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John Chaney, commanding Temple basketball coach, dies at 89

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PHILADELPHIA (AP) — John Chaney’s raspy, booming voice drowned out the gym when he scolded Temple players over a turnover — at the top of his basketball sins — or inferior effort. His voice was loudest when it came to picking unpopular fights, lashing out at NCAA policies he said discriminated against Black athletes. And it could be profane when Chaney let his own sense of justice get the better of him with fiery confrontations that threatened to undermine his role as father figure to scores of his underprivileged players.

Complicated, cranky, quick with a quip, Chaney was an imposing presence on the court and a court jester off it, all while building the Owls perched in rugged North Philadelphia into one of the toughest teams in the nation.

“He wrapped his arms around you and made you a part of his family,” said Chaney’s successor, Fran Dunphy.

Chaney died Friday, just eight days after his 89th birthday, after a short, unspecified illness.

Chaney led Temple to 17 NCAA Tournament appearances over 24 seasons, including five NCAA regional finals. Chaney had 741 wins as a college coach. He was twice named national coach of the year and his teams at Temple won six Atlantic 10 conference titles. He led Cheyney, in suburban Philadelphia, to the 1978 Division II national championship.

When Chaney retired in 2006, the scowl was gone, the dark, deep-set eyes concealed behind sunglasses, and the over-the-top personality turned subdued: “Excuse me while I disappear,” he said.

He became a de facto father to dozens of his players, many coming to Temple from broken homes, violent upbringings and bad schools. He often said his biggest goal was simply to give poor kids a chance to get an education. He said the SAT was culturally biased and he joined Georgetown’s John Thompson — another giant in the Black coaching community, who died in August — in denouncing NCAA academic requirements that seemed to single out “the youngster who is from a poor, disadvantaged background.

Eddie Jones and Aaron McKie, perhaps Chaney’s two best players, were Prop 48 recruits who parlayed their Temple years into successful NBA careers. McKie is now Temple’s coach and leaned on his mentor when he had to shape the program.

“Coach Chaney was like a father to me,” McKie said. “He taught not just me, but all of his players more than just how to succeed in basketball. He taught us life lessons to make us better individuals off the court. I owe so much to him. He made me the man I am today.”

When Chaney joined Temple in 1982, he took over a program that had only two NCAA tournament bids in the previous decade and wasn’t widely known outside Philadelphia. Often, as he exhorted his team, he put himself in situations he later regretted. He was known for a fiery temper — sending a player he called a “goon” into a 2005 game to commit hard fouls. Chaney served a suspension and apologized.

In 1994, he had a heated exchange following a game against UMass in which he threatened to kill coach John Calipari. Chaney apologized and was suspended for a game. The two later became friends.

“Coach Chaney and I fought every game we competed – as everyone knows, sometimes literally – but in the end he was my friend,” Calipari tweeted. “Throughout my career, we would talk about basketball and life. I will miss those talks and I will my friend.”

In 1984, Chaney grabbed George Washington coach Gerry Gimelstob by the shoulders at halftime during a game.

Chaney, whose deep, dark eyes seemed fitting for a school whose mascot is the Owl, was intense on the sidelines. His loud, booming voice could be heard across an arena, and his near-perfect designer clothes were in shambles after most games. After an especially bad call, he would stare down referees. He once gazed at a referee for an entire timeout with a look he dubbed the “One-Eyed Jack.”

Though he seemed permanently cranky, especially during games, Chaney was often tender and funny. He loved telling stories. His postgame news conferences were sometimes more entertaining than the games that preceded them. His retirement news conference in March 2006 wasn’t about hoops but about education’s role in helping the poor and disadvantaged. They included amusing anecdotes, pokes at the school administration and playful threats to slap the mayor.

After losing to Michigan State in his last trip to the NCAA regional finals, in 2001, he was the same old John Chaney — with water-filled eyes, wearing a tie torn open at the collar and waxing poetic about another missed chance at the Final Four.

“It is something we all dream about, but very often dreams come up short,” he said. “Very often you don’t realize everything. But you have to realize that the growth you see in youngsters like these is probably the highest accomplishment you can reach.”

Temple’s style of play under Chaney’s guidance was never as pretty as that of Duke or North Carolina. Slow, patient and disciplined, his best teams rarely made errors, rarely turned the ball over and always played tough defense. Chaney was simply fearless in all aspects of his work.

He refused to load his schedules with easy teams, and instead traveled to hostile courts to play teams supposedly brimming with talent. He was outspoken about the NCAA’s recruiting rules, which he said hurt players trying to improve their standing in life.

