SF Chronicle: A Stanford Hall of Famer Turns Blue and Gold

Ray Ratto

It seems so preposterously delicious, this Mike Montgomery-Cal thing. The hero of Palo Alto, the scourge of Oakland, and now the savior of Berkeley - man, that's a skullful.   The decision, apparently reported first by ESPN's annoyingly reliable Andy Katz, comes as something of a bolt from the blue, after athletic director Sandy Barbour's apparently brief chats with Pitt's Jamie Dixon and Nevada's Mark Fox. Montgomery had been linked by persistent rumormongers to Indiana (filled by Tom Crean) and Loyola Marymount (taken Thursday by Billy Bayno), but Monty to Cal was largely an Internet pipe dream, the product of illogical, disturbed and Chee-to-destroyed minds.

Except that it wasn't. Not even the Chee-to part.  Montgomery clearly recognized that opportunities, even middling ones like this, do not leap out every day, and given that he lives in the area, knows the conference and at 61 still has some tread on the mental tires, it made sense to him - and, clearly, to Barbour.

It is not yet known whether he will install his son John, currently an assistant at Furman, as an aide here, though it is safe to assume that he would not poach anyone from the current Stanford staff. It is also not known how hard he will try to recruit Ryan Anderson, who announced Thursday that he was going to investigate the NBA draft (currently figured in the 18 to 25 range).  But it is known that he becomes the first member of the Stanford Hall of Fame to seek and find work up the 880 Corridor, and that will cause some brains to bend.

Montgomery has been out of the game for 585 days, since getting the black ticket from the Warriors, and he never hid the fact that he wanted back in. Cal, though, seemed like an odd fit, at least for those people who believe that Cal and Stanford aren't actually two sides of the same coin.   And the money? Oh, the money. Rumored (though not yet confirmed) to be in the six-year, $10 million range, it surely would get Montgomery's attention. The money is fungible, of course, but the duration is the intriguing part, given that he would be 67 when the contract expired. Fortunately for him, and Cal, nobody regards a contract as anything other than a general rubric - Ben Braun's contract ran through 2011, and Barbour ran through him with three years to spare.

Whether this makes cosmic sense for Cal is another issue, and one that can only be answered in each person's head. Fan response on the chat boards was running relatively even, and that is in places where everyone starts with the same assumption, that God, Allah and Robert Gordon Sproul all agree that Cal is the center of the galaxy. Montgomery is a weird sell for those who believe that Stanford is the natural predator and enemy of all things Bear.

But politics makes strange bedfellows, and if this seems a bit like Bob Knight at Purdue, Geno Auriemma at Tennessee, or Barack Obama at the Clinton family weenie roast and fund-raiser, well, so be it.  Montgomery is a name, which Barbour clearly felt the program needed. He has a Division I track record, which others, including putative favorite Mike Dunlap, did not. He becomes a sure talker; here at the college basketball trade show that is the Final Four, the news is being regarded as something between a surprise (that Montgomery would take the job after being so secure at Stanford) and amazement (that the numbers and length would be so inspirational).

Assuming the agreement in principle doesn't explode, a press conference will be scheduled soon, at which time Montgomery will turn on his evident, if occasionally asymmetrical, charms upon the same folks who saw him in triumph at Stanford and in defeat in Oakland.  The challenge of Cal is a daunting one - not quite Oregon State, where San Diego's Bill Grier just turned down the Beavs for the security of San Diego (!), but still a program in long and studied repose. Montgomery must pretty well hit the ground running, which will not be easy if Anderson leaves.

We won't know for some time whether he is what Cal needs, but we know he is what Sandy Barbour needed. She couldn't come in with an off-brand name or someone else's fourth choice, and though Dunlap would have been a sound choice, Montgomery is one fraught with greater possibilities at each end of the spectrum.   Barbour went deep with Joanne Boyle on the women's side, and this is her second high-profile hire. No pressure, though.