How Myrtle Beach, Purdue play role in strange coincidences of Beard-vs.-Bennett finale
Tonight it’s Chris Beard vs. Tony Bennett.
No, not the Tony Bennett who hired Beard as the Myrtle Beach-based South Carolina Warriors head coach more than seven years ago. It’s the other Tony Bennett, the one who has taken Virginia to its first Final Four and national championship game, in which it will take on Beard and the Texas Tech Red Raiders at 9:20 p.m. today.
That name coincidence is just one of several that uniquely link Beard and Bennett heading into tonight’s winner-take-all game.
Thanks . . . sort of
Beard left his post as an assistant at Texas Tech in 2011 when head coach Pat Knight was let go. At the same time, Tony Bennett, who is based in Indianapolis, was the original GM and later the owner of the Warriors and was in the process of looking for a coach through basketball connections he’d gained since his time as a walk-on at Purdue.
Talking with some folks, including now-Purdue coach Matt Painter, Bennett found out Beard was available as it was too late for him to find another college job, and soon Beard was on his way to the beach.
Fast forward three jobs later to when Beard was the coach at Arkansas-Little Rock and Painter again enters the equation. The Trojans went 30-5, won the Sun Belt Conference tournament and made the NCAA tourney as a 12 seed and drew fifth-seeded Purdue. Little Rock pulled the upset, beating the Boilermakers 85-83 in double overtime.
But Beard wasn’t done with Painter just yet.
Two years later, the Red Raiders made their first-ever Elite Eight berth by beating, yup, you guessed it, Purdue in the Sweet 16 of the 2018 NCAA tournament.
“It’s just kind of ironic, the circle, you know?” said Tony Bennett, the original general manager of the upstart ABA South Carolina Warriors. “The circle of basketball — it’s kind of funny.”
Perhaps Painter is lamenting lending a helping hand to Beard years ago.
Father-son connections
Tony Bennett and Virginia topped Painter and Purdue to make the Final Four this year.
As the other Tony Bennett mentioned to The Sun News, there’s connections with that result as well.
Virginia’s Tony Bennett played in the 1991 Pan American Games for famous Purdue coach Gene Keady, who missed out on a Final Four berth in 2000 when Dick Bennett, Tony’s father, led Wisconsin past the Boilermakers. It was Dick Bennett’s first and only Final Four appearance.
Painter, Keady’s hand-picked successor, this year missed out on a Final Four berth in the loss to Virginia in the Elite Eight.
For those keeping score, that’s 2 for the Bennetts and 0 for the Purdue coaches.
Who’s rooting for who?
With the tangled web, it’s difficult to determine which team Keady, who now lives in Myrtle Beach, and Painter should be rooting for.
Is it Chris Beard, who has twice knocked Painter’s teams out of the NCAA tournament in the last three years? Or is it Tony Bennett, who kept the Boilermakers out of the Final Four 19 years after his father did the same to Keady and Co.?
This may be impossible to answer, but one thing is for sure: Two Tony Bennetts and a complex Purdue coaching web have in some way played a part in the lead-up to this year’s national championship matchup.
