EAST LANSING — On Jan. 4, 1996, Tom Izzo never could have imagined that 29 years and a little more than a month later he’d have as many Big Ten wins as the coach in the red sweater on the opposing bench.
He had bigger problems — building a program, keeping his job, making sure Breslin Center never again looked like Assembly Hall North with thousands of Indiana basketball fans in the stands.
Izzo’s first Big Ten win — 65-60 over Bob Knight’s Indiana program nearly three decades ago — was both a depressing occasion and defining moment for Michigan State’s then first-year head coach.
“I swear there were 4,000 red sweaters,” Izzo said.
There won’t be nearly as many Tuesday night, when Izzo tries to break Knight’s record, fittingly, against Indiana — which next season will hire its sixth head coach since Knight’s exit in 2000.
The Hoosiers are trying to find their Izzo.
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Izzo long ago took over as the dean of Big Ten coaches. Saturday, he tied Knight, winning his 353rd Big Ten game — 86-74 over Oregon in one of the more epic games at Breslin Center in some time.
“It’s one I never thought was even obtainable,” Izzo said of the record, ahead of Saturday’s win. “Never thought about it. Just because I know the man who held it. I also know that I’ve got another year under my belt than he did. We played more conference games than (back then). Records are records, but it’s an honor and a privilege, to be very honest with you, to even be talked about in the same breath as him.”
Izzo today is the dream for an athletic director when they hire a men’s basketball coach — or football coach, for that matter — the relative unknown who turns a middling program into a powerhouse and then sustains it for decades, never leaving and never losing his passion for the job. It’s an impossible standard. He, like Knight, has very few peers.
“I think passing Bobby Knight puts Tom’s success in perspective on a more national level,” said friend Nick Saban, who began as head football coach at MSU in 1995, just as Izzo was taking over the basketball program.
Passing Knight for Big Ten wins is another notch in a Hall of Fame career that features eight Final Fours, 10 Big Ten championships, a national championship and 26 straight NCAA tournaments — the longest streak in college basketball — which means as much to Izzo as any of his records. All of it at MSU, of course, a place where sustained greatness didn’t seem possible.
Saturday, his legacy could be seen throughout Breslin Center — in the throng of former players who returned for their annual alumni weekend, in the packed stands and the scarcity of available tickets, and the Izzone, the student section, bearing down on the court. The Izzone’s expansion and emphasis was one of things that came out of that night 29 years ago, as Izzo and Mark Hollis huddled in the tunnel afterward.
“I was pissed,” Izzo said. “And Mark Hollis guaranteed me that we would do something about it.”
“Tom judges so many things by pleasing others,” said Hollis, MSU’s former athletic director, who was then an associate AD in charge of marketing and promotions. “And when he walks out into a stadium or an arena and he sees the corners empty or he sees the opponents colors in the stands, (he thinks he’s) letting people down because you haven’t done enough to drive them to want to be in those seats.
“That Indiana game was the defining moment for Michigan State basketball to go from mediocre to great. Tom lives by fear. And he was afraid of losing his job. It was all of those elements where he was letting people down. And it was reflected by a lot of red in the Breslin center.”
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The concept of having students surrounding the court, with their energy working its way up through the crowd — even if there was more money to be made in selling those seats — came out of that frustrating night, an idea that’s been replicated elsewhere since. So, too, did Izzo’s commitment to engage every aspect of the campus and community.
Those were humbling years in a lot of ways, before Izzo became a household name on par with anyone in the sport.
Back then, Knight, Purdue’s Gene Keady, Illinois’ Lou Henson and Minnesota’s Clem Haskins were the names that personified Big Ten basketball. In Izzo’s first Big Ten basketball head coaches meeting in the spring of 1995, they were voting on whether to have a Big Ten tournament. Knight, Keady and Haskins were against it. They told Izzo he was, too. So he voted with them — against it — the first of his many votes on all sorts of committees that fell on deaf ears.
“I sat there in the back of the room just kind of hiding out,” Izzo, who was 40 at the time, said.
He had their respect early on, even if he didn’t know it.
