died of cancer at the age of 50 in 1997, of his gentle humour, and his camaraderie during the endless, monotonous treks from the rock of Sudbury to Toronto and Ottawa, and in those days, Montreal and Quebec City (when the OUA East played an interlocking schedule with Quebec), the road trips from nowhere to games often without quarter or mercy.

It was Ennis who opened the door to university coaching for Campbell. After graduating from teacher’s college in Ottawa, Campbell was moving up the educational administration ladder in southwestern Ontario, and had just become a principal in Tilsonburg, when “Peter called me and said, ‘Listen, our men’s coach has just quit. It’s too late to get anybody good. Why don’t you apply and do it for a year? Then we’ve got a year to search for someone’.”

After twisting wife Jackie’s arm about the joys of the North, it was off to Sudbury. “My first year, I was paranoid that these guys would think I was a woman’s coach and a candy-ass, so I went after them hard. I have a history and politics degree so I don’t know a lot about the physiology of sport. And I’d come home and tell Jackie, who was a phys ed teacher that ‘we did this today’. She’d say: ‘No, you can’t do that. They can’t recover.’ But we did it. It was great. I was kicking their ass every day and they responded. I was so lucky.”

Six OUA East coaching awards later, seven regular season titles (and a share of an eighth), and two postseason crowns, and it was off to Laurier. “I needed a change. I think I’m ADD or ADHD, or one of those things. I’d been there 15 years. Pete had passed away two or three years before. That had been one of the rocks that had tied me into Sudbury and that was gone. So I thought, you know, maybe a fresh start will be good. … And (Laurier athletic director) Peter Baxter was recruiting me and it’s always nice to be recruited.”

All told Campbell took seven different teams to the Canadian Interuniversity Sport championships, twice making the national semi-finals.

In all those years, did he ever lose his mind on the court?

“Oh yeah. Too many times. Sometimes about the officiating, sometimes about the effort of my team.”

Was he a hard- ass coach?

“Yeah, I think probably I’ve always been one. I’ve mellowed for sure over the 30 years. I think that’s one of the reasons why it’s probably a good idea to retire because, unless you get the right kind of guys and immerse them in a terrifically competitive environment, I’m not sure that I can do that anymore.”

Campbell certainly had no trouble with the role early in his career, quips Swords, now the men’s coach at Laurentian, who periodically reminds his former coach that he cut him from the provincial juvenile team during tryouts while in his second last year of high school in Ottawa. “I can’t believe I did that,” Campbell deadpans in response. “I remember I was recruiting him. Everyone was. And I know, the next year I picked him for the team.”

“When we came in to Laurentian as freshmen, we thought he was crazy,” Swords recalls. “And the older guys would say: ‘You haven’t even seen him yell yet.’ But every year, he seemed to lighten up, lighten up, a little bit more. But for me, it wasn’t that hard. I mean, I had Dave Smart as my club coach. I wasn’t shocked at anything Peter yelled at or did.”

Swords tells the tale of a game in the Concordia Preseason Invitational tournament final in Montreal early in his playing career, when Campbell took two quick technicals after five or six minutes of play. “Bang, bang, two technicals, one because he was losing his mind and then another because he hadn’t stopped yet. So he said, ‘alright, that’s it. We’re out of here. We’re going.’ The whole team was like, ‘no, you got kicked out.’ He says, ‘no, we’re all going.’ So he took us out and marched us to the locker room. … John (Dore) had to come down and say, ‘come on guys, you gotta play, this is the finals.’ He tried to talk Peter and our team to come back. And he keeps going back and forth from the locker room and the gym, and finally comes back and says: ‘Okay, Peter, I’ve talked to the refs, you can come in and sit in the gym but you can’t coach them from the stands.’ Eventually, Peter agrees that we can go back up and finish the game.”

“Mike Homsy was the referee,” Campbell explains. “And he comes up behind me and he says, ‘that’s a technical foul.’ And I say, ‘I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to Gilles (Brière, the other official)’. And Homsy says ‘any more out of you, and you’ll get another one.’ And I look at him and say, ‘Mike there’s 35 minutes left. There’s not a hope in hell I’m not saying another word for another 35 minutes. And he says: ‘one more word out of you and you’re out of here’. So I said, oh boy, you better learn the rules, I’m out of here now. The bad news is these guys are going with me because I’m here on my own (not having brought an assistant).”

“John wanted us back on the floor so they could kick our ass, so they negotiated a deal so that I could sit in the gym but I can’t coach. So I’m sitting in the stands and of course, you can’t ‘not’ coach. But some parent comes over to me and says: ‘You’re not supposed to be coaching’. And I’m like, give me a break, I’m not yelling, I’m sitting. … They won it at the end. But we almost won it. I was so proud of our guys for that.”

Doubtless there are referees across the country who will take issue with the notion, but the tale also speaks of traits that coaches, ex-players, reporters and other observers of the national hoops scene attribute to Campbell: unstinting civility, a quick wit and a reverence for the game.

“I love Peter,” says U.B.C. men’s coach Kevin Hanson. “He taught me a great deal about how to respect the CIS and how to respect the game of basketball and respect our national championships.”

“He cares about the game,” adds Hanson, who has organized a ceremony to honour both Campbell and Dore during next week’s CIS championships in Vancouver. “He cares about the players and the coaches, and he cares about the status of the coaching association and where it’s going in the future. Give him credit for being one of the old school guys. It’s not all just about winning and losing basketball games. There’s a whole lot more to the basketball life. He’s always said to me: ‘In the end, it’s still just an awesome job’.”

“He’s one of the guys who really laid the foundation for coaching becoming a profession in Canada,” says Victoria men’s coach Craig Beaucamp. “There’s been a complete change in university athletics and his knowledge and past experience have been invaluable when it comes to coaches meetings, national championships and protocol.”

“And he always brought his wit and personality to coaches meetings,” adds Beaucamp. “There are a lot of lessons to be learned from guys like him. He’s a very sociable guy and that’s probably a testament to why he’s lasted so long in the profession. You can’t take yourself too seriously in this profession. It’s a rough ride. You have to have good balance and I think that Peter has always had that balance.”

“He’s a great character,” says Guelph men’s coach Chris O’Rourke, who’s known Campbell for roughly 30 years, having played against his son John at the school level, against his teams at the university level, and then coached against him since 1998. “At coaches meetings, he always said what he thought. It was honest and it was unfiltered and I always appreciated him for that.”

“And I always enjoyed his takes on the referees and coaching against him. It always made you a better coach,” says O’Rourke, adding that he’ll forever recall a host of Campbell meltdowns about officiating. “His face would always get really red and I’d be hoping he’d get a T, because he was so worked up about the refs. I kept thinking: That might help us.”

Would Campbell, who hopes to retain some link to basketball after his retirement, possibly as an assistant coach, ever consider becoming a referee?

“No. Not ever,” he responds. “No chance. No chance. No chance.”