ames Flint was born in Philadelphia. He grew up as a basketball player. Basketball is a hard sport to escape in Philadelphia, the hub of east-coast basketball.

Temple, Saint Joseph's, Villanova, and the University of Pennsylvania all reside in, or close to, Philadelphia. Legends like Wilt Chamberlain, Moses Malone, and Julius Erving have suited up for the 76ers over the years, and Philadelphia matched the Boston Celtics blow-for-blow in the early 1980s, when the Bird Era was in full swing.

This is where Flint grew up. We know him best as "Bruiser," the name his grandfather bestowed upon him at birth. Bruiser - known as "Bru" to colleagues and friends - spent 12 years in the UMass basketball program. He started as an assistant coach in 1989 after John Calipari brought him on board.

Calipari mentored Bruiser for seven years before he took over the head coaching position after Calipari left for the NBA's New Jersey Nets in 1996. He was there when UMass basketball began its transformation to a prestigious Final Four program, and when the team's popularity nosedived in the wake of a scandal involving star player Marcus Camby forced the NCAA to revoke the Minutemen's Final Four appearance in 1995.

Bruiser tried to turn things around after Camby and Calipari left for the pros. And he did so successfully - for a few years at least. Bruiser was the fastest coach in UMass basketball history to reach 30 and 40 wins, and he was the second-fastest to reach the 50-win mark. Now, he is but a memory at UMass, and the student body - ever-changing and fickle - has forgotten the man who devoted so much of his time to UMass basketball.

These days, you won't find Bruiser coaching at a high-profile ACC school or doing play-by-play broadcasts. The Philly native has started over with a new program in the Colonial Athletic Association, and just like he did in the Pioneer Valley over 10 years ago, is overseeing the development of a small-time basketball program. This time, it's Drexel University.

From Philadelphia to UMass

Bruiser's inspiration, like so many other men in sports, came from his father. The elder James Flint ran a recreation center when Bruiser was growing up, and the young Flint did everything at the club - managing, coaching, getting the players towels, and of course, playing.

"Our recreation center was famous for basketball players," Bruiser says. "I did everything. I had been around it so much for so long. I enjoyed it. I loved it."

And he was good at it, too. Bruiser went on to play college ball at St. Joe's, leading the Hawks to an A-10 championship in 1986. At St. Joe's, he got a tip from an unlikely source.

"Jim Foster, the women's basketball coach at Ohio State - he was the women's coach at St. Joe's at the time - asked me to go help him with his team one day," Bruiser says. "It was a Saturday morning and he asked me to go to the practice and the other coach didn't show up. So [Foster] had to coach the other team and I had to coach his team. And from that point on I used to go every week.

"[Foster] used to come and watch my teams play in the summer league. One day, he told me in the office that I should think about [coaching] as a profession."

His dad, the basketball lifer, agreed.

"I thought about it, and my dad thought I'd be good at [coaching], too," Bruiser said. "He said, 'I think you're good around the kids and that's the most important thing. You should try it out.'"

So he did. He started at Coppin State where he coached for two years (1987-88) before an encounter at a summer basketball camp led him down a path that eventually made its way to Amherst. It was there that Bruiser met Billy Bayno, one of Calipari's assistants at UMass, and Bayno asked him to join the UMass coaching staff.

Calipari was small-time then. There was no Final Four appearance, no superstars in the Pioneer Valley, and no NBA teams calling. There was just a young, energetic coach that would do anything to win. Bruiser liked the situation, but Calipari's presence made some people question the UMass program.

"Everybody told me to watch out for [Calipari]," Bruiser said. "When I told everybody in Philadelphia that I was going up to work with Cal - and Cal had some history with some guys that he had recruited in Philly - I'll tell ya, they were crushin' me, man. 'Don't go up there with him. He's not a good guy.' And I told those guys that they were crazy."

As Bruiser says, the rest is history.

