By GLENN GUILBEAU, Tiger Rag Editor
Dale Brown, who dramatically turned around a dormant LSU basketball program in the 1970s and took it to its first Final Four since 1953 in 1981 with another one in 1986 and who brought some of the most talented players in the nation to LSU such as Shaquille O’Neal and Chris Jackson, died at the age of 90 on Friday in Baton Rouge, Tiger Rag has learned.
Brown was just over a week from his 91st birthday. He was born on Halloween, Oct. 31, 1935, in Minot, North Dakota. He moved to Baton Rouge ahead of the 1972-73 season from an assistant coaching job at Utah State and never moved away.
He had been ill for several months at his home in Baton Rouge with his wife Vonnie and daughter Robyn Brown Prudhomme. Dale and Vonnie were high school sweethearts and married in 1959. They have three grandchildren – Christopher, Peyton and Cameron – from Robyn and her husband Chris Prudhomme, who met as LSU students in the early 1980s.
“We have lost the most loving and most loved man any of us has ever known,” the Brown family said in a statement Friday. “Dale Brown always put others first. He always led with the heart. He was always a great humanitarian before anything else. Dale long ago fell in love with Louisiana. And the people of Louisiana loved him right back. We are forever grateful for that.”
A graduate in 1957 of Minot State, where he was a three-sport star in football, basketball and track, Brown was an assistant at Utah State from 1966-71 after coaching high school basketball in North Dakota and California for several years.
Brown was named the Associated Press Coach of the Year in 1981 and was a four-time Southeastern Coach of the Year. In 1979, Brown led the Tigers to their first SEC regular season championship since 1954 and won three more league titles in 1981, ’85 and ’91.
His four SEC regular season titles were the most of any SEC coach in history not at Kentucky. Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp won 27, Joe B. Hall had eight and John Calipari six. Brown is the last LSU coach to win the SEC Tournament, in 1980.
A salesman through and through, Brown regularly began selling out the Pete Maravich Assembly Center – dubbed the “Deaf Dome” in the late 1970s and kept filling it on through the early 1990s before he retired after the 1996-97 season.
Brown’s Tigers reached 10 straight NCAA Tournaments from 1984 through 1993 with O’Neal dominating the SEC from 1989-92 after Jackson from 1988-90. In all, Brown took LSU to 13 NCAA Tournaments from 1979-1993. The Tigers had been to two before him in 1953 and ’54 after the tournament began in 1939.
The final years of Brown’s career were marred by an NCAA investigation over alleged recruiting violations. During the 1996-97 season, the NCAA concluded that an LSU booster had paid one of Brown’s former players, Lester Earl, about $5,000 while he played for the Tigers. The Tigers went on probation in 1998 under Brown’s replacement, John Brady. Earl apologized to Brown years later, and Brown as he so often did in his life, forgave him.
Brown was inducted into the College Basketball Hall of Fame in 2014, the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame in 1999 and the LSU Athletics Hall of Fame in 2013.
The Pete Maravich Assembly Center court was named after Brown in 2022. When Brown’s name was unveiled on the court during a halftime ceremony, Brown credited his former players and assistant coaches, many of whom were in attendance that night.
“The best potential of me is we,” Brown said, using one of his favorite comments, at the ceremony. “This is an example.”
Brown idolized UCLA coaching legend John Wooden and remained friends with him until Wooden died in 2010.
“I will always remember Dale for his enthusiasm,” Wooden said of Brown. “He amazed me because there is a lot more depth to the man. He was much more than a basketball coach.”
Just this week, Brown received the John Wooden Legends of Coaching award.
Brown promoted LSU basketball from the outset by traveling the state and hanging purple and gold nets on every goal he saw while drivng by.
He finished with a 448-301 record at LSU in 25 years with Elite Eight finishes in 1980 and 1987 in addition to the Final Fours.
After his coaching career, Brown focused on motivational speaking, which he did often while coaching. He also started the Dale Brown Foundation that strived to promote educational opportunities for young people with physical disabilities, impoverished backgrounds or from broken homes.
Brown came from a broken home as his father left him as a very young child with his mother, who raised him in a small tenement apartment in Minot.
“I’ll never forget where I came from,” Brown said during his induction weekend at the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame in 1999. “It never left me, and it fueled me throughout my life.”
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