“He had his own style,” Haskins said last week. “He was firm. He was gritty, a no-nonsense guy when it comes to coaching the game of basketball and working with young people. And I really respected that in him. I could see that he was going to be just an excellent, excellent coach. He didn’t say a whole lot when he started, but when it came to coaching the game of basketball, he held his own against any of us.”
Back then, the dream was a Big Ten championship or Final Four. But Izzo had to survive first. He went 16-16 in his first season, then won 17 games the next season, losing in the second round of the NIT both years.
Had things not turned in the middle of Year 3 — after a 5-3 start, including a loss to Illinois-Chicago and third straight defeat at the hands of Detroit-Mercy — who knows.
“Folks were saying, ‘He’s no Jud (Heathcote). He’s not going to get it done,’ ” Hollis said. “From my recollection, that was all permeating throughout the Spartan community. ’This is not the guy.’ And looking back at Tom’s history all the way back to Iron Mountain, he and (Steve Mariucci), they’re fighters, and when you hear those words, it hurt him to the core.”
Thomas Kelley, Izzo’s first point guard at MSU and now one of Izzo’s assistant coaches, remembers those days — and the Indiana game (after all, he had seven assists that night), and how big a deal that game felt. He remembers the grind, before they’d turned a corner as a program, including 5:45 a.m. runs, the team and Izzo.
“We’d meet at the top of the (Breslin Center) tunnel and run through campus, like 3 1/2, 4 miles and he’d be right there with us,” Kelley said. “We’d be coming back up, by the Kellogg Center, and he’d yell, ‘If I’m within 20 yards of you, y’all are running again.’ Man, we would take off.”
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Times have changed. Izzo feels good. But feels good for 70, after getting new hip last spring. The success that began with Izzo grinding and the players eventually buying in — “We were tired of being average,” Kelley said — has sustained itself for most of three decades.
Just after Kelley first returned to the staff as a graduate manager in 2015 — just as former players David Thomas and Austin Thornton joined, as well — they heard Izzo ask his players what time they wanted to practice.
“He gave them an option,” Kelley said. “We all started laughing. ‘An option?! We didn’t have that.’
“But, Coach, to his credit, he has adjusted. He still does the same thing, too, when you talk about putting in time, meeting with the players, always having his door open. He’s always conscious of what’s going on. He still does things that he did back then really well, like the time spent — that hasn’t changed.”
Another person who remembers those early days is Saban, who first met Izzo in 1983, when Saban was hired as George Perles’ defensive coordinator at MSU and Izzo was just beginning on Heathcote’s staff. Saban then returned as MSU’s head football coach just as Izzo was getting set to take over for Heathcote.
“We were kind of always at the same level,” Saban said.
In the mid-1990s — back when you might find Izzo and assistant Tom Crean mapping out their program at the Frandor Burger King and the name “Tom Fizzo” scribbled above urinals on campus — Saban and Izzo were partners, trying to build their fledgling programs. They’d each help the other recruit, be it on campus or when they were visiting a high school that had a player from the other’s sport.
“Philosophically, we both believed in the same things,” Saban said, “hard work, perseverance, overcoming adversity, pride in performance, discipline, toughness — all those kind of intangibles that help you be successful, not just in sports, but in pretty much anything.
“(Through the years) we never compromised how we tried to get players to be the best version of themselves. We changed the technical way that we had to adapt to football and basketball to be able to compete relative to how the game changed, but we never changed the first part. And I think a lot of people think that if they change the first part, that’s going to help them in the second part, but it really doesn’t.”
By the time current MSU athletic director Alan Haller first met Izzo, in the early 2000s, Izzo might have been the biggest young name in college coaching.
“I came over to get a ball signed and I didn’t know him at all,” said Haller, who was working for MSU Police at the time, but was well known for his football career at MSU. “I specifically remember him telling me that he knew all about me and he asked me, ‘How long do you think you’re going to be in law enforcement?’ At the time, I wanted to be a (police) chief. It struck me because he said, ‘I think I see you doing some other things.’ He always seems to know more about the people he’s talking to than they realize. He’s got that human side of him that you just can’t teach, like his care factor for people is as much as I’ve seen, maybe outside of my mom. It’s remarkable.”
