July 27, 2007

By Bill Hass
TheACC.com

GREENSBORO, N.C. - The brain can be selective about what it remembers and forgets, but occasionally there are moments indelibly etched into the memory banks.

Here are two I recall about Skip Prosser.

On a steamy August night in 2001, the Wake Forest football team opened its season at East Carolina. It was the first game for new coach Jim Grobe and the Deacons were considerable underdogs against a team that had visions of a national ranking. Wake Forest pulled the upset, and one of the first people on the field to embrace Grobe was Prosser, grinning from ear to ear.

That told me Prosser was a man who cared. To make the drive from Winston-Salem to Greenville, a considerable haul, to support the head football coach in his first game was well beyond the call of duty. But Prosser, also new on the job as head basketball coach, had bonded quickly with Grobe and I'm sure it never occurred to him to be anywhere else. I could tell from Prosser's reaction that no one was happier at the outcome.

The second moment came in February of 2003. It was a tough time for me, with my mother in the hospital and my dad in failing health. I had received a note from the Wake Forest Sports Information Department that they were thinking about me, and they mentioned that coach Prosser was including my family in his prayers. I considered that an extraordinary gesture.

My dad died shortly after that. About a week later, as much for my own therapy as anything else, I covered a Wake basketball game. As I stood in the Joel Coliseum corridor before walking out to the court, I saw the Deacon coaching staff huddled together. With tipoff only minutes away and his mind undoubtedly occupied, Prosser caught my eye, took a step forward and said, "Bill, I'm sorry for your loss."

It was a moment entirely out of public view, one human being to another, and I knew it was genuine on his part. The act of kindness meant everything to me.

"Genuine" is one of the first descriptions that comes to my mind about Prosser. If there was a phony bone in his body, I never detected it. He wasn't without flaws - he could be curt, even irritable, especially after a loss. But following those rare instances, he was always fine the next time I saw him.

Prosser was a beat writer's dream - quick with a quip, armed with an exceptional vocabulary, fond of quoting authors, poets and philosophers. And in this era of increasingly limited access and "availability" of coaches and athletes, he always returned phone calls, sometimes when he was changing planes at an airport. Whenever I dropped by practice - which in itself is almost unheard of these days - he would glance over while the players were stretching and ask, "You need me?" and then give me 10 or 15 minutes of an unfailingly good interview.

Anyone who follows Wake Forest basketball knows how much enthusiasm and passion Prosser infused into the program, from the tie-dyed T-shirts to the motorcycle entrance before home games. And no one will forget some of the classic games his team played, from the triple-overtime win at Chapel Hill to the double-overtime win against Duke in Joel to the triple-overtime ACC Tournament win against Georgia Tech last March.

Losing gnawed at Prosser and he admitted he carried the losses much longer than he should. Even after Wake suffered two consecutive losing seasons within the ACC, he never wavered in his drive to make his team better. The reported verbal commitments of three highly-ranked players for the 2008-09 season is a testament to his determination.

Prosser particularly enjoyed coaching young players with open minds who were willing to absorb instruction like sponges. As a consummate teacher, he often said the time he cherished the most was the two or three hours of practice with his team each day.

And he never forgot where he came from, up through the ranks of junior varsity high school coaching. He always welcomed high school coaches and their teams to his practices.

There was so much to admire about this man. When you cut to the core of Skip Prosser, what I will remember the most was the intimate touch of the ultimate people person. At the end of the 2006 basketball season, when I told him my plans to retire from the newspaper business, I expressed the hope that I would continue to be around the Wake Forest program on an occasional free-lance basis.

"You're welcome here anytime," he said, looking me straight in the eye. "You know that."

When you work for a newspaper for 36 years, writing obituaries and reactions to deaths comes with the territory. I probably wrote scores of them, from old-time coaches and players to contemporaries who died unexpectedly to athletes taken way too young. Many of them I knew well. Calling people for reaction to a death is never easy, especially when you have to break the news to them. The thing that helps a writer do his job is withdrawing to a place of professional detachment, at least long enough to get the story done.

Not this time. A man that I liked immensely and respected greatly on the professional and personal levels has been yanked from us, suddenly and inexplicably. I'm not going to pretend that it's anything less than acutely painful.

There's no telling how many thousands of lives he touched. Among the eloquent testimonials that poured in Thursday, the most touching to me was the end of a TV interview. Josh Howard, who blossomed under Prosser's guidance and became the ACC Player of the Year in 2003, talked about how much the coach meant to him.

"I'm really going to miss that guy," Howard said, choking back tears.

Same here, Josh. Same here.

Bill Hass is a long-time observer of ACC sports. His career at the Greensboro News & Record spanned 36 years, from 1969 until his retirement in March, 2006. He is now writing "Bill Hass on the ACC" for TheACC.com. His weekly columns will keep fans plugged in to the Atlantic Coast Conference.

This article can not be copied or reproduced without the express written consent of the Atlantic Coast Conference.