See the coach now: 58 years old, with 716 victories and the kind of recruiting and resources to place him squarely among college basketball's elite.



This is Dana Altman in 2017.



When the third-seeded Oregon Ducks opened the NCAA men's basketball tournament Friday, March 17 versus Iona, it marked a UO-record fifth consecutive tournament appearance in Altman's seven seasons as coach in Eugene, and 13th overall in Altman's career. Home games are played in a $227 million arena with a billionaire sitting courtside. When Altman was awarded a seven-year contract extension worth $18.45 million five months ago, his athletic director said it was his hope that Oregon will be Altman's last job.



None of this, Altman says, would be possible without his first two.



From 1982-86, Altman paid his dues coaching well off of college basketball's beaten path at community colleges in Nebraska and Missouri. There, in the little-discussed portion of his long career, the die was cast for a coach whose working-class roots are still visible, even as he's entrenched among the game's upper crust.

How we reported the story

Tyson Alger of The Oregonian/OregonLive contributed reporting through his interview of Altman in Eugene.



With hard work and a few wins, a young Altman believed, he might just get a crack at coaching 10 miles from his hometown, at Nebraska's Doane College.



Instead, it led him to a fortuitous stay at a Holiday Inn in Kansas, a job at Moberly in Missouri, a career-altering recruit and a future well beyond his aw-shucks dreams.



"I'm going to be really honest," Altman said. "I never even knew if I would get into Division I."



Given Altman-coached teams have won at least 20 games in 18 of his last 19 seasons, it can be hard to picture Division I without him now. That is, until earlier this month in his Casanova Center office, when Altman was handed a picture of his younger self.



"Oh man," he said, chuckling.



See the coach then: 24, standing ramrod straight, eyeing a camera with suspicion. Fair hair covers his ears and a mustache his top lip. It's 1982, at Southeast Community College in Fairbury, Nebraska, and Dana Altman, after an MBA and a flirtation with law school, is a first-time head college basketball coach. He has a dark tie, a patterned blazer and zero victories.



Back in his office, Altman pauses. A few seconds pass.



"A long time ago, huh?"

"Hire Dana Altman"

The black-and-white photo from Altman's lone season at Southeast is from a yearbook that survived the college's move from Fairbury to Beatrice three years after Altman left, in 1983, and lived in a closet.



Bring up that team and year, however, and the memories for those who lived it rush back in vivid, full-color memories.



Gary Bargen remembers picking up the phone late in spring 1982 and hearing Southeast's college president on the other end. He needed recommendations for his basketball coaching opening -- for a third time. And the previous two times, much to Bargen's chagrin, his advice had gone unheeded.



"I said, 'Hey, are you serious? You want to know who to hire?'" said Bargen, who'd coached at Southeast for nine seasons until 1978. "He said yeah. I said: 'Hire Dana Altman.'"





The Altman name would have been familiar. He'd grown up in Wilber, a 35-mile drive away, before playing point guard for Bargen at Southeast from 1976-78. Altman met his wife Reva there, before finishing his playing career at Eastern New Mexico and starting in coaching as an assistant at Western State in Colorado. As a teen, he'd arrived in Fairbury with a smooth crossover, a solid midrange jumper but a better "basketball mind," one that wowed Bargen, his coach, from the start, as Altman grasped concepts quicker than any of his teammates.



That was helpful, considering Bargen's budget didn't include enough money for an assistant.



"I always had him sit beside me even when he wasn't in the game and run things by him," Bargen said. "Maybe he saw something I didn't."



In 1982, what Bargen saw at Southeast was an opportunity for his former player to become a full-fledged coach. Altman was a few weeks shy of 24 when he accepted the job in June, barely older than one of his players, a 6-foot-7 post from rural Virginia named Neil Wake.



"The thing about Dana," Wake said by phone, "is Dana always knew who he was."



By that he meant a grinder. And he needed to be, because at Southeast, Altman inherited a successful team and almost nothing else. Tucked among the fields of southeastern Nebraska, Fairbury had 4,800 residents, 19 churches, six doctors, eight lighted tennis courts, and a few hundred students at a 42-year-old junior college with one dorm, the school's yearbook noted.



"You wouldn't want to dare bring recruits in for a visit because they wouldn't see anything," said Dan Johnson, who succeeded Altman as men's coach at Southeast and never left, remaining as athletic director today.



Road trips to Norfolk, York, McCook and Great Bend, Kansas, were in vans driven by Altman and 6-4 sophomore forward Rex 'Racer' Haskell. Altman taught physical education classes on the side. Southeast didn't have its own gym, so games were at the local high school's, the kind with a stage on one side of the court. His office was down the street in the practice facility -- the National Guard armory.



