Dantley’s last job, as an assistant coach with the Denver Nuggets, also ended badly. He was canned after the 2010-2011 season for refusing to sit in a row of seats behind the players, as head coach George Karl had asked his aides to do.
Dantley knew he’d bruised folks during and after his playing days. “I’ve got enemies out there,” he told me in 2007, after he had been bizarrely denied again for the basketball hall of fame.
But those wounds seem to have healed, and all the honors that took too long to come Dantley’s way have been realized in the past few years: His jersey was retired by the Jazz in 2007, and in ceremonies related to the event Layden took the blame for everything that went wrong. Dantley was elected to the hall of fame in 2008 after way too long a wait. And Notre Dame, which he left amid some squabbling with Digger Phelps, put him in the school’s Ring of Honor in 2012. In a speech given as his jersey was hung in the rafters at the Joyce Center, Dantley tried to explain to the kids that life didn’t get much better than college, even for superstars.
“Enjoy your years here at Notre Dame,” he said. “You get a job in the real world, it’s going to be a lot different.”