Present day, Haller is Izzo’s boss. So Izzo was right. It’s Izzo’s care for and effect on the entire athletic department — especially the other coaches — that Haller most appreciates.
“A couple of weeks ago, I saw him after the Illinois game and I thought we were going to talk about that, and the first thing he said to me was, ‘Man, I dipped into that gymnastics meet on Friday. That was spectacular.’ He’s tuned in with everything that’s going on in the community and especially in athletics, and it makes my job much, much easier. I can have these conversations with other coaches, with donors, with other people within the university, because Tom cares so much about it. If it was the other way around, it would make this job really, really difficult. I know it’s like that at some places.”
Haller sees MSU’s other coaches watching and trying to emulate Izzo’s culture with his players, so many of whom come back regularly, a lot of them Saturday.
“It’s not necessarily his grit on the court and his teaching philosophy, or maybe not even his wins and losses,” Haller said, “but what I see some of our young coaches trying to figure out is how he develops that culture, how do his players want to play so hard for him, and he’s so hard on them? That’s what I see our other coaches trying to emulate. It’s exciting to see — especially in (hockey coach) Adam (Nightingale), who is really trying to learn as much as he can from the Jedi.”
Izzo used to watch Ron Mason’s MSU hockey program that way. And Bob Knight at Indiana, too.
Knight, who died 15 months ago, was a fan of Izzo’s predecessor and mentor, Heathcote, to the point that he visited Heathcote at Sparrow Hospital in Lansing when Heathcote had a minor heart attack in September of 1984.
“He walked in (the hospital room) and said, ‘Hey, I was just in the neighborhood. I thought I’d stop by,” Hollis recalled.
When Izzo was Heathcote’s assistant, he used to stand in the handshake line after games hoping Knight would shake his hand.
“He never shook assistants’ hands much,” Izzo said. “And I figured maybe he didn’t like me. But he was real close with Jud and I remember when I got the job, (Knight) called me and told me welcome to the league, and as long as I don’t cheat and do it the right way, I’d be able to lean on him. And then when we beat him that first game (in 1996), a lot of people told me, ‘Well, he’s good to you until you beat him.’ He was really just as good to me.
“The year we won the national championship, we (played) them down there late in the year, we were both ranked and he called me into his war room (at Assembly Hall) after and told me my team was good enough to win it all and gave me a couple tips on how to deal with the media and fans and keep the players focused — and then told me to get the hell out. And I did. We went on and won it.”
A year later, just five years after that first Big Ten win against Indiana, Knight was gone and the chasm between the two programs had flipped. Indiana’s fans stormed their home court when the Hoosiers upset No. 1-ranked MSU.
“I’ll never forget this one cop that always took care of us, he came running out and grabbed me and said, ‘Come on, Coach, get off the court,’ ” Izzo said. “I told him to get his hands off me. ‘If Indiana is storming the court when they beat Michigan State, I’m going to watch it.’ And I sat right on the scorer’s table and I watched every minute of it.”
Saturday afternoon, after one of the better games and scenes in his 30 years at MSU, Izzo was happy to celebrate what he’s built, to enjoy it with his players and former players and coaches, some of whom have an understanding of just how unlikely it once was that Izzo would stand tied with Knight for something as substantial as their number Big Ten wins.
“Bob was controversial. I loved him,” Izzo said. “He was good to me and he was a great coach, and he did many things that I haven’t done. And so if he wants to trade the record, I’ll give him a buzz tonight up there. If he wants to trade the record for the (two) other national championships, I’m all in because it’s about winning championships, not records.
“But I am proud of the record in two ways: I’m proud of it because I get to be talked about with a guy that I really thought highly of as a coach. No 2, I get to appreciate how many players (it took) — because I didn’t win one damn game — how many players won games for me in different ways. It’s amazing. It’s amazing.”
Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on X @Graham_Couch and BlueSky @GrahamCouch.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Tom Izzo beating Bob Knight changed MSU, set path to break Knight’s record
