As brothers Dan and Mike will tell you, when you get one D’Antoni you get them all. And that has been good news for Marshall athletics.
Dan D’Antoni appreciates the benefits of taking the long view. When he steps off the porch of his home on a beautiful hilltop bluff in Cabell County, he can look to the east and see all the way to the cooling towers of the John Amos Power Plant in Winfield. A turn to the west and he gets a clear look at Ashland, Kentucky. This is his landing spot after a life lived in Mullens, Myrtle Beach, Phoenix, New York, Charlotte and Los Angeles.
This place is home.
“I’m a romantic, a dreamer,” Dan said. “That was my dream to have a house that sat on a hill. To kind of overlook everything and sit back and have your family here. I built the house so my family could come back and be comfortable.”
Brother Mike D’Antoni has his own idyllic view not far from the main gate at the Greenbrier Resort. Howard’s Creek meanders through his backyard and world-class golf courses are adjacent to his neighborhood. His house affords him the solitude to escape the night-to-night rigors of the NBA — a place to avoid the media glare after his Houston Rockets finished a run in the NBA playoffs with a 4-2 series loss to the Golden State Warriors.
“I’m going to be here for the next couple of weeks,” Mike said. “I’m going to hang out here and play a lot of golf.”
This is his home away from home.
These are “latitude” adjustments for the coaching D’Antonis, two brothers who are separated by time zones and charter flights, by hotels and gym floors. These lifestyles were fostered the old-fashioned way, back on Moran Avenue in Mullens, West Virginia. Their modest brick home was the bedrock of the D’Antoni family. Their father, Lewis, and mother, Betty Jo, created a loving abode and Mullens literally became the kids’ personal playground.
“Dad made sure the playground was always open,” Dan recalls. “The basketball nets were nice, the court was clean, the lights were on. He set the table for you not to fail.”
“There were very few distractions in Mullens, let’s put it that way,” Mike said. “That made it a little bit easier. You grow up and do the right thing. The whole town was fundamental in everything we did.”
Nobody seems more comfortable with his place in life than Marshall’s basketball coach. Dan is something of a “hillbilly” philosopher, and he would take no offense at that description. He’s always looking ahead with the ability to reminisce at the same time. It’s how he’s able to turn the page from Marshall’s first-ever Conference USA championship and its first-ever NCAA tournament win in 2018, to a College Inside Tournament Championship in 2019. He’s always focused on the road ahead.
“Dad always told me the guy who’s running the 100-yard dash and looks back to see if he’s winning usually loses,” Dan said. “Just keep running through the tape and on to the next one.”
When he took the Marshall head coaching job in 2014, there were some skeptics. There was an effort from Marshall to try to entice younger brother Mike to coach in Huntington. That didn’t work out, but the Herd was getting a D’Antoni one way or the other. Dan brought swagger, confidence and charisma to the Marshall program.
Now, at age 71, he is already approaching 100 wins with the Thundering Herd and has taken the program to heights unseen.
“I don’t think negatively,” Dan said. “Find the positive and chase it. I didn’t think, ‘Man, I may be too old; I don’t have enough experience; I’ve never coached at this level or my time has passed.’ When I got the job I said, ‘I’m doing it.’”
Younger brother Mike had no doubt that Dan would succeed at Marshall. He watched him build Socastee High School in Myrtle Beach into a national program. He hired him as an NBA assistant, not to be a “Yes-man,” but to help him implement the D’Antoni system at the highest level of basketball. They did that in Phoenix, New York and Los Angeles. After those years of experience, Mike knew Dan was more than ready to lead his own college program. The only downside is that it didn’t happen sooner for his brother.
“There’s a lot of pride and satisfaction to see what he’s done with the basketball program,” Mike said. “I suffer and can hardly watch the Marshall games because I’m too emotionally involved — I don’t need any more stress in my life. Dan has done an unbelievable job and he will continue to do so because he really cares about Marshall. He loves the people, he loves the community, he loves Marshall.”
