Long before Monday afternoon arrived, and Matt McCall became the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s 19th men’s basketball coach, he had the same dream as most youngsters who could, in his words, “really, really shoot.”
Said McCall of that dream: “I wanted to play in the NBA.”
But he wasn’t lucky enough to be blessed with the same body as his father, Wayne, who was a University of Florida linebacker good enough to become the Gators’ captain in the mid-1960s.
“My mother’s a musician,” McCall said. “I got a musician’s body.”
So despite several Division II scholarship offers and a preferred-walk-on invitation from Stetson, McCall decided to embrace the immortal words of Clint Eastwood’s iconic character Dirty Harry, who once noted, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”