A (Birmingham) Southern Gentleman

He swung a black trunk over his shoulder and thumbed a ride.That August in Santa Fe was hot--waves levitating off the pavement hot--and a young, walk-on point guard was hunting down the College of Santa Fe, where he had just snagged a half scholarship. The New Orleans native had never been on an airplane before, much less out West, and there were no greeters waiting on him as the wobbling plane kissed the tarmac.“I was an All-State player at De LaSalle High School,” says Reboul, “but I only averaged 6 points per game. We ran that old shuffle offense, where basically you just held the ball.”Once he identified campus, Reboul began to learn a great deal about pacing the sidelines (later on in life, he would become a master at it), as it took him three weeks to wedge himself into a pick-up game.“I finally got in, as the tenth guy,” recalls Reboul. “After that, our team never lost. By December, I was starting and on full scholarship.”By the spring, however, Reboul’s brother got sick with spinal meningitis, and young guard decided to move back home.Reboul was one of ten children born into a big Catholic New Orleans family. “Going to Catholic school was a financial drain on the parents,” says Reboul. “In our family, if you wanted to go to a Catholic school, you had to go on an athletic scholarship.” Although he received a baseball scholarship, a coach by the name of Johnny Altebello convinced him to pursue basketball, and this is where the road forked.“I knew in high school that I wanted to coach,” says Reboul. So he stuffed that dream in his hip pocket and learned as much about that swift-paced, beatific game as he could.After returning from New Mexico, yet another pick-up game at a court in New Orleans led to a chance (divinely-appointed?) meeting with University of New Orleans Coach Ron Greene, who offered him a scholarship on the spot. Although UNO was just putting their basketball program together, Greene, a big dreamer, felt that a premier athletic program was possible if he found the right pieces. He was right. In Reboul’s senior year of ‘71, the team at one time was ranked #1 in the country.The scrappy, zealous point guard learned valuable leadership skills under Greene’s tutelage, becoming cerebral about Xs and Os, but also learning about managing varied team personalities, skills he would need later as a coach.“I was short and small,” says Reboul. “So I had to look for every angle to get an edge. I learned that teams are going to have to beat me with their weakness.”After UNO, Reboul went to work for Jimmy Dykes at his high school alma mater, De LaSalle. “He was a details guy, taught his players to be fundamentally sound, and he was highly motivated,” Reboul says of Dykes. Reboul took over as head coach the next year and led the team to state finals three years later. In 1976, he became the head coach at Jesuit High School in New Orleans, amassing six straight 20-win seasons. Reboul was then lured back to UNO, where he served as an assistant under Don Smith for 3 years.After Smith was fired, Reboul, now jobless, worked for a year in commercial real estate before a chance (predestined?) meeting at the Final Four in Dallas that year landed Reboul an assistant coaching position at Mississippi State under Head Coach Richard Williams.Reboul stayed at Mississippi State for 3 seasons before taking the head coaching job at a little liberal arts school run by Dr. Neal Berte just off of Highway 78 in Birmingham. Birmingham-Southern College swung open its iron gates for Duane Reboul in June of 1989 as the 11th head coach in the history of their basketball program.At the time BSC was an NAIA school, but the kicker is that this brand of four-year basketball was good—awfully good—even though the names of the schools might sound obscure as you shrug your shoulders. Reboul quickly found success in his first year, winning the NAIA national championship in 1990 and building a platform for BSC to stand on in the coming years. He won national championship number two in 1995, freeing a path for an even higher plateau: the eventual transition to Division-I in 2003-04.Reboul, who was pro-move to Division I, believed at the time that the jump was “professional suicide,” but was able to put personal feelings aside for the sake of the school. “I felt like we weren’t going to have the same success, and that we’d have to take some losses,” Reboul admits. “But I felt it was the best thing for the college.”He was wrong about one thing. Across three seasons as a Division I and Big South Conference member, the Panthers went 74-39 and were conference co-champs with Liberty in 2004 and runner-up in ’05-’06.But while BSC was on the precipice of national recognition, in 2006, the new P.B. (Post-Berte) Birmingham-Southern administration clandestinely informed the coach and A.D. Joe Dean Jr. that they were considering moving athletics to D-III (nonscholarship). Reboul wasn’t happy at all, as he had assembled a solid team for the upcoming season, including a seven-footer from Poland.“I thought that we could be the Butler or Gonzaga of Birmingham,” Reboul reflects. “Being D-I brings national attention to the college. We had everything in place. We didn’t have to compromise athletics and academics.”That summer, he resigned.Around that time, Reboul says that he also began to notice some changes in his wife of thirty-plus years, Rainey. “We began to realize that something serious was going on,” says Reboul. “She had a change in personality. She was a first grade teacher and was very detailed. But we began to notice that she wasn’t as detailed about some things. At first, we thought it was grief. She lost her sister to ovarian cancer and her dad in a short time frame. So we started to see doctors and we found out through a process of elimination. Doctors started to rule certain things out, and she was officially diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2007.“My first reaction was just like a coach. I thought, ‘We can fix this.’ So we went to several doctors. One thought it was frontal temporal dementia, another thought it was vascular and I thought, ‘Oh good, we can just increase the blood flow.’ Then another thought it was a combination of frontal, temporal, and Alzheimer’s.”But Rainey deteriorated rapidly. Nurses and sitters were required to feed, bathe, and dress her. She is now bedridden.“She hasn’t known who I am for three or four years,” says Reboul. “Her quality of life is not good, but I cherish every moment with her.”Rainey now requires round-the-clock care, and Reboul admits he hasn’t gotten a full night’s sleep in years.“I have to turn her every two hours so she doesn’t get bed sores,” he says.As Reboul recounts his life, he tells a few stories about some big victories and some memorable moments as a coach for over 30 years. A kidlike grin shoots across his face as he admits to beating (throttling?) Texas A&M (by 20) in College Station, TX while he was at BSC. He laughs about getting ejected in a game against Alabama State and punching a locker early in his career and breaking a finger. He talks about all of the relationships he built along the way, and admits this is the best part of the game of basketball. He talks about Birmingham (“Birmingham’s been good to us’), his favorite places in the world (submitting Stockholm and Reykjavik without hesitation), and two big influences on his life—his father and his father-in-law (Rainey’s dad.) He talks about his musical preferences (Smokey Robinson, The Temptations) and how coaches can often miss out on life because they become so myopic. But perhaps nothing has more greatly defined him than this past decade, caring for the love of his life—as he describes, the “perfect coach’s wife.”“Alzheimer’s is an awful disease,” Reboul says. “I can’t imagine it getting better and I fear for the next generation. There are 5 million people that currently have it, and that number is growing.”Reboul says that he wishes there could be an “Ice Bucket Challenge” for Alzheimer’s research and hopes that a vaccine or other preventative medicine can be discovered soon. He continues to give his wife care while balancing teaching duties at Birmingham-Southern.“It’s been an honor to care for her,” he says. “She was a very, very devout Catholic. God has given us so many blessings, and we have been a very lucky couple.”As the dark frontiers of his eyes are washed with tears, Reboul describes Rainey’s unflinching devotion:“She is so sweet. She never questioned the decisions I made as a coach. Never wondered why we didn’t call a time out. When I was deciding to take the assistant coaching job at Mississippi State, I asked her if she would like to go there. And this just gives you a little bit about her personality. She said, ‘Sure! Where’s Mississippi State?’” 78 Images by Gary ClarkFor more stories like these, please visit www.facebook.com/78mag