Back at those playgrounds in Mullens, the D’Antoni brothers honed their games in the 1960s and usually against some very accomplished players. They pushed each other too. Both became star point guards at Marshall and both are now Thundering Herd Hall of Famers. Each aspired to playing at the next level.
Dan got a shot at the NBA out of college, but he didn’t have the 6-foot-3-inch frame and long arms that younger brother Mike was blessed with. “The Baltimore Bullets brought me in to camp and Coach Gene Shue told me I wasn’t ‘big’ enough,” Dan recalled. “He might have meant ‘good’ enough.”
Mike got his chance to play professionally in the NBA for the Kansas City-Omaha Kings and San Antonio Spurs before taking his talents overseas, where he became a star in Europe. There he played for Olimpia Milano and became the team’s all-time leading scorer while winning five Italian League titles and two EuroLeague titles. In 1990 he was voted the Italian LBA League’s top point guard of all time, and in 2015 Olimpia Milano retired his No. 8 Jersey.
But despite all of Mike’s on-court accolades, it was Danny who nearly always had the upper hand when they competed one-on-one.
“I’d come back from Italy after the season was over and he’d go out and whip my ass,” Mike recalled. “I’m sure I’ve beaten him a few times, but not many. He was tough and fast.”
Dan doesn’t argue that he dominated what became a lopsided one-on-one series.
“But I was smart and folded before my little brother could catch up,” Dan said with a smirk. “When I was 30 I decided to retire from our one-on-one battles.”
The D’Antonis look out for one another. In fact, the family motto might as well be, “When you get one D’Antoni you get them all.” Older sister Kathy is an accomplished administrator at the West Virginia Department of Education, yet she navigates the Twitter-verse with the digital dexterity of a teenager, cheering on Herd players from her keyboard. Younger brother Mark, a lawyer in Charleston, is the volunteer assistant coach in the family. A former college player at Coastal Carolina, he’s got the gravitas to give both his brothers coaching tips.
“When they’re not annoyed by me, I think they take me seriously,” Mark says. “But I tell you, it’s not easy for me to watch the Herd or Rockets games. It’s taxing. It’s like watching my kids play.”
Mike watches the Herd program from his head coaching perch in Houston. He’s won 628 games in his NBA coaching career and has twice been named the NBA Coach of the Year. And, he’s still dishing out assists for his alma mater, helping with fundraising efforts including the recently completed Vision Campaign that he co-chaired with Chad Pennington. The duo helped raise a staggering $35 million for the athletic department and those funds, from donors large and small, led to numerous upgrades including a new soccer complex, a long-coveted indoor athletic facility that is home to both a football field and 300-meter track, new skyboxes at the football stadium, a 19,000-square-foot sports medicine research center, a 14,000-square-foot student-athlete academic center and a Thundering Herd Hall of Fame complex.
“You can aim high when you’re invested in the school and community like we are,” Mike said. “My brother Dan wants to spend the rest of his life in Huntington and that makes a huge difference. When a coach is just looking to jump from place to place, job to job, there’s no real connection to community. But when your work comes from a genuine love for the school or city, then special things can happen.”
The D’Antoni brothers, and their entire family, are evidence of that. Just look at what they have given to their alma mater over the years in terms of pride, goodwill and victories both on and off the court. The passion the D’Antoni family has for Marshall runs deep, all the way back to their Wyoming County roots. And the view of home has never looked better.
Keith Morehouse is the sports director for WSAZ NewsChannel 3 in Huntington. A 1983 graduate of the Marshall University School of Journalism, he is a regular contributor to Marshall Magazine.
Photos (from top):
Dan D’Antoni.
Mike D’Antoni.
Meet just some of the D’Antoni family: Front row: Anna (aunt), Betty Jo (mom) and Mike (brother). Back row: Kathy (sister), Lewis (dad), Dan (brother) and Mark (brother).