“John Chaney was more than just a Hall of Fame Basketball coach. He was a Hall of Fame in life,” Dunphy said. “He touched countless lives, including my own.”

Chaney arrived at Temple before the 1982-83 season. sitting in one of Philadelphia’s toughest neighborhoods, Temple was the perfect match for a coach who prided himself on helping players turn their basketball skills into college degrees.

He was 50 and already had success at Cheyney State University, where he had a record of 225-59 in 10 seasons.

Chaney was born on Jan. 21, 1932, in Jacksonville, Florida. He lived in a neighborhood there called Black Bottom, where, he said, flooding rains would bring in rats. When he was in the ninth grade, his family moved to Philadelphia, where his stepfather got a job at a shipyard.

Though known as a Hall of Fame coach, he also was one of the best players ever to come out of Philadelphia. He was the Philadelphia Public League player of the year in 1951 at Benjamin Franklin High School.

A graduate of Bethune-Cookman College, he was an NAIA All-American and an NAIA tournament MVP before going pro in 1955 to play with the Harlem Globetrotters. With black players still being discriminated against in the NBA, he spent 1955 to 1966 in the Eastern Pro League with Sunbury and Williamsport, where he was a two-time league MVP.

“He knew what I needed when I started coaching. He just fostered that and allowed me to grow and allowed me to make mistakes and was there to pick me up when things weren’t working out as I thought they should,” said South Carolina coach and former Owls coach Dawn Staley. “Everybody in their lives, whether they’re in coaching, outside of coaching, or whatever profession, needs a person like coach Chaney in their life.”

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Associated Press writer Jonathan Poet contributed to this report.

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A city’s problematic vaccine rollout raises larger questions

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PHILADELPHIA (AP) — When Philadelphia began getting its first batches of COVID-19 vaccines, it looked to partner with someone who could get a mass vaccination site up and running quickly.

City Hall officials might have looked across the skyline to the world-renowned health providers at the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University or Jefferson Health.

Instead, they chose a 22-year-old graduate student in psychology with a few faltering startups on his resume. And last week, amid concerns about his qualifications and Philly Fighting COVID’s for-profit status, the city shuttered his operation at the downtown convention center.

“Where were all the people with credentials? Why did a kid have to come in and help the city?” said the student, Andrei Doroshin, in an interview with The Associated Press.

“I’m a freaking grad student. But you know what? We did the job. We vaccinated 7,000 people,” the Drexel University student said. “This was us doing our part in this crazy time.”

City officials said they gave him the task because he and his friends had organized one of the community groups that set up COVID-19 testing sites throughout the city last year. But they shut the vaccine operation down once they learned that Doroshin had switched his privacy notice to potentially sell patient data, a development he calls a glitch that he quickly fixed.

It’s not clear when the city will find a new site operator.

“They were doing a reasonably good job on giving the vaccinations. They decided apparently that they were going to monetize some of this information, which was wrong, and we terminated our relationship with them,” Mayor Jim Kenney said at a news conference Tuesday, citing the work of local news outlets in raising the concerns. “And that’s the end of them.”

Doroshin also conceded that he took home four doses of the Pfizer vaccine and administered it to friends, although he is neither a nurse nor licensed health practitioner. He said he did so only after exhausting other options. There were 100 extra doses set to expire that night, and the site was able to round up just 96 eligible recipients, he said.

“They either had to go into an arm or be thrown out,” said Doroshin, who said he had done intramuscular injections before. “I felt OK ethically. … There’s nothing that I did that was illegal.”

State and local prosecutors are now pondering the question.

Many believe the situation speaks to a larger point about the health care system, in Philadelphia and nationwide.

Public health budgets had been hard hit before the pandemic, leaving local and state governments ill-equipped to roll out a mass vaccination program. That left them scrambling for COVID-19 partners.

“I think there is a place in our health system for our innovative partners,” said Julia Lynch, a health policy expert who teaches at Penn. “But maybe this isn’t the time to be experimenting with disruptors? Maybe this is the time we should be turning to a health service delivery infrastructure that operates like a well-oiled machine?”

She is also distressed that city data shows just 12% of the city’s vaccinations have gone to Black residents, who make up 42% of the city’s population. She, like others, hoped the job might have gone to a more established group such as the Black Doctors Consortium, which has been testing and vaccinating people in low-income areas of the city this past year.

