Doyel: Former Bobby Knight student-manager Dusty May is coaching's next big star

One thing you should know about Dusty May, the former IU basketball manager who has turned FAU into a mid-major monster: He values efficiency. No. 20 FAU has the country’s longest winning streak and a 21-1 record behind an offense that ranks among national leaders in effective field goal percentage, but that’s so much blah blah blah. And it’s not the efficiency you need to know about.

More like, economical efficiency. More like, he’s cheap.

“Frugal,” Dusty’s trying to tell me from his office in Boca Raton, Fla., where he’s stacking self-help books – he particularly enjoys Doug Lemov, an IU graduate – and all those wins.

You decide. He rides his bike to work, because it’s only 1½ miles from his house and because he lives in Boca and because he’s a fitness freak. He tries to argue that it’s a nice bike – “It’s a Felt,” he says, like that means something to me – but I know more:

He’s had it for more than 10 years, when he was an assistant coach at Louisiana Tech. He bought it from a doctor in Ruston, La.

And he bought it used.

“The seat is definitely worn down to a nub,” reports former IU guard Dane Fife, whose career at IU for Bob Knight overlapped with May’s time as a student-manager (1996-2000), and who was a graduate assistant under Mike Davis when May was on Davis’ administrative staff from 2003-05. They’re good friends, Fife and May, with Dane visiting Dusty last month to see the wonders he’s been working with that FAU basketball program, though with friends like this…

“Who told you about the bike?” Dusty’s asking me.

One guess, I tell him.

“Anything stupid probably comes Fife,” he says.

But eventually Dusty relents. He tells the story of rejoining Davis at UAB in 2007. May was working at the time at Murray State, for Davis’ buddy Billy Kennedy. Davis called Kennedy with a question:

“The job doesn’t pay a lot,” Davis told Kennedy. “Is that going to be a problem?”

Kennedy answered: “Dusty still has the first dollar he ever made. He’ll be fine.”

Dusty’s chuckling as he tells that story from his office in beautiful Boca, but he’s unaware of just how much I plan to write about the topic of efficiency.

His bike as an administrative assistant at IU, before he bought that used Felt at Louisiana Tech? Another hand-me-down, that thing, with tires that were beyond flat. More like: rotted. It had been IU student-manager Jon Stuckey’s bike as a kid, an old 10-speed still hanging in the family garage in Brazil, Ind., until Dusty May bought it, replaced the tires and rode it to work at Assembly Hall the next day.

'An ability to irritate people'

Another thing you should know about Dusty May, who inherited a loser of an FAU program – five winning seasons in its first 31 years – and has led it to five winning seasons in five seasons: He values toughness. FAU is among national leaders in rebound margin and field-goal percentage defense, but that’s so much blah blah blah. And it’s not the toughness you need to know about.

More like comical toughness. More like, he’s a hothead.

“Ultra-competitive,” Dusty’s trying to tell me from his office in Boca Raton, Fla., where staff rules include the following: If you’re going to be on the phone for more than two minutes, take it outside. Get some sun. Be healthy.

You decide. He plays pickup basketball daily – or he will again, when his knee heals from massive surgery – with games after practice, FAU coaches vs. graduate assistants, with a running clock for 30 minutes because things could get ugly if it goes much longer.

“I’ve not played many games in my life where I didn’t get into fisticuffs,” says May, a four-year starting point guard at Eastern Greene, 20 miles southwest of Bloomington, for current Lafayette Jeff coach Mark Barnhizer. “I’m physical, know how to get leverage.”

Pause.

“I have an ability to irritate people,” he says.

When he was an administrative assistant at IU, daily pickup games – staff against graduate assistants and managers – meant Dusty vs. Dane, and things got ugly. Dane’s a tough guy himself, or thinks he is anyway, and in eighth grade he won his county’s half-mile race by such a wide margin, he turned around and ran the last 50 yards backward. Cocky, too. Which is why he’d been talking big, when he and Dusty worked for Davis, about winning the preseason stress test administered by IU trainer Tim Garl.

Dane must not have known that Barnhizer had his players at Eastern Greene run cross country. After spending his first year of college at then-Division II Oakland City (Ind.) – still playing basketball, still running cross country – May could run 5,000 meters in about 17½ minutes.

“Dusty and I started out shoulder to shoulder, then he starts moving ahead of me,” Dane’s telling me. “I’m thinking, ‘Ah, he’ll get tired.’ Long story short, he finished so far ahead, I couldn’t even see him. I might’ve had to stop to take a break. I was an easy second, but he didn’t just beat me. He mercy rule’d me.”

Back to basketball, where Dane and Dusty took their competition to daily pickup games.

“We had some great fights,” Dane says. “No punches were ever thrown, but he’d be pushing his team hard, and I’d be pushing mine. We had some debates.”

Says Dusty: “After a couple weeks everyone came together and said, ‘You two have to be on the same team – that way we can get through the day.’ We joined forces, became the Bad Boy Pistons, and almost never lost.”

His inner bad boy is still there. Remember his knee surgery? He’d torn the meniscus from the bone. It happened during a basketball game, a men’s league. Dusty tries to argue that it was a major tournament – “The Masters in Coral Springs,” he says, like that means something to me – but I know more:

His team was playing a group out of New York, and one of those Noo Yawk guys was sizing up the feisty FAU coach and talking trash. Listen: Don’t talk trash to Dusty May. Says Fife: “I met my match in that area.” Dusty’s giving it back, and now he has the ball, just him and the loudmouth in the open court. Dusty goes right at him and gets drilled to the floor, landing awkwardly on the knee.

“I used to be much better (playing pickup) than I looked,” says the baby-faced May, who at 46 could almost pass for a paper boy, “but right now I’m probably right on par with how I look.”

