The Kresse story

Re the thread over at DavidsonCats.com wondering about the Larry Brown and John Kresse “myths” from Davidson basketball’s past:

I’d say most folks have heard more versions and more different versions of the uncomfortable Brown coming-and-going tale from 1969.

But the John Kresse deal? No great mystery there.

He took the job in the spring of ‘81.

He was the head basketball coach at Davidson College for six days.

Then he wasn’t. Just went back to Charleston.

C of C was an NAIA school at the time, and a good program at that level, having gone 25-5 the year before. Kresse knew about Davidson and its basketball program. He had been an assistant at St. John’s in the late ‘60s and those St. John’s teams played against Lefty’s Davidson teams, and lost to them, twice, in the NCAA tournament.

“So when Davidson courted me strongly,” Kresse told me back in ‘99, “my immediate impulse was to look to get to Division I as a head coach.”

Quickly, though, he regretted the decision, he said, because of the city he left behind and the players he left behind. Who knows if those were the only reasons? Those essentially were the reasons he gave to the Charleston Post & Courier, too, in a story that ran in ’99, C of C’s first season in the Southern Conference.

From that story: “The situation with Davidson certainly wasn’t pretty, an ugly glitch that I’ll always remember and feel badly about.”

“It was the most embarrassing time in my entire life,” he told me.

Here’s what else he told me with more specificity: “When I finally realized I needed to ask out of the Davidson contract, I was recruiting in Dayton, Ohio, for the Wildcats. I called Thom Cartmill from Dayton. I met him at the Charlotte airport. Cartmill was kind enough to allow me to return to the Port City.”

Kresse won an NAIA national championship two years later. Davidson, meanwhile, hired the late Bobby Hussey. Eight years later he was fired.

His replacement was Bob McKillop.