“You need to write a book.”
If former University of Tennessee at Chattanooga men’s basketball coach Mack McCarthy has heard it once during his 46 years inside college hoops, he’s heard it a thousand times.
And to listen to Mack recall even a handful of colorful stories from his days as Sonny Smith’s assistant at East Tennessee State and Auburn (where he coached the legendary Charles Barkley), to his 12 seasons guiding the Mocs, to later gigs as both a head coach and assistant at Virginia Commonwealth and East Carolina (as well as a stopover as assistant for Georgia Tech’s women’s program), to his current television work is to clearly understand why.
Plus, as the 68-year-old recently said of his desire to take on such a project before any more time passed, “I do forget more than I used to.”
So when he was quarantined inside his home in Greenville, North Carolina, after a friend contracted COVID-19 in March just after the sports world, and pretty much everything else, stopped turning, he got out his laptop and began to chronicle his professional past.