Who knows what Bruiser Flint's politics are, but on matters of college basketball he is a registered progressive, and a loud one at that. Damn the torpedoes and the status quo, he says what he thinks and treats reporters not as annoyances but as sparring partners and useful tools in getting his point across.
In recent memory, the message was simple, catchy and fit for a headline: Come to my building and play me.
It was nothing if not a valid complaint. Yesterday was the first time one of Flint's Drexel squads ever hosted a Big 5 team at the Daskalakis Athletic Center and the first time he had ever opened the season at home against a Division-I team.
Absent Flint's relentless Rodney-Dangerfield-type complaining - don't get no respect - Glen Miller would likely have said thanks but no thanks, we'd prefer not to have this game in a high school gym masquerading as something else. If Flint's undiplomatic diplomacy proves anything, it's that the way of Fran Dunphy - doling words out as if he were paying for them and mindlessly praising everything and everybody - may earn you a good-guy reputation, but it won't accomplish much.
"Finally, we got one in our building," Flint said, moments before he started really working the media crowd like a comedian. "That's the biggest thing right there. Anybody who thinks that didn't make a difference didn't watch the game today."
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Optimism isn't normally a big part of his repertoire. Flint is not the kind of coach who assumes that things will get better because, well, they have to - or because if you pound the hardwood for enough hours, the rest of the world will take notice. Most of the time, people don't notice, and they don't start spontaneously respecting you, which is why Flint has seemed so annoyed for the past few years.
Now, he's secure in the knowledge that things will indeed get better.
"If you say to me, 'We're gonna play you at the Palestra or our place,' I'm gonna say to you, 'That's okay, we won't play you guys. Thanks but no thanks. You still my friends. Watch your games, cheer for you, text you when you win."
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If you asked most area coaches or basketball savants to pick a favorite Big 5 game, they would conjure up some 35-32 struggle from decades ago, memorialized now only in black-and-white photos on the Palestra's south wall. Not Flint - for him it's Saint Joseph's-La Salle from last year, a 90-89 affair that capped off a year of offensive mayhem and smashed stereotypes in the City Series.
You almost get the sense that Flint delights in the unusual, in defying convention, but it's probably because he has to. The junior member of the city's basketball hierarchy can't afford to go with the flow if he wants things to change, and he does.
He revealed after the game yesterday that St. Joe's coach Phil Martelli has agreed to a home-and-home with Drexel starting next year. Granted, it's easier for Martelli to make that agreement because right now he doesn't really have a home.
"Actually, Phil wants me to open up his new building. He must think we're gonna be terrible," Flint joked.
But still - progress is progress. If you're coaching Drexel, you take it and run.
Andrew Scurria is a senior International Relations major from Wilmington, Del., and is former Senior Sports Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. His e-mail address is scurria@dailypennsylvanian.com.
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