Purdue assistant coach, Texas Tech head coach go way back
BOSTON — Steve Lutz and Chris Beard worked just one season together many years ago, but it was in that single season as young coaches at Incarnate Word that a close bond that's continued to this day began.
Friday night here in Boston, either Beard's second season as Texas Tech's head coach will end, or Lutz's first season as an assistant at Purdue. The two teams are meeting in the Sweet 16 on opposite sidelines, more than 20 years after Lutz was sleeping on Beard's floor in a tiny San Antonio apartment, while the two were graduate assistant coaches together in Lutz's native city.
"We essentially lived together for a year," Lutz said Thursday. "He had an apartment down the street from Incarnate Word. I was living with my parents. He was making $3,600 for the year and I was making $2,000. We’d work in the office ’til midnight, and I’d drive across town to go to my parents’ house, or I could go sleep on his floor. I put a — I don’t know what you’d call it — little mattress under his bed, and his apartment was no bigger than 800 square feet. I’d put it underneath there and sleep in the corner, then you’d get up the next morning and go to work."
Working is all you do at that point in a coach's career.
For Lutz, it was his role at Incarnate Word plus Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and parts of Sundays, he said, tending bar at San Antonio's Bombay Bicycle Club.
"He'd come eat every night over there," Lutz said of Beard. "You don't know any different.
“Your first year in the business, where you don’t know anything about basketball or coaching, you’re just working and surviving.”
Friday in Boston, Beard used part of his NCAA Tournament press conference to discuss Lutz, sort of.
"I think I was in Steve's wedding. I don't know," Beard said in a humorous exchange. "You get to my age, you kind of forget. I kind of characterize weddings on who had the best reception. Was it an open bar? Were we in Hawaii? But I think I was in Lutz's wedding, maybe. I know he came to mine, my first wedding. I've only had one."
Beard was not in Lutz's wedding, but ...
“As Chris Beard always does, he made a late appearance, right before the wedding started," Lutz said. "He came in and brought a lot of energy right before the service began.”
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