A young program

It wasn't all fun and games when Bruiser arrived on the scene. UMass had just 10 wins in Calipari's first year and the shadows of Julius Erving and Al Skinner still stretched across the UMass campus. Bruiser, however, didn't see it like that. He saw hope in Calipari, even though the results had yet to come.

"It was tough at the beginning, but John was great with that and still is to the day," Bruiser says. "John can get the masses moving, man. And although the year before they only won 10 games, people felt good about him.

"I came the year after [Calipari] had started. And people felt good about it. They were saying that we had some pretty good talent. We were young, but the talent was there. John's great with the players, too. He made everybody believe."

Bruiser speaks fondly of these times. It was a long time ago, 17 years now, but the Philly coach with the raspy voice and enough optimism to fill a room talks about his early UMass days like it was yesterday.

When Bruiser and Calipari recruited Travis Best, the NBA regular who made stops in Indiana, Miami, and Dallas during his professional career, they ran into some stiff resistance from Best's family. Best is from Springfield and played high school ball there. He asked Calipari and his coaching staff to come to his house for a face-to-face talk, and what happened then still gives Bruiser a good laugh at his own expense.

"We were at [Best's] house and his sister was giving us a hard time," Bruiser recalls. "Cal says to his sister, 'Listen to me, one day we're going to be playing in the Final Four.' And his dad and his sister and his mother started laughing at us. Seriously. They actually started laughing.

"So we go the Final Four. Travis goes to Georgia Tech. I see [Best's] dad a few years later because I saw him off and on after that. And his dad said, 'You know what? I still remember that day when you and Cal said that we're going to the Final Four. And I'll be damned if you sure did.'"

They went to the Final Four in 1996. UMass' career-points leader - Jim McCoy - had already passed through during Calipari's tenure. But another superstar arrived in the form of a 6-foot-10 shot-blocking machine, a player destined for stardom at the highest level: Marcus Camby.

Camby - along with Edgar Padilla, Carmelo Travieso, and others - took UMass to the Final Four before Rick Pitino's fast-breaking Kentucky squad (that included future pros Antoine Walker, Tony Delk, Ron Mercer, and Walter McCarty) squashed the Minutemen in the semifinals.

In the ensuing years, Calipari and Camby were mired in a controversy that plagues UMass' image to this day. Camby allegedly received funding from an off-campus source to bribe him to come to UMass. Calipari's name was cleared of any wrongdoing, but the label stayed with him and he left UMass for the NBA's New Jersey Nets after the 1996 season.

Bruiser stayed - and tried to repair the damage.

Early exits

In the 1996-97 season, Bruiser's first as head coach, the Minutemen went 19-14 overall and 11-5 in the A-10. They made it to the NCAA Tournament and got the 11th seed in the East Regional bracket before sixth-seeded Louisville edged UMass, 65-57, in the first round.

Next season it was more of the same. A 21-11 regular season record and an efficient 12-4 in the A-10 led to postseason expectations. The Minutemen defeated Virginia Tech in the first round of the 1998 A-10 Tournament before rival George Washington sent them home with an 88-83 loss. UMass, despite the disappointing defeat in the conference tournament, earned an NCAA Tournament berth for the seventh straight year (the second for Bruiser as UMass' head coach). But the Minutemen, given a No. 7 seed, went down in the first round of the NCAA Tournament again, this time to underdog Saint Louis, a No. 10 seed.

"We wanted to try to win the national championship," Bruiser says. "We were coming off of some remarkable years so we were trying to keep that thing going. When I got the job, I was trying to just continue what I was trying to do."

Bruiser was one of the winningest coaches in UMass history by the end of his tenure. In five years, he won 86 games and lost 72. The only two coaches ahead of him on the all-time wins list - Jack Leaman and Calipari - are certified coaching legends. Leaman won 217 games in 13 years at the helm, and Calipari won 193 games in his eight-year reign.

Then it's Bruiser - third on the all-time list for coaching wins at UMass. But two NCAA Tournament appearances, an 86-72 overall record, and a 52-28 record against the A-10 wasn't good enough for a program that tasted the national semifinals just a couple of years before. The athletic director, Bob Marcum, was fiery and impatient, and Bruiser's relationship with his boss soured over time.

