Dan Dougherty may have turned down Villanova, but he lived a wonderful life

The morning after legendary Episcopal Academy coach Dan Dougherty died, a call came in. The ID said Speedy Morris.

You answer that call.

“Did you know Dan Doc turned down the ‘Nova job?” Morris immediately said after initial pleasantries.

Nope, did not. Dan Dougherty, who died last week at age 87, had been a Villanova assistant under Jack Kraft when the 1971 team reached the NCAA title game against UCLA. Dougherty, respected and maybe revered by ‘Nova players of that era, had moved on to be Army’s head coach for four seasons.

It was while Dougherty was at Army that Kraft left Villanova. Morris had his facts straight. Multiple people at Dougherty’s funeral service Saturday had details of how there had been a verbal offer from Villanova in 1973 that Dougherty had been inclined to take, but he went back to Army, got some commitments from the leadership there, and decided to stay. Villanova then turned to a Penn assistant coach named Rollie Massimino.

Pause to imagine how much local basketball history could have been different. Dougherty would have won lots of basketball games at Villanova, but with different players than Massimino, and different assistants.

Maybe Tom Ingelsby, who played on that ‘71 team, would have been on a Dougherty Villanova staff and eventually ended up as the head coach. Or maybe just-retired Lafayette coach Fran O’Hanlon, who had been on a ‘Nova freshman team coached by Dougherty, would have coached his alma mater in a Final Four instead of Georgia Tech getting there in 2004 using much of O’Hanlon’s offense.

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Maybe a young Drexel assistant named Jay Wright wouldn’t have ever moved over to the Villanova staff. So much local basketball history could have been so different. Dougherty found some of those commitments at Army slowing down after a leadership change at the U.S. Military Academy, and was let go after a couple of more tough seasons. Imagine if he had never come home to coach high school ball, for a year at Penncrest High, then settling in at Episcopal Academy. Let’s assume Episcopal could have had good teams under a different coach, but maybe not with the same players Dougherty coached. Crazy to think about it all, so many forks in so many roads.

To say it worked out for Dougherty would be radically underplaying this man’s achievements in local basketball. I had once written that if you think of Philadelphia basketball geographically, you’d place Speedy Morris himself in the middle, right at Broad and Market. Well, put Dougherty up Ben Franklin Parkway, up those Rocky steps. Dougherty was like the Art Museum, sturdy and consequential for decades.

Sure, Dougherty could have chased other college jobs.

“He turned down the Iowa job,” said one of the mourners in a pew at the funeral.

In fact, after checking with one of her sons, Mary Ellen Dougherty, Dan’s wife of 64 years, said the job offer had been from Xavier. But moving around the country with four children chasing coaching glory, they decided it wasn’t worth it.

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But that ‘Nova job offer was different. One of their three sons quipped that Mom didn’t talk to Dad “for a year” after he turned that down.

“I was so upset,” Mary Ellen said last week over the phone. “You know what, I’m a Philly girl. I thought we were going back. But Dan was patriotic. He loved the Academy, loved to just stand on the parade ground.”

Dan and Mary Ellen grew up in the Olney section of the city, right around the corner from each other. “We met in the schoolyard playing basketball,” she said.

Can’t make it up, right out of a movie. Mary Ellen figures she was in seventh grade. She’d see Dan, then in ninth grade at St. Joseph’s Prep, shooting hoops out there. She’d sneak out of the house, good time to get her own shots up.

“I played for Little Flower,” Mary Ellen said. “We didn’t start going together until he was at St. Joseph’s.”

The college, she meant. Dougherty had walked on. Another great fork-in-the-road story. Dougherty eventually started for Jack Ramsay, but Ramsay wasn’t coach yet when Dougherty showed up for a tryout. The story told by Ed Garrity’s sons — and by Dougherty himself, apparently — was that Garrity, who liked the look of this kid, told him, “You go left … I’ll go right.” Dougherty did as told and got by the starting point guard. Then: “You go right … I’ll go left.”

The coach was impressed, decided he had to take him if his star guard couldn’t stay in front of him. He turned out to be right for the wrong reasons, as Dougherty eventually started in the very first Big 5 game.

At his funeral, it was just apparent that Dougherty’s impact at Episcopal went far beyond his basketball practices, which often didn’t have any set out-of-bounds lines anyway.

Mary Ellen had an eye for all of her husband’s ex-players who came up to her next to the casket, nailing the names.

“Rainbow Johnson,” she immediately said to O’Hanlon, using the nickname given to him playing in the Baker League in the summer.

The ones who maybe moved her the most coming up on the viewing line weren’t all the basketball stars.

“Dan was in the advising system, and he had more advisees than anyone at Episcopal,” Mary Ellen said over the phone this week. “So many children, teenagers, who had boyfriend/girlfriend problems, problems at home.”

One man came up to Mary Ellen Dougherty at the service, knelt in front of her seat by the casket, told how her husband had turned his life around, that he was thinking about the end, about suicide, when Dougherty talked him through it, and talked to his family.

“Others came up, told me, ‘I never would have graduated,’” Mary Ellen said, remembering how her husband loved to teach geometry but also relished teaching “the kids who had a difficult time learning math.”

Dan Leibovitz, now the associate commissioner of the Southeastern Conference for basketball, played for Dougherty at Episcopal and said he was “absolutely the reason I wanted to coach. I went through Penn planning to be a high school coach. That was my intent going to Temple practice.”

So the path veered, as Leibovitz became a longtime John Chaney assistant at Temple. But while at Penn, “I called [Dougherty] because I was drowning in classes. Hated it. Didn’t feel like I belonged. Didn’t know what to major in.”

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His old coach and math teacher told Leibovitz to major in Spanish, “because schools always need language teachers. And that’s what I did. Walked to the language department the next day.”

Dougherty got attention from his teams winning 13 Inter-Ac titles. But his life clearly wasn’t only measured by banners on a wall. His wife got to all the games, knew all the players, baked all the cookies her husband felt they didn’t need.

“I kept a notebook of opponents,” Mary Ellen Dougherty said. “A little scouting report. What kind of defense they played. Who is Mr. Hustle. That kind of thing. We never did anything that wasn’t together.”

So Dan Dougherty turned down the big job. He didn’t turn bitter. He got to work, stayed in the same house in Roxborough he’d raised his children in. By all accounts, it turned out just fine. The headline is obvious: It was, in fact, a wonderful life.