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Monday, July 17, 1989
A Surprise Translation
Jack Cavanaugh
Not many first-time authors receive letters of praise from such literary giants as James Michener. But Dan Doyle did. And what makes that particularly noteworthy is that Doyle is a former college basketball coach with no experience as a writer.
The Michener letter, which described his work as "fascinating" and "impressive," was one of several surprises Doyle has experienced following the publishing of his novel, "Are You Watching Adolph Rupp?" which offers an insight into many of the abuses in big-time college basketball.
Though friends like Bob Cousy, who wrote the introduction, told him he had written a good novel, Doyle was skeptical about the book's chances. But the novel, published by Stadia Publishers, has done very well and is about to go into its third printing.
The latest surprise was a telephone call that Doyle received last week requesting permission to translate the novel into Czechoslovak.
"A lady who serves as a translator for a number of Czech sports federations phone from Czechoslovakia and said that a member of their basketball federation had picked up the book while he was here for the Final Four in Seattle in April," Doyle said in an interview. "After a few more phone calls, we worked out a deal that definitely is not going to make me rich."
Doyle, who is 40 years old, is aware that some cynics will think that Czechoslovak authorities want to publish the book because is depicts the seamy side of American college basketball, although the main protagonist is an honest coach who eschews any illegal practices. But he does not believe that is the reason for their interest.
"I'd like to think they feel it's a good story," said Doyle who was a coach at Trinity College in Hartford before founding the Institute for International Sport at the University of Rhode Island, which he serves as the executive director.
"One factor for the interest by the Czechs, I think, is their incredible curiosity about American college and professional basketball, neither of which they have, although the sport is very popular in Czechoslovakia," he said. "And they told me they like it because it demonstrates the human ability to triumph over adversity."
Tuesday, September 5, 1989
Here's a great guy who's finishing first
Bill Reel
Spend the weekend reading a wonderful novel with a New York setting authored by a great guy with a ton of integrity, Dan Doyle. His success in writing and publishing despite a decidedly unorthodox approach to both is a story almost as good as his book.
"I have a wife, six children, and a job, so writing full-time obviously was out of the question," Dan, 40, told me. We gabbed on the phone yesterday. "I wrote only on Sunday mornings from 7:30 to 10:30. By that time everybody was up and we went to church. It took me three years but it was a labor of love. I don't play golf. Writing was my escape. It was never drudgery."
Dan lives in West Hartford, Conn., and commutes to work in Rhode Island. The drive takes an hour and a half. "Instead of listening to the radio or daydreaming, I used the commuting time to think about the story," Dan said. "I traveled with a tape recorder. I thought about characters and visualized scenes and made comments on tape. When I sat down Sunday morning to write, I knew what I wanted to say."
With no experience in publishing, Dan sought advice from those in the know and was assured that he needed a high-powered agent. He contacted one in New York. She read what he had produced and like it, but…"There's no sex, and novels without sex don't sell," she told Dan in no uncertain terms. "Your story is about college athletics with all the warts-a perfect vehicle for plenty of sex. This novel needs sex and lots of it."
Dan told her he had spent a good part of his life in college basketball, and that a gratuitous emphasis on sex would distort the truth and smear good family men in the game. He was writing because he had something important to say. He wanted to portray the power-grabbing, egoism and greed that infect big-time college sports. He also wanted to show that coaches, players and administrators with good moral values could prevail over the sleazy element bent on exploitation. To throw in sex scenes for sales would discredit his purpose. He wouldn't consider it.
End of relationship with agent. Dan took it from there. "I sent a manuscript to one of the major book distributors, and their representative liked it so much they agreed to distribute the book," Dan related. "I sent a manuscript to a bookstore chain, and they agreed to sell it. The introduction to my book is by Bob Cousy. The bookstore representative was a big fan of Bob's. I think that helped. A few friends and I formed a publishing company, Stadia Publishers of Kingston, R.I. We paid for the initial printing. Soon we had enough orders so there was a cash flow."
"Are You Watching Adolph Rupp?" (Stadia Publishers, $18.95) came out last February. Some 36,000 copies have been sold. Expectations are high for strong Christmas sales. Creative Artists Agents of Los Angeles has approached Dan about making it into a movie.
This novel evinces the same kind of authenticity that made Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities" a best seller. A reader can tell that the author is intimately familiar with his subject. The hero of the novel, Jack McHale, reminded me of Holy Cross coach George Blaney, one of the outstanding men in sports. "The McHale character was inspired by several coaches. George was one of them," Dan acknowledged.
The struggling assistant coach, the referee desperate enough to dump a game, opportunistic parents of talented sons, avaricious sports promoters, barracudas in expensive suits in executive suites who would pollute pure sport for personal gain-they're all in this book, depicted in detail that spells truth. Maybe a few developments stretch credulity, but first-novelist Doyle is entitled to a little poetic license. "Are You Watching Adolph Rupp?" is for everyone who enjoys and cares about sports. The plot is thick, the pace fast, the ending perfect, the final scene a heart-tugger. I loved it. Doyle writes better then Reel, darn him.
Dan grew up bouncing a basketball in Worcester, Mass., wanted to play at Holy Cross but wasn't recruited, co-captained the team at Bates College and majored in psychology, got a master's in international law at Tufts University and did coaching stints at a high school and three colleges. Unwilling to keep uprooting his family to further his career, he quit coaching and settled down as founder and director of the Institute for International Sport at the University of Rhode Island. And as an avocation, he wrote this very good novel.