"I loved it [in Amherst]," Bruiser says. "I pledged money to the Jack Leaman Fund this year. People treated me very well. I just didn't get along with my bosses very well. We weren't always on the same page. But people treated me well up there, and still to the day."

Bonnie Otto is a secretary in the UMass athletic department and has been for 21 years. Bruiser mentioned her when he reflected on his times in Amherst and called her "family." He spoke fondly of friends and places he left behind. When the men's lacrosse team made it to the national championship in Philadelphia last year, Bruiser met up with some of his UMass friends who made it the trip down.

"I still come up [to Amherst] a lot," Bruiser says. "My daughter was born in that area. My wife is a UMass grad. I got a lot of ties. I feel proud that I got some people that I can call some real good friends up there."

"I do keep in touch with Bruiser," Otto said in an email. "We speak often and I try to get to some of his games when he is in the area. He still sends me a Christmas present every year. We got along well and I could talk to him about anything. I enjoyed working for Bruiser and was very sad when he left. I have a lot of great memories of Bruiser's time here at UMass."

A fresh start

Bruiser has moved on to the Colonial Athletic Conference and his Drexel Dragons, a school west of Philadelphia and about 10 blocks from Bruiser's childhood home. He's close to his family now. His wife, Rene, and daughter, Jada, were ecstatic that a big piece of their family was coming back for good.

"It was great going home," Bruiser said. "My family, they didn't really say anything to me about coming back. My family didn't want to say 'hey, we want you to come back home.' But when I told them I was coming to Drexel, they went absolutely crazy."

Bruiser moved back to Philly in 2001 after landing the Drexel job and started recruiting locally. But his father got very sick a short time after he moved. It was cancer, and it was terminal - a big blow for a father's child. Bruiser's dad was there for the long haul. He inspired his son back in the old recreation center where little James got his start on the hardwood. He went to every UMass game when Bruiser coached the Minutemen. When Bruiser moved to Philadelphia, he went to every practice and traveled with the team on the road trips. He was as much a fan as he was a father.

"For him, it was great," Bruiser says. "He could see me every day, he could come to practice. For him, that was really big. He actually started crying on the phone when I told him that I was going to take the Drexel job.

"And if I were still at UMass when he got cancer, I wouldn't have been able to deal with it because he got really sick and everything happened in a short period of time. I was able to be with him."

Bruiser had another rebuilding situation on his hands at Drexel - a small school without a fan base, playing in the CAA, a small a group of teams with little national exposure. When Bruiser arrived in 2001, four of the team's top scorers just graduated. Drexel was competing for recruits with some of the top basketball schools in the northeast - Temple, St. Joe's, Villanova, and Penn.

Bruiser believes that being a local guy helped him land the Drexel job because it increased Drexel's chances of stealing some of the local talent from the bigger schools.

"One of the things I talked to [the Drexel athletic department] about was that I knew that if I came to this school, they could get local kids that they couldn't get in the past," Bruiser says. "It was a little different for me. Now you're going into a different conference and you're recruiting a totally different kid.

"I think that that was one of the things I felt I could do anyway, put us in a situation where we could get local kids."

It wasn't easy to garner support from the fan base, either. When Bruiser arrived in 2001, enthusiasm for basketball at Drexel was nonexistent. The stands at the ends of the court didn't need to be pulled out because so few students went to the home games.

"It was crazy because the [Drexel athletic department] told me that they usually only got 500 people to the games," says Bruiser, laughing at the memory.

The Dragons finished with a 14-14 record in Bruiser's first season as head coach in 2001. They finished with an 11-7 mark in conference, tied for third in the league. The CAA named him Coach of the Year, and it wasn't long before Drexel fans began showing up at home games. ("From that point on, people were like, 'We got a shot,'" says Bruiser.)

