EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview has been edited. No context has been changed.
Greg Kampe has been defying expectations for decades. So it seems fitting that he grew up defying Ohio allegiance in a town called Defiance.
“My dad played football at Michigan and my brother played football at Michigan. My dad played on the ’47 national champions. So I grew up in Michigan Stadium as a kid. The first word I ever said was ‘Michigan.’
“[Growing up], our mailbox had the Michigan helmet painted on it. And after every Ohio State game, somebody would come with the car and run it over…and [my dad] just expected it. He went out and, you know, put it back up and re-dug the hole.”
Kampe, head coach of the Oakland University Golden Grizzlies, even defies Father Time. His astonishing 40-year run with Oakland makes Kampe the longest-tenured coach in college basketball. In March, in the NCAA basketball tournament's first round, Kampe’s underdog and overachieving Golden Grizzlies slew their latest and greatest Goliath: the mighty John Calipari-coached Kentucky Wildcats.
But when I ask Kampe about his relationship with the game of basketball, he says, “Love/hate. There's nothing else i could do or would do, [but] there's many days I hate it, everything about it. It’s the chase of perfection. You know you're never gonna catch perfection, right? So it's the chase.”
Oakland’s stunning upset of the Wildcats is already a distant memory for the coach. He’s preoccupied with the subsequent contest against North Carolina State, where the Golden Grizzlies were in a position to win with the clock running down.
“Our greatest moment in Oakland history was the win against Kentucky. And yet, two days later, to go to the Sweet 16, we’ve got the ball with ten seconds to go and don't get a shot off. And I have not had a night since then that I don't wake up and think about that we didn't get a shot, and it's my fault. ‘What if I would have run this play? Why didn't I do this? Why did I call time out?’ And then that team went to the Final Four. So that could have been us in the Final Four. And those thoughts just keep going through and, and I just can’t…so love/hate would be the best way to put it.”
Given that complicated relationship, it makes sense that Kampe’s dream wasn’t to be a coach.
“I wanted to be a broadcaster. I have a broadcast journalism degree. I interviewed [at Channel 11 in Toledo] for the internship in the sports department, and I didn't get it. I didn't know what I was gonna do. And the basketball coach at the University of Toledo offered me the graduate assistantship.
"A lot of my coaches that I played for said, ‘You love the game, you seem to be mentally astute in it, and you should go into coaching.’ I never wanted to. My dad had been a coach. He told me, don't do it, because it's a suck job. It’s, you can't please people. It's the only job in the world that everybody knows how to do your job. Can you imagine, in a court of law, if they had announcers in there? ‘He needed to object to that.’ You know? Everybody knows how to do my job. And my dad, he just said, ‘It's a bad lifestyle.’
“I was told by three NFL franchises they were gonna draft me, and back in those days you stood by the phone all day, and I stood by the phone for two days, and the call never came. And [Toledo’s basketball coach] said, 'You gotta make a decision.’ So I decided to stay at Toledo. It’s hard to get a coaching job, especially at a college.”
Kampe’s NFL draft call was not the only one that never came. His beloved Michigan Wolverines never called either. Not in 2000, when Oakland upset the Wolverines. Not in 2015, when they came within a point of defeating the No. 1-ranked Michigan State Spartans.
Not even after Kampe’s team upset Kentucky.
“[Michigan] didn’t offer me the job. I would have taken it. Oh, hell yeah. [But] when it's all finally said and done…my hope is I've never gotten fired. Every coach gets fired. All my friends in the business, everybody I started with, they've all been fired somewhere. And so I figure I got five or six more years to try and not get fired.
“I'm appreciative that I have a job. I'm appreciative that I've been here so many years and they still want me. I am grateful when I put my key in the door and it still opens.”
When Kampe took over, Oakland had never had a winning season in league play.
“I took the job thinking, ‘we're gonna win the national championship next year.’ It took one year to find out how hard this is, how tough this business is.
“We won 20 games in my third year, and we've kept going since. We got it turned around. But this is not an easy job. It's not easy to win. It’s hard to win.”
Yet winning's what Kampe’s teams do. As an example: at the request of a former major league umpire, Kampe once agreed to coach a Little League team with 13 eight-year-olds who'd been cut from other teams.
11 of those kids got college baseball scholarships.
What did Kampe teach them?
“How do you steal a base? How do you field a ground ball, catch a ground ball? We spent all our time on the fundamentals. We didn’t play games in practice. We didn’t play many games. The emphasis and focus was not on games. The emphasis and focus was on learning old-fashioned fundamental baseball.”
I ask Kampe about his internal psychology as a coach, and he slides his computer monitor away from the wall. “Can you see it?” Kampe asks. “It’s hidden so nobody can see it.”
It’s a white sheet of paper tacked to the wall, bearing three words:
ADAPT OR DIE
I want to know more.
“When I grew up, the team was the most important thing. That's what I was taught: the team, the team, the team, right? No one teaches that today. And so I can be the old guy that sits around and bitches about it, or I can adapt, understand it, and still have success. And I can still have my non-negotiables.”
I ask what Kampe means by non-negotiables.