Lucinda Ayers, 74, had jumped at the chance to book a Feb. 12 appointment through Doroshin’s website at the Pennsylvania Convention Center and wonders if the city shouldn’t have helped him get in compliance.

“They were vaccinating people. I’m on the fence about it,” said Ayers, who hasn’t had any luck finding another appointment despite spending hours online. “There’s so much lack of clarity on the information coming out.”

Doroshin, while working on his graduate degree, switched gears from the COVID-19 testing operation to the vaccine work when he heard about the city’s need. He said he borrowed $250,000 from a family friend for startup costs, and the city — through nothing more than a verbal agreement — gave him a cut of its vaccine supply, with the top priority being health care workers.

He said he agreed to pay $1 million to lease the convention center for six months and expected to charge the city $500,000 a month once he was fully up and running. He hired about 30 people, although at least some of the doctors, nurses and nursing students doing the injections were volunteers, he said.

“I was going to take a salary,” he said. “In a perfect world, I wanted to vaccinate Philly in six months and then apply for my Ph.D.”

Dr. Thomas Farley, the city’s health commissioner, said this week the group had a good track record of doing the testing, so “we decided to give them the opportunity to run mass clinics, and the first mass clinic went quite well.”

For now, the city has pledged to make sure people who got their first vaccines there can get their booster shots.

“It certainly shows why we need a real public health care system,” said Council Member Helen Gym, who noted that two private hospitals in the city have closed since 2019, while the city remains one of the few large U.S. cities without a public hospital.

She called the aborted vaccine rollout “an egregious, profound failure.”

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Follow Maryclaire Dale on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Maryclairedale.



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Philly Fighting COVID CEO Andrei Doroshin Admits to Giving Vaccines to Friends – NBC10 Philadelphia

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The 22-year-old CEO of a company once working with the City of Philadelphia to distribute coronavirus vaccines but now embroiled in controversy admitted that he took some vaccines home with him and injected his friends.

Andrei Doroshin made the confession Thursday on the TODAY Show in what was his first TV interview since the fallout of the scandal involving Philly Fighting COVID, a group that once injected city-issued vaccines. The city has since cut ties after the group failed to disclose that it recently became a for-profit company, after collecting the personal information of thousands of residents.

Doroshin defended his decision to inject his friends, despite not being a registered nurse. He told TODAY’s Stephanie Gosk that he administered four doses which had been left over and were about to expire. Doroshin maintained he and his group made calls looking people at high risk who qualified for a shot but could not find anyone.

“I stand by that decision. I understand that I made that mistake. That is my mistake to carry for the rest of my life, but it is not the mistake of the organization,” Doroshin said.

City health officials had said Wednesday that an audit of vaccine doses given to Philly Fighting COVID found “no evidence that vaccine was wasted, stolen, or otherwise misused.”

The Philadelphia Department of Public Health’s decision to partner with PFC, a 9-month-old startup, despite having a litany of other options in the hospital-heavy city, was surprising from the get-go.

“Why we have to rely on an organization that is less than nine months old, started by students primarily to produce PPE, and not by organizations that have a vetted track record around helping people address COVID-19, is beyond me,” Councilwoman Katherine Gilmore Richardson said. “I’m flabbergasted, I’m dismayed and I’ll never understand how this happened.”

The group never signed a contract with the city before receiving vaccine doses, because, health department spokesman James Garrow said, the city did not receive federal funds to distribute the doses. Instead, the city requires only that organizations fill out an interest form before receiving and distributing the vaccine, he said.

The city has declined to make public the registration form that Philly Fighting COVID filled out to begin getting doses.

Initially, the group was testing for the coronavirus and set up shop at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, where they ran vaccination clinics and injected nearly 7,000 people. But in recent weeks, the department of health said PFC abruptly stopped testing for the virus, as well, a key component of the partnership.

As recently as Jan. 8, the city actively directed people toward the group’s website to “pre-commit” to being notified when they qualified for a vaccine. However, the group only recently posted a privacy policy, following concerns about people’s personal information being sold off, which Doroshin said has not happened and would violate HIPAA rules.

The city has since set up its own website and is encouraging people to sign up there instead.

PFC also started billing instance companies for the vaccines, despite receiving them for free. Doroshin defended that decision, as well, claiming that the donations the group was receiving were not enough to cover the costs of running the vaccination clinics.

However, reporting from WHYY and Billy Penn has since indicated Doroshin embellished his resumé and always planned to make a profit. A former volunteer at PFC told the news outlets that Doroshin openly bragged about using the opportunity to become a millionaire.