Seeded his career on Dr. Rink's lawn

Another thing you should know about Dusty May, who has grinded his way to this catbird seat – coaching the team of a lifetime now, and sure to top the wish list of every high-major school with an opening in less than two months – after 26 years in the business: He owes his career to a lawnmower.

You want to hear this story or not? Dusty was 14 when he started doing yardwork for a guy in Greene County, Dave Rutherford. Turns out, Rutherford had served in the U.S. Navy with longtime IU team physician Larry Rink. Turns out, Dr. Rink needed some yardwork done in nearby Bloomington, too.

One thing led to another, and pretty soon Rink is giving Dusty tickets to IU basketball games, then suggesting – if he’s serious about being a coach – he work for Knight as a student-manager. Dusty spent a year at Oakland City, 40 miles north of Evansville, then transferred to IU, where the doctor whose grass he once cut put in a word with Coach Knight.

Doyel: Graduates of the Bob Knight finishing school rule the sports world

May goes from student-manager on Knight’s last four teams at IU to a video position at Southern California for Henry Bibby to an administrative position for Knight’s replacement at IU, Davis. After nine years behind the bench, he gets his first assistant coaching position at Eastern Michigan, then goes to Murray State with Kennedy, then is reunited with Davis at UAB.

In 2009 he moved to Louisiana Tech, where he coached for Kerry Rupp. Here’s where life and death come together, one of those odd connections – like cutting Dave Rutherford’s grass – that can change a career. For May it started with the firing of Rupp in 2011. Louisiana Tech hired promising young Ole Miss assistant Mike White.

White didn’t know much about May, but had known one of his best friends: Torrey Ward, who played at UAB in the late 1990s and met May while working Knight’s basketball camps. Ward and May stayed close until 2015, when the Cessna 414 taking Ward from the 2015 Final Four in Indianapolis back to his assistant’s job at Illinois State crashed, killing all seven aboard.

White, who’d worked with Ward on Andy Kennedy’s staff at Ole Miss from 2006-11, started settling in at Louisiana Tech. May took his wife and their kids to Fort Myers, Fla., where she had family. He dropped them there and went on a driving tour of high school programs around Florida.

“Just to have a pulse on some guys out there (still available as recruits),” he says. “I wasn’t ever really stressed. I don’t do this to provide for my family – I do it because I love the game. Love being around it, being in the gym. I have a degree, so I knew I could figure out a way to coach ball – whether it be high school or D-II, whatever I can to stay in the game.”

White, still looking to fill his staff at Louisiana Tech, arranged a meeting with May at the 2011 Final Four in Houston, then invited him back to Ruston for another interview.

“He had me put up a list of guys who were available, that we could recruit,” May says. “He had names too, and we filled up the board and ended up signing three or four of them. That was the class that won 100 games at Louisiana Tech and changed the culture.”

White went 101-40 in four seasons at Louisiana Tech and was hired by Florida in 2015. May stayed with him until 2018, when the job opened at FAU. Any idea who the athletic director is, at FAU? Brian White.

Mike White’s brother.

“Dusty was my No. 1 choice,” Brian White said when he hired May in 2018.

Five years later, Brian White could have a vacancy again. Dusty May already is being linked to Notre Dame, with Mike Brey retiring after the season. It’s just rumor, but get used to that as dominoes fall around college basketball and Dusty May, the former student-manager at IU, has his choice of big-time jobs.

Dusty May will be country's hottest candidate

One option: May stays at FAU. Could it happen? Sure. Doesn’t seem likely, but don’t rule it out.

Twenty-five years ago, when he first met ultra-competitive Dusty May, Dane Fife knew he’d found his relentlessly driven match. Years later, working for Tom Izzo at Michigan State, Fife would tell Izzo about May.

“Those two reminded me a lot of each other – their work ethic, their willingness to go out of their way to help others, their uncanny dedication to the craft,” Fife says. “That was one of the things that worried me about (May): Would his work consume him?”

All these years later, Fife feels he has his answer. He was in Boca Raton last month visiting May, remember. Three days. Stayed at his home and everything. Here’s what he saw:

“He’s got an incredible perspective, and the ability to be a family man as much as he can,” Fife says. “How is that kid back in the day ever going to find time to be a dad and husband? Well, he has. It seems like he’s found the perfect situation and perfect balance.”

May has an easy charm about him, quick-witted and self-deprecating, and apparently does a mean impression of Chris Farley as “Tommy Boy.” But it's about to get serious as March approaches and FAU – whose only previous NCAA Tournament appearance was in 2002, a one-and-done shot as a No. 15 seed – barrels toward a single-digit seed. With nine players averaging at least 15 minutes per game but just two of them scoring in double figures, with all that offensive efficiency and toughness on defense and the glass, Dusty May has built a team you don’t want to play, and maybe even a program he doesn’t want to leave.

Before we hang up, I tell Dusty what he already must know, that his phone will be ringing after the season. It could be Notre Dame on Line 1, Ole Miss on Line 2, Cal and Stanford on Lines 3 and 4. May talks these days about handling success, how his hungry 2022-23 Owls have done just that, and now I’m asking about his own success: Is he prepared to handle it?

“I am,” he says, “because those things are down the line and I’m so consumed with our team – our program building and elevating this place – I don’t spend any brain power thinking about it or talking about it unless someone brings it up. I’ve already surpassed all goals and expectations when I got into coaching. I wanted to be a high school coach. Now this …”

Dusty May pauses.

“I’m driven by being happy every day,” he says. “And I’m happy here.”

Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at  www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.

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This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Ex-IU student-manager, Bob Knight pupil Dusty May leads FAU into March