“Everybody’s dressed the same. We’re a team. Right? No longer. They want to wear these shoes. So how do I mix that? I don’t care what shoes they wear anymore. That’s adapt or die. Why am I kicking you out of practice because you got a pair of SpongeBob socks on, which a kid wore one day? I have to find non-negotiables that I can live with that don't send them running. And more importantly, they're what they can take into life.
“You have to be on time. If you're late, you screw the other 14 guys. So that's one of our non-negotiables. They know if they're late, don't even come in. You can't practice that day. But that's gonna affect them in their job, that’s gonna affect them in life.
“Academically, you miss class? It’s non-negotiable. You’re here to get a degree. And you may not care about that right now, but when you're 35, you're gonna care about it."
One quality Kampe looks for in a player is an elite work ethic, like Oakland’s Jack Gohlke, who made ten three-pointers against Kentucky. Kampe sees Gohlke in the gym an hour before practice starts. And after classes. And after dinner.
“[Gohlke’s] an elite worker. I value that. I want a guy to say to himself, ‘This is what I have to do to become great,' and then do it. Because most people, when they find out what they have to do to become great, they're not willing to sacrifice to do it.”
He also wants to understand a player’s raison d’être.
“What makes them—what is their ‘why?’ Right? That's a big thing today. Everybody wants to know your why. Why are you doing what you do?”
Kampe hears his own words and chuckles.
“See, I have adapted. If you would have said ten years ago, ‘What's your why?’ I would have laughed at you and told you to get out of my office, right? Now, I use that: ‘what is your why?’”
I ask the coach what other quotes he’s known for.
“‘Everybody wants to be great till they find out what they have to do to become great.’ That would be number one. And number two would be ‘consistency is the hallmark of greatness.’ I say that to my team all the time. I want a consistent effort, a guy that's gonna show up every day and do his job.”
The fire in Kampe’s eyes and words belies an inner sensitivity.
“I have the thinnest thick skin of anybody in the world. Little things really bother me. The fact that a guy I don't know doesn't like me or thinks I'm a bad coach, that bothers me.
“I'll give you a perfect example. We were playing a team, and we were way ahead, and if we score 85 points in the game, everybody in the place gets free pizza. So there's 15 seconds to go and we’ve got the ball, and normally in that situation, you just dribble out the clock, right? And this kid went down and dunked it—and I wanted him to.
“Well, the other coach wasn't happy about it. I went and I told him why he did it, and I don't think he really thought that was a good reason. There are 4000 people out here that wanted free pizza, and I want my fans to have it. We weren't running it up, we did it for that. So I sent pizza to his office. 'Cause I didn’t want him mad at me.
"And I think that's how I've lasted. There's no coach out there that I have a beef with. I want people to love Oakland basketball. They can wanna beat us, but I want be their second-favorite team. That’s my goal.”
I ask Kampe when he knew he was going to beat Kentucky.
“I never thought we would lose, but I never, ever thought we had the game won. I mean, with 18 second to go, I went nuts on one of my players, because he was celebrating. I called him over and I yelled at him, ‘Act like you've been here!’
“But I realized, now he's getting yelled at on national TV by his coach. So I put my arm around him and I [added], ‘…even though we never have.’ And he laughed, and the tension went out, and we finished the game.
“I had to shake Calipari's hand, shake all [the players’] hands. And then I turned and I realized, ‘Holy shit.’ I tried not to show any emotion, I had to go talk on TV, but inside, it was ‘Holy shit. We did it.’”
Kampe says he often defuses tense moments with humor.
“The world sees most people in my situation as arrogant, and…I don't know what the right word is…authoritarian maybe? And so I try to be the opposite. I think laughing is the greatest part of humanity.”
He might enjoy making people laugh. But Kampe would be hard-pressed to find anyone laughing at his legacy. This season, he surpassed 800 victories, putting him in the rarified air of names like Krzyzewski and Boeheim and Knight.
Yet winning is not what drives him.
“In the heat of the battle, winning is what's important,” Kampe says. “You know, when you're screaming and yelling, and keeping your cool and figuring a way to win the game—that’s what's seen.
“This year, we played 37 games. A game is two hours. 74 hours. That’s it. The rest of the time is my real job: making sure that 15 kids become young men, academically, socially. It’s, it's what? Adjunct parenting? I guess that's the word.
“When this is all said and done, I've coached 200-plus kids and I made a difference in their lives. I’ve got more championship rings than I have fingers, but that's not important. None of them are on my hands. And to be honest with you, I don't know where they are. Somewhere in my home.
“What means the most is, are [those 200 kids] better because they played at Oakland and I was their coach? I am in constant contact with many of our players. I have a young man right now, his eight-year-old’s got leukemia. So we've been really fighting that with him.
“My job is to make you the best person, the best player and the best student that you can be. That's my job. And I will never waver from that.”
But winning matters greatly to this product of Defiance. Kampe shows me a clipboard of half-court drawings. He says he spent two sleepless hours the night before, diagramming play after play after play.
“We didn't get a shot. And it's gonna haunt me the rest of my life. I know that. That’s why this job sucks. That’s why my dad told me not to do it.”
Then Kampe’s fiery eyes flash.
“I guarantee if we ever get in that position again, we'll get a shot up."
The first word I ever said was ‘Michigan.’
…this is not an easy job. It's not easy to win. It’s hard to win.