In his second season, the Dragons went to the postseason for the first time in six years on the heels of a 19-win campaign and a 12-6 record in the CAA. Drexel got a bid to the NIT after that season, and won two games in the conference tournament before losing in the finals. Bruiser also notched his 100th career win with a 68-65 win over UNC-Wilmington.

Since then, Bruiser has added another CAA Coach of the Year award to his resume, along with another NIT appearance for the Drexel Dragons, just the seventh postseason appearance in the program's history.

But Bruiser and company have a long way to go if they are to attain national recognition. The CAA is improving now. With George Mason's Cinderella run to the Final Four last season, the CAA was suddenly on the national radar. Because of the Patriots' success in the NCAA Tournament, the rest of the conference is reaping the benefits, which include multiple national television appearances for Bruiser Flint's Drexel Dragons.

"The [CAA] just called me and said that we're going to have nine games on TV in the conference," Bruiser says. "We're going to be all over the place. And that's why the other teams get better, because people see [George Mason] and know they know that you're playing in a pretty good league.

"And the same thing happened with UMass and the Atlantic 10. When I was coaching there, that was probably some of the best years that the league has ever had. They were sending four or five teams to the tournament every year, and I think [George Mason] will have the same effect on our conference this year. George Mason is a really good team and they have great coaches, but our league is going to be better from top to bottom."

Keeping in touch

Bruiser is not a bitter man. He didn't hold grudges after he left UMass, and that has helped him preserve a solid relationship with the university and the athletic department. Things have changed since he left. Steve Lappas, the Villanova coach hired after Bruiser's departure, has come and gone without an NCAA Tournament appearance. Now it's Travis Ford at the helm, the Kentucky graduate who played for Pitino when Bruiser paraded the sidelines with Calipari. Ford and Flint crossed paths for the movie "The 6th Man," where Ford made a cameo as a bumbling backup without much skill.

"Travis was a player when we coached. I'm getting a little old," Bruiser jokes. "We did the movie 'The 6th Man' together. He had that funny little haircut.

"I know that the people up there really like Travis. They just like what he brings to the table in terms of uniting everybody."

Bruiser roots for UMass and doesn't let his untimely departure change the good times he had in Amherst. Marcum and Bruiser weren't on the same page at the end of his stint at UMass. The Minutemen didn't make the postseason in the 2001 season, and the impetuous Marcum had had enough. The relationship came to an irreparable point, and that's when Bruiser knew that his tenure was close to its end. But now, six years and three NIT's later, he doesn't hesitate to talk about the past or share his opinions about what happened six years ago.

"If you want to have a good program, everybody has to be on board with what you're trying to do," he says. "I think that people lost their way up there [at UMass]. They just thought that it was going to happen. They thought that Marcus Camby's were going to come around all of the time. They didn't understand their part that they had to play in it."

Bruiser feels that he has a better relationship with his co-workers at Drexel, simply because there is positive dialogue between him and the athletic director. But Bruiser knows that financial support plays a substantial role in the success of a team, and without that support from the administration, the program will stall before it starts.

"A lot of it comes down to the money," he says. "Are you going to give the money up to be good enough to put yourself in the Top 20 or not? And I think that's the problem that they ran into up there."

Now the Minutemen have their best chance for a postseason berth since Bruiser's days on the UMass sidelines. Ford - like Bruiser did at Drexel - has brought instant credibility to the UMass program. He is recruiting players and grabbing talent from all over the country. Talented cagers are transferring to UMass in order to have a shot at an NCAA Tournament.

Bruiser watches from a distance and keeps close tabs on his old stomping grounds. When asked about this year's UMass squad, he mentions several players - Gary Forbes, Tiki Mayben, and Chris Lowe included - that he tried to recruit and goes into detail about their respective abilities.

He knows what is developing in Amherst these days. And he knows that his situation couldn't have worked at UMass, no matter how badly he wanted it to. So Bruiser has moved on. And so has UMass. But Bruiser Flint was an anchor for the UMass program for 12 years, and was on the bench for some of the greatest years in UMass basketball history. And no matter where the Drexel head coach goes next, he will always reserve a special place for his UMass Minutemen.