Shelby Metcalf, whose self-effacing humor and flair for upsets shaped the image of Texas A&M basketball for nearly three decades, died Thursday night, school officials confirmed. Metcalf was 76 and had battled cancer in recent years.
In his 27 seasons as A&M's head coach, Metcalf won 428 games, more than any other coach in Southwest Conference history. His teams won SWC championships six times, including his debut season in 1964.
Metcalf was the winningest coach in SWC history, and had quite a list of accomplishments on his resume. I met Metcalf several times in passing when I was a student at A&M. He was always friendly and funny, never taking himself too seriously. There was a general feeling at the time among the students that the game had passed him by, but that's not what did him in. For some reason, John David Crow--who was the assistant AD under Jackie Sherrill and later the AD when Sherrill left--hated Shelby with a passion, and undermined the basketball program at every opportunity to try and force him out. Crow went so far as to block the original plans to build a 14,000 seat version of what would eventually become Reed Arena because he refused to let Metcalf coach in a new arena. After Crow fired Metcalf, there was an ugly lawsuit which was eventually settled, and in the summer of 1991 when I sports editor at the Battalion, I assigned one of my reporters to do a "Where is he now?" feature on Metcalf. Ever the wit, Metcalf somehow got around to talking about "The two stupidest people I ever met--one's dead, and the other I can't talk about until Aug. 31, 1994" or something along those lines. The jab, of course, was directed at Crow and the gag order on the settlement.
I'd heard several times that Metcalf planned to write a book about his SWC exploits. It'd have been funny as all get-out, I'm sure. Sad now that it will never grace my book shelves.
Update: There are some all-time classic Shelby quotes over at TexAgs.com. Great stuff.
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