The meteoric rise and fall of Bob Bender, Washington’s once promising, young college basketball coach.
(Photo by Harley Soltes / Seattle Times).
With apologies to soccer star David Beckham, no one could bend it like Bob Bender.
He had it all. Good looks. Infectious personality. Energetic recruiter. A son of a successful high-school basketball coach. A standout player at Indiana and Duke, two of college basketball’s blueblood programs. A coaching disciple of legendary Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski.
Arriving at the University of Washington in 1993 as its 17th basketball coach, Bender had his work cut out for him. The program he inherited from Lynn Nance was in disarray.
But Bender had big plans. He had every intention of building the Huskies into “the Duke of the West.”
When his Husky team advanced to the Sweet 16 in 1998, coming within a buzzer-beater putback by UConn’s “Rip” Hamilton from moving to the Elite Eight, UW was looking a lot like Coach K’s teams from Durham, North Carolina. Bender’s star was soaring as high as Microsoft stock. Texas and other suitors lined up to lure him away. But four years later he was out the door, caught in the spin cycle of a “what-have-you-have-done-for-me-lately” culture that is not only indicative of our society today, but is especially true of college and professional sports.
I caught up with Bender in early January to talk about the current woes of UW’s basketball program. He expressed empathy for the “down cycle” Mike Hopkins is currently going through, recognizing how difficult it is to sustain a winning program in today’s era of one-and-done players and the increasingly popular transfer portal. He cited North Carolina and Kentucky’s recent struggles as examples that even the best college programs go through tough times. He certainly experienced a dropoff at Washington. It would cost him dearly.
After taking the Huskies to back-to-back NCAA Tournament berths, Bender’s last three teams never came close to reaching the postseason. But help was on the way. He had secured Brandon Roy and Nate Robinson in his final recruiting class. He never got to coach them. Instead, the two future NBA stars would become the springboard for the program’s early turnaround under his successor, Lorenzo Romar. This must have been hard for Bender to watch.
According to a well-placed source, after Bender’s last game – a 86-64 loss to Oregon in the first round of the 2002 Pac-10 Tournament in which UW had jumped out to an early lead, Bender thought he was done. His wife, Alice, was seen outside the locker room crying. But when the team returned to Seattle, UW Athletic Director Barbara Hedges led Bender to believe he would be back. He held end-of-season meetings with his players with that in mind.
Ten days after the season, according to this source, Hedges reversed course and fired Bender.
For years, Bender never spoke to reporters about his ouster at UW, though I’m told they tried. He would only talk about how he enjoyed his new life as an NBA assistant coach, which he did for 15 years until his retirement two years ago. Perhaps his talking about his exit would be interpreted as sour grapes.
For whatever reason – perhaps time has at least partially healed some wounds – he graciously talked to me. After making several calls to cell phones that were either disconnected or wrong numbers, on my final attempt I reached a number that belonged to Alice. She handed the phone to Bob. He talked, at first reluctantly, then opened up as we went along.
We didn’t address his firing specifically, but he said his final team, which finished 5-13 in conference play and 11-18 overall, “fought hard, but we just didn’t get the job done.”
At the end of Bender’s tenure at UW, he didn’t have much to fight with.
When Ray Giacoletti left in 1997 to take the head coaching job at North Dakota State, Bender not only lost his trusted, top assistant coach, but also his best recruiter. Giacoletti was largely responsible for landing Todd MacCulloch, a raw, 7-foot center from Winnipeg, Manitoba, who would become an All-American, lead the nation in field-goal percentage for three seasons and finish as one of the top scorers in school history.
And he had help. The UW coaching staff spanned the globe for the other starters on the 1998 Sweet 16 team, arguably one of the most talented groups in school history:
Patrick Femmerling, a 7-foot-1 rim protector (Dusseldorf, Germany); shooting guards Deon Luton (Del City, Oklahoma) and Donald Watts (Lake Washington High, Kirkland), son of former Sonic great Slick Watts; and point guard Jan Wooten (Elizabeth, New Jersey). Bench depth included freshman forward Thalo Green (Salem, Oregon) and point guard Dan Dickau (Prairie High, Vancouver, Washington), who would later become an All-American player at Gonzaga. That team very easily could have featured Watts and future NBA star Jason Terry in the same backcourt. Both were UW verbal commits in the same class. But in a signing day surprise, Terry, who starred at Seattle’s Franklin High School, cast his lot with Lute Olson and Arizona.
Two seasons later, the bulk of that group that lost to UConn at the buzzer in the Sweet 16 had graduated, and the talent drain was underway.
Dickau transferred to Gonzaga, an alarming trend that would later see promising point guard Senque Carey leave for New Mexico and guard Erroll Knight for Gonzaga. Bender’s final three teams were, for the most part, not very athletic and undersized –unless you count 6-11, 300-pound center David Dixon, who arrived from a Texas junior college overweight and out of shape. Dixon could not play for very long stretches at a time. When he was out of the game, he was often seen on the sidelines riding an exercise bike.
Bender thought he was poised for a turnaround with Robinson and Roy on board for the 2002-2003 season. But three consecutive losing seasons at most Power Five schools today will get you fired, and that was even true back then. Looking back on it years later, Bender says he left the program in much better shape than when he arrived.
“We rebuilt the program and left a foundation for Lorenzo, and now going forward,” he told me. “It should always be in a position to have success.”
Of course we know now fans and athletic directors have a short memory when it comes to success. The Husky basketball program, just two years removed from an NCAA Tournament berth, is struggling mightily in Hopkins’ fourth season there, his team on track to one of the worst win-loss records in school history. Now fans are calling for Hopkins’ head.
| Winningest UW coaches | Wins | Years |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Clarence “Hec” Edmundson | 488 | 1921-1947 |
| 2. Lorenzo Romar | 298 | 2003-2017 |
| 3. Marv Harshman | 246 | 1972-1985 |
| 4. Tippy Dye | 156 | 1951-1959 |
| 5. Bob Bender | 116 | 1994-2002 |
The UW’s Sweet 16 run is just one of many fond memories Bender had at Washington. He and Alice started their family in Seattle, made good friends there. They spent a month last summer at Sun Valley Resort in Idaho, reconnecting with some of those friends they hadn’t seen since they left the Emerald City nearly two decades ago.
Time has moved on. People have moved on. Bender said the only person he’d recognize in the UW athletic department now would be current AD Jen Cohen, who was just beginning her climb up the ranks back then. “She was awesome,” he said.
People I talked to inside and outside the UW also liked Bender. It remains a mystery to me how this shooting star in the college basketball coaching ranks fell prematurely to earth, never to coach a college game again.
In my wide-ranging interview with him, he talked about his recollection of his first team at UW, the gut-wrenching, Sweet 16 loss to UConn, and his time in the NBA, among other topics, in my story for The Seattle Times in January. Here’s the link:
| Bender at UW | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Year | W-L (Conf.) | W-L (overall) | Pct. | Postseason |
| 1994 | 3-15 | 5-22 | .185 | |
| 1995 | 6-12 | 10-17 | .370 | |
| 1996 | 9-9 | 16-12 | .571 | NIT* |
| 1997 | 10-8 | 17-11 | .607 | NIT |
| 1998 | 11-7 | 20-10 | .667 | NCAA |
| 1999 | 10-8 | 17-12 | .586 | NCAA |
| 2000 | 5-13 | 10-20 | .333 | |
| 2001 | 4-14 | 10-20 | .333 | |
| 2002 | 5-13 | 11-18 | .379 | |
| Total | 63-99 | 116-142 | .450 |