"Probably the most gratifying thing is that I received a letter from one of my favorite authors, James Michener, saying he loved the book," Dan said. He added that he's at work on another novel-Sunday mornings before church only, of course. Say, that might do for a title.
April 3, 1989
Irish Eyes, and Rupp, Are Watching Doyle
Joe Gergen
NEW YORK- Dan Doyle picked his Final Four some time ago, long before the start of the college basketball season. Three of the teams that qualified for his national championship semifinals at the Kingdome, North Carolina, Indiana, and Iowa-were traditional powers. The fourth-State University of New York-was an outsider of his invention.
A former college coach, a part-time promoter, and a full-time educator, Doyle recently entered the field of fiction. His theme was ethics and morality in an era of greed and corruption. His vehicle was basketball, a sport with which he has been involved for most of his life and with which he remains romantically linked.
"Are You Watching Adolph Rupp?" traces the resurrection of a college program through sound coaching, clever marketing, and illegal recruiting inducements. It's a story as old as sin and as new as the next package of cash to a poor family delivered by an air freight company. Perhaps mindful of the little problem at Kentucky, Purolater was the choice of Doyle's antagonist.
The book, offered by Stadia Publishers in Kingston, R.I., examines many of the abuses with which we have grown all too familiar. But it does so with an abiding affection for the game that is evident from the first chapter, the Holiday Festival showdown between Bill Russell's San Francisco Dons and Tommy Heinsohn's Holy Cross club told from a small boy's perspective. The title is illustrative of the man's feel not only for the rhythms of the sport, but for its history.
It refers to an actual event at the NCAA coaches' convention held in conjunction with the 1977 Final Four in Atlanta. Doyle, then in the process of moving from an assistant's job at Brown to the position of head coach at Trinity (Conn.), was among the coaches who listened to speeches made by three of the most accomplished men in the history of college basketball-Henry Iba, John Wooden, and Adolph Rupp.
"Rupp was the last to speak," recalled Doyle, now the executive director of the Institute for International Sport at the University of Rhode Island. "Everyone seemed to know he was close to dying. He gave this incredible speech about basketball and life. I remember him freely quoting Parkingham Beatty and Rudyard Kipling. He called Kipling 'Roodyard.' He got a standing ovation that lasted several minutes."
Doyle confessed he would have liked to have spoken with Rupp after that address. So he did the next best thing. He put his protagonist Jack McHale, in his seat and had him follow the legendary Kentucky coach back to his hotel room, where he introduced himself and told Rupp what an effect that speech had on him. Rupp's imagined response? "I'll be watching you, son."
In the book, McHale takes his State University of New York team all the way to Seattle for the NCAA title game. But the price of the trip in human lives is considerable, the result of payoffs and deceit on the part of school officials. Real coaches as well as real problems within the sport are woven into the fabric of the story, one that remains basically hopeful.
"I'm very optimistic," Doyle said. "I think 99% of the people in the game go in for the right reasons. And I think (Executive Director) Dick Schultz will be good for the NCAA."
If there is one thing Doyle would like to see changed, it is freshman eligibility rule. "A lot of people talk about he Proposition 48 and 42," he said. "To me, they miss the point. Freshmen now miss too much school. You're always better off with a period of preparation. I think one of the problems has been that people on the fringes have grabbed too much power base. If productive changes come about, it has to be the presidents who take control."
Doyle knows something about administration. After he earned a master's degree at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts, he started the Irish American Sports Foundation, a volunteer organization that has sent more than 300 coaches-among them Hubie Brown, Jack Ramsay and Billy Cunningham-to the Emerald Isle in the last six years and has provided the funding for the first major indoor arena in Dublin.
Doyle's institute at Rhode Island, the first of its kind in the country, has prepared to carry the ideals of sport to foreign lands.
Despite his heritage, the connection with Ireland came about by accident. Doyle was taking a sabbatical from coaching in 1981 after a 22-4 season at Trinity in order to spend more time with his autistic son, Dan jr., one of six Doyle children.
"I had promised the Czech basketball people a clinic," he recalled, "and my flight had a stopover in Ireland. A story about my upcoming trip appeared in the local paper, and a neighbor of mine, who had connections in Ireland, talked to people over there. So I got a call form the Irish Basketball Federation.
"Noel Keating, the president, met my plane. He's a 5-4 schoolteacher, and he was standing with a sign that had a basketball painted on it. He said, 'You're not going to believe how bad our facilities are.'" Certainly, that statement was accurate.
In time, Doyle coached the Irish national team and initiated the foundation that has contributed to athletics throughout the island. From that sprang the seeds for the institute at Rhode Island, a program that awards master's degrees in international sport and trains sports educators for duty overseas. Doyle's occasional forays into promoting will continue with the New England closed-circuit telecasts of Sugar Ray Leonard-Thomas Hearns rematch in June.
The book was a three-year undertaking that drew on his international experience as well as his knowledge of basketball and coaching. Not only had the finished product given him satisfaction, but it has provided Doyle with an opportunity to monitor the sports closest to his heart. He has attended book autographing sessions in Providence, R.I., and Lexington, Ky., in conjunction with the NCAA Tournament events and will do the same in Seattle, site of the real, and his imagined, Final Four.
There's nothing coincidental about the scheduling. "At this time of the year, I kind of miss coaching," the author said. "(The NCAA Tournament) still is a great event."
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