John Chaney

John Chaney, the famously combative Hall of Fame coach who took Temple University to 17 N.C.A.A. basketball tournaments, largely recruiting high school players from poor neighborhoods who were overlooked by the college game’s national powers, died on Friday January 29 2021. He was 89. Chaney was 50 when Temple hired him, giving him a chance to coach major-college basketball after 10 seasons and a Division II championship at Cheyney State College (now Cheyney University), outside Philadelphia. He coached at Temple, in Philadelphia, for 24 seasons, winning more than 500 games and six Atlantic 10 tournament championships and taking his teams to the N.C.A.A. tournament’s regional finals five times. Chaney was voted the national coach of the year in 1987 and 1988 and elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., in 2001. John Chaney was born on Jan. 21, 1932, in Jacksonville, Fla., and grew up in a low-lying house that often flooded. His father left the family when he was young, and his mother, Early, who worked as a domestic, remarried. His stepfather, Sylvester Chaney, brought the family to the Philadelphia area during World War II, seeking work in a defense plant. He became a small-college all-American at the historically Black Bethune-Cookman College in Florida, then played briefly for the Harlem Globetrotters and played for teams in Sunbury and Williamsport, Pa., in the semipro Eastern League. Chaney’s survivors include his wife, Jeanne Dixon; their sons, Darryl and John Jr.; and their daughter, Pamela Clark.