THE LATEST LINE: NEW SEMO COACH HAS IMPRESSIVE CREDENTIALS

It's easy to see that Gary Garner, selected last week to become the 17th head men's basketball coach in Southeast Missouri State University history, doesn't really consider what he does for a living work.

Garner, who has spent nearly 30 of his 53 years as a basketball coach, grinned broadly after Wednesday's news conference to announce his hiring when I asked him if coaching is something he always wanted to do.

"Since college, I've been out of it for two years (when he went into private business)," he said. "I haven't worked a day in my life, other than those two years."

Those two years spent in the real estate business came at a period in Garner's life when it would be only natural if he felt somewhat down in the dumps.

After all, Drake fired him as its head coach in 1988 when a new administration came on board, even though Garner had the program moving along nicely, going 50-39 in his last three years there.

All told, Garner's 95-104 record in seven seasons at Drake -- his only Division I head coaching job -- ranks him as the third winningest coach in the school's 90-year basketball history. Garner coached the last winning team at Drake and the last Drake squad that made a postseason appearance. The Bulldogs have floundered ever since he left.

When I asked him if he felt bitter about what happened at Drake, he said that's not the way he approaches things.

"It was disappointing, but I wasn't bitter," he said. "I have a saying that it's not what happens to you, it's how you react."

With that, Garner made a point about how many times you see a player miss a shot, and then commit a frustration foul on the rebound. It's the same principle, he said. It's all about how you react to what happens to you. People who are successful -- both on the basketball court and in life -- overcome what happens to them and react in a positive manner.

Garner's track record says this guy can definitely coach. He went 138-44 in six seasons at Fort Hays State in Kansas, including a 63-2 mark the past two year that featured a 34-0 Division II national championship season in 1995-96.

He also appears to be genuinely interested in the academic side of things and he's backed that up in with some pretty stringent rules. For instance, at Fort Hays, if a player missed a class -- any class -- he had to run six miles the next morning. All players also had to sit in the front row of every one of their classes.

Garner, who was selected over three other finalists, reportedly made the best overall impression on the search committee and the various groups he met with during his initial campus visit and interview process.

As can be expected, different people have different opinions over who should have been hired. The other three finalists -- Missouri assistant Kim Anderson, Iowa State assistant Sam Weaver and Purdue assistant Bruce Weber -- all had their pockets of support.

Plenty of people have asked me in the past few days if I think SEMO hired a good coach, the best possible coach to come in and try to take the program to Division I success.

I tell them that, from talking to Garner and from everything I have heard and read, it appears that SEMO got a highly impressive individual who is extremely qualified to succeed on this level.

But I also tell them that hiring a coach is kind of like the NFL draft. On draft day, it's easy to sit around and talk about which teams had a great draft. But you're really not going to know if it really was great -- or actually pretty lousy -- until a few years down the road, when you see what those draft choices have actually accomplished.

I'm extremely impressed with Garner -- just like I was extremely impressed with Anderson, Weaver and Weber when they came in for their interviews -- and have every reason to believe that he will be able to lead the Indians to plenty of Ohio Valley Conference and Division I success.

But the true answer as to whether or not SEMO hired the right man for the job will come a few years down the road, when we see what kind of shape the program is in and what kind of success the Indians have had.

~Marty Mishow is a sports writer for the Southeast Missourian