"His office wasn't much of an office," said Haskell, who'd grown up in Fairbury and watched Altman play. "It was right there next to the weight room, which wasn't much of a weight room."





During his first two jobs as a head coach, Altman also taught classes on the side. At Southeast Community College in Fairbury, Nebraska, Altman (above) taught physical education and health.

Altman wrote the copy of player bios in the team program.



"Hopefully," Altman wrote of Wake, "Neil will provide some of the needed leadership on this year's team."



Southeast players recall the leadership coming all from Altman. A lack of amenities didn't bother him because, having come up the same route himself, he didn't know any better. As a player, he'd worked his way out of Southeast on effort, and expected the same now as coach.



"If you wasn't working as hard as he was, then you wasn't working hard," said Kenny Fields, a 6-2 guard from Maryland with an improved outside shot, as Altman noted in his program bio.



"There were nights that we didn't want to let him down. There wasn't nothing else to do in Fairbury, so we'd go over to the practice facility late and not leave until 2 or 3 (in the morning)."

Altman walked the line of relating to players through his youth while commanding their respect like an elder. Cookouts were in his backyard, and extra sprints reserved for those who missed class. The bench was his stick and the future a carrot, sending several on to four-year colleges after his lone season.



One of those players to transfer was Haskell, who got into a business college in Rapid City, South Dakota, with Altman's help. He's worked in banking ever since, crediting Altman with an assist.



"You looked up to him and and if he told you to do something, you didn't question it," Haskell said. "He had a maturity level about him, you didn't think of him as that much older than you. You thought about him as a coach."

A hot tub, "Hutch" and a career-changing recruit

In the 1970s and 80s, the place to be at the junior college national tournament in Hutchinson, Kansas, was the town's Holiday Inn, called the "Holidome."



Altman and Southeast booked rooms there at the tail of the 1982-83 season, when the 29-6 Bombers finished third and wound up a missed jump shot away from playing in the final. So, too, were the Moberly Area Community College Greyhounds of Missouri and a few of their thousand-or-so die-hards who seemed to annually make the trek to "Hutch."



One day during the tournament, some of those fans were in the hot tub when a tall, young coach dipped his toe in.



"Dana gets in and starts talking with us," said Bob Mongler, a Moberly booster. "This old booster, an old car dealer, says, 'Son, what team do you play for?' Dana says, 'I'm the coach at Fairbury.' The old booster turns to his wife and said, 'Can you believe this guy is the coach?'"



Less than a month later, Altman became Moberly's coach.



As Mongrel recalled, when decision-makers were considering candidates, some remembered the region's coach of the year who'd impressed them with his folksiness and basketball smarts during his first impression in the hot tub.



At Moberly, games were played in an old-time gym nicknamed the "Snakepit" for its two levels of rabid fans. Altman says he also still taught, this time business at a medium-security prison where a guard stood in a hallway within shouting distance just in case.



"During the interview," Altman said, "they asked how I would feel about teaching in a prison. And I said, 'Do I have to?'"



Altman still drove the vans to road games, playing cassette tape requests over the speakers.



"We liked Whitney Houston," said Charles Bledsoe, a 6-7 forward who was a top recruit from St. Louis. "He loved Whitney Houston."



But things were also very different at Moberly, a Cadillac program at the two-year level where Cotton Fitzsimmons and Charlie Spoonhour had once received their own big coaching breaks into the NBA, and Division I colleges. At a season-opening cookout before Altman's first season at Moberly, Fields, who'd transferred from Southeast, expected hot dogs and hamburgers. He found steaks and corn on the cob.



Players and friends describe Altman as a man unchanged, however. Just as at Fairbury, he stocked his roster with players from the Washington, D.C., area, thanks to a connection to the Executive III AAU team. Just like at Southeast, Moberly's players found him easy to approach to discuss their personal lives. Bledsoe called Altman a "father figure," despite being in his mid-20s.



But Altman was as relentlessly competitive as ever. The Moberly job moved him closer to big-time opportunities, and he charged forward to achieve them. Altman can depict himself as Midwestern nice, but he was ambitious and understood Moberly's potential to be a career springboard. But that would only happen if Moberly, with all its relative perks, could win like Southeast had.

Said Sam Moore, a Moberly guard from 1983-85: "There was no misunderstanding of who was in charge. He would pull you aside and tell you what you'd done wrong and how he wanted you to fix it. And when he stopped talking, that was a good time to start doing it."



Losses wore out Altman -- Mongler joked that Altman lost "two notches on his belt" every season due to his weight loss from worrying -- and players sometimes found Altman wandering off afterward, lost in thought.



