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Bozeman Comes Off the Bench
Former Cal basketball coach Todd Bozeman, who recuited and coached players like Jason Kidd, Lamond Murray and Shareef Adur-Raheem, relaxes at his parents' home in Forestville, Md.
(Jessica Tefft - The Washington Post)
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His wife, TeLethea, and their two children went on family vacations without the father. Bozeman's father, Ira, came to California for a six-week visit and only saw his son when he sat in the stands and watched practice.
Only once during his head coaching tenure was Bozeman persuaded to take a vacation, for a family reunion in South Carolina. He flew back to Maryland and drove to South Carolina with his brother, Michael, the girls' basketball coach at Bishop McNamara.
"I thought we would finally get to catch up," Michael said.
Bozeman had other ideas. He brought a portable television and a VCR in the car so he could spend the five-hour drive watching game tape.
"He was always overdoing it," Michael said. "And my thing was, where do you go from there? You're 30 years old, you're getting every top recruit, you're working like a mad man -- where do you go from there? He kept turning up the dial, turning up the dial. He was going to lose his head. I mean, something had to happen."
Something did.
Convinced he had to sign Mendocino, Calif., point guard Jelani Gardner to replace Kidd, Bozeman agreed to pay Tom and Linda Gardner $15,000 each year Gardner played at Cal so the family could travel to watch his games. Through intermediary Butch Carter, Bozeman made two such payments, preceding Jelani's freshman and sophomore years. Then the Gardners, frustrated by their son's lack of playing time, turned Bozeman in to the NCAA.
Carter was later exonerated because he said he did not know what the money was for, and he was named head coach of the NBA's Toronto Raptors two years later.
"It was temporary insanity on my part, that's the only thing I can say," Bozeman said. "Initially I wasn't going to do it, then I did it. The thing that kills me is we would have gotten the kid anyway. I would have had him anyway. I just got caught up in competing. I got crazy."
Said Tom Gardner, Jelani's father: "It was a huge train wreck. That's putting it as bluntly as I can. Going to the NCAA was a lifetime call. It's something that changed a lot of lives."
An Uncertain Future
There are days when Bozeman wonders if the Gardners actually did him a favor; May 22 was one of them.
In the early afternoon, he spent three hours at a D.C. Assault practice, where he looked and felt very much like the coach who became famous coaching Cal games on ESPN. Decked out in a black-and-white Adidas shirt, black shorts and Adidas shoes, Bozeman stopped the practice every five minutes to admonish someone, then ended each criticism with a high-five.