The group has also come under scrutiny for other allegedly shoddy practices.

Katrina Lipinsky, a registered nurse and former PFC volunteer, told NBC10 she found it “unusual” that the group didn’t ask to see her credentials before allowing her to administer vaccines.

It’s now unclear if Doroshin, who says he has recently received death threats, will face any criminal charges. Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Kraner and Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro are looking into the matter.

Several Philadelphia City Council members are also calling for hearings into the partnership between the city and the group.



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Philadelphia 76ers’ Joel Embiid says Los Angeles Lakers’ LeBron James should have been ejected for foul

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12:28 AM ET

  • Tim BontempsESPN

Philadelphia 76ers star Joel Embiid said he believed Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James should’ve been assessed a level two flagrant foul and been ejected from Philadelphia’s 107-106 victory over the defending champions Wednesday night.

“Well, first of all, I mean you look at it, that’s a very dangerous play,” Embiid said of James’ foul, which came at the 5:44 mark of the third quarter. “I guarantee you that if it was me, I would have probably been ejected from the game, which has happened in the past with me getting flagrant fouls really for nothing.”

While Embiid was annoyed about James only being given a flagrant one — allowing him to remain in the game — he was equally bothered by the fact that, 68 seconds later, he was called for a flagrant one foul himself for an elbow to Anthony Davis that Embiid didn’t believe merited that penalty.

“When you compare that to the one that I got, which I thought I didn’t really hit him, I didn’t elbow him,” said Embiid, who had 28 points, six rebounds, four assists and two blocked shots in 38 minutes. “I might have touched him. But I don’t think it deserved the flagrant, if you’re gonna compare those two.

“Those are tough plays and I just thought, you know, it should’ve been a flagrant 2.”

For his part, Sixers coach Doc Rivers, a product of a different era of the sport that featured just a bit more physical play than today’s game, said he didn’t think either play should’ve been called for a flagrant at all.

His only concern in the moment was that Embiid, who fell several feet onto his back and writhed on the ground in pain, was all right after falling down. And while Embiid wasn’t moving as well after the play, he managed to stay in the game and help the Sixers win.

“First of all, LeBron’s not a dirty player,” Rivers said. “It was just a physical play and they had to call the flagrant, I guess.

“You know, all of the flagrants tonight … you can get a flagrant easy these days. But that fall was hard, and there was some concern there for sure. The fact that Joel kept going, clearly he wasn’t the same after that as far as his movement. And we kinda knew that and we used him a lot in pick and rolls because of that.”

Embiid, who has been on the injury report off and on recently with a sore back, which has kept him out of a game or two, said he won’t know how it responds until after he wakes up in the morning, but that he felt it limiting him during the game.

He said part of Philadelphia’s collapse down the stretch, which saw the Lakers score 13 straight points to erase 12-point Sixers lead with three minutes to go and take a 106-105 lead with 11.2 seconds remaining, was in part because of his back limiting his movement.

“It’s on me,” Embiid said of Philadelphia’s late-game slide. “I missed a couple shots. I just didn’t have the legs. Not because I was tired, which I wasn’t, but my back just didn’t allow me to dominate the way I’ve been doing in fourth quarters. I missed a couple shots, we made a couple mistakes on defense, they made a few threes, and just like that they were up 1.”

But just when it looked like the ongoing questions about the Sixers and their inability to close down the stretch would come back to haunt Philadelphia once again, the Sixers were bailed out by a terrific shot by Tobias Harris, who confidently took a pass, dribbled to the elbow against Lakers guard Alex Caruso and rose up to bury what turned out to be the game-winning jumper with 3.0 seconds remaining.

“I’m a person that I visualize myself in those spots, so when the opportunity came … that’s a shot I work on time and time again but in those moments just being confident enough to let it go and being OK with the result.

“Tonight, it fared well.”

It was a shot that also allowed the Sixers to laugh off those late-game foibles, a stretch that nearly ruined what had been an incredibly impressive performance by the hosts over the first 45 minutes against the NBA’s defending champions, one Harris said his team viewed as a measuring stick given the opponent they were facing.

“I would say a little bit of both,” said Harris, who finished with 22 points, when asked if he’d focus more on being happy he hit the game-winner or being frustrated at Philadelphia’s sloppy play late. “I’d say there’s always growth in everything. So, tonight’s win is a great win for us against a great team, but, at the same time, we know we could be better, especially in the fourth quarter.”

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