But defeats were few. Altman was 94-18 in three seasons at Moberly.



Instead of dreaming of Doane College, he was on the fast-track to Division I. In 1986, a 27-year-old Altman was hired as an assistant to Lon Kruger at Kansas State, and Richmond and Bledsoe followed. At 30, he earned his first shot as a D-I head coach, at Marshall. One season later, he was back at Kansas State, to succeed Kruger.



"Every time I tried to think of a reason not to hire him, I thought of another reason to hire him," Kansas State athletic director Steve Miller told the AP in 1990.



In 1994, he left for Creighton and spent 16 years building a mid-major success story at a school his Oregon Ducks could now face in the second round of this year's tournament.



Today, Altman is 11th among active coaches with 593 Division-I wins.



"I owe a lot to Fairbury and I owe a lot to Moberly," Altman said. "Those four years of junior college really gave me a chance."

'That formula is going to pay off'

Altman's mustache disappeared sometime in the 1990s. His hair has thinned, and no longer droops over his ears.



He may look different, but he's the same coach.



Altman still wears starched, white dress shirts and color-blocked ties with dark slacks. He still runs an uptempo offense and switches between a variety of pressurizing defenses. He still ditches his blazer well before tipoff and stands the whole game, yelling "bend your knees!" at Dillon Brooks, Tyler Dorsey and Jordan Bell in 2017 much the same as he did to Wake, Fields and Haskell in 1982.



Because those Altman hallmarks can be traced to his very start, he can appear in hindsight like a coach who seemingly arrived with his identity and philosophy fully formed, knowing a secret few others could see.



Altman says they should instead be taken as reminders of a practical guy overjoyed at the opportunity to coach but scared to death he'd screw it up. Switching defenses and pressure wasn't a stroke of genius, he said. He just figured calling the kind of defenses he hated going against as a player might frustrate opponents, too. What worked at Southeast and Moberly, he stuck with.



"You think you're prepared and you're arrogant enough to think you're ready, but every situation you get into there's a lot of stuff thrown at you," Altman said. "Nobody is ever completely ready. I wasn't.



"You don't change who you are. I started standing because of insecurity trying to communicate as much as I could to the team. Still probably a little insecure today standing up trying to communicate to the team."



Yet in learning on the fly at basketball's lower levels, he created a flexible system that, if it could work with Southeast and Moberly's hodgepodge of talent, can certainly endure with the more highly rated players he can now recruit at Oregon.



"But talent and hard work are two different things," said Fields, the point guard. "If you don't scrap, you're just a person with potential. For him, that formula is going to pay off. If he has talent and guys with heart and guys with hustle, he's going to be successful."



Among teams seeded sixth or higher in this year's tournament, only two, Oregon and SMU, have coaches whose career paths included the junior college ranks. Though outliers exist -- Gonzaga's Mark Few and North Carolina's Roy Williams began coaching high school, and Virginia's Tony Bennett in New Zealand -- most top coaches jumped into the industry as a graduate assistant at a Division I school and worked up from there. One notable young coach going the junior college route? Altman's oldest son, Jordan, an assistant at Garden City in Kansas.



Friends believe taking the longer route through his industry undoubtedly has informed Altman's current success. After being put in a decision-making role very early in his career, he was prepared for head-coaching responsibilities at Marshall, Kansas State, Creighton and Oregon, said Larry Riley, Altman's coach at Eastern New Mexico, who later drafted Steph Curry as Golden State Warriors general manager.

He also continues to mine his old ranks for talent, signing a dozen former junior college players since coming to Oregon in 2010. The last two, Chris Boucher and Kavell Bigby-Williams, each were national JC players of the year.

"He's the best coach, I would say, at blending junior college talent with four-year talent," said Sean Bowers, a sophomore on Altman's first Moberly team. "He is not afraid to take those guys because he's from that system."



Each player from his two-year college days expressed gratitude toward Altman and added they've followed his career with every stop. Some have seen him in person over the years, while others root from afar. Bledsoe, a long-haul truck driver in St. Louis, tapes UO games while he's driving to watch back at home.



Haskell took his sons to Altman's summer camps at Creighton. Later, when he coached high school ball in Nebraska, he cribbed a few Altman-isms for his own.



"I tell them to 'bend their knees,'" Haskell said.



See the coach now. He's smiling.



"That was a long time ago," Altman said. "A lot of fun."



-- Andrew Greif

agreif@oregonian.com

@andrewgreif

Correction: Altman-coached teams have won at least 20 games in 18 of the last 19 seasons, not 20 consecutive seasons.