By Mike Pearson
FightingIllini.com

Jimmy Collins, the longtime University of Illinois assistant basketball coach for Coach Lou Henson, passed away on December 13. An All-America player and team captain for Henson's 1970 Final Four club at New Mexico State, Collins served as an assistant coach in Champaign-Urbana from 1983-96.

Four of Jimmy Collins' former Fighting Illini players use similarly endearing words and phrases to describe their beloved basketball coach. Respected … patient … mentor … father figure.

For Marcus Liberty, Kiwane Garris, Ervin Small and Deon Thomas, their reverence for the man they call "Coach Collins" is unmistakable.  

"He was the one guy who stood with me," said Liberty. "There were many times that I wanted to leave school. I just didn't want to be there. And he was the one that pulled me back in. He explained to me what it's like to make a decision and stick with it. He'd say that it may not seem right at the time, but it would get better. It wasn't just about basketball; it was life lessons."

Collins' often used his unique sense of humor to make a point with his players. Ervin Small remembered one occasion in particular when he was an Illini freshman.

"There were five or six of us in the dorms and we always used to call Coach Collins," Small said. "One night we called him and told him we were bored. 'We don't know where to go wash our clothes. We don't know where to get our hair cut. We don't know where to go to do this or to do that.' So, one day Coach Collins came to our dorm. We all went down to the car and he opened his trunk. He'd bought a bag of Pampers (diapers). So he started giving every one of us players a Pamper. He said 'I'm giving you all one of these daggone Pampers because y'all don't do nothing but cry like babies.' His logic behind it was telling us to stop acting like babies and be grown men. He told us 'It's time to grow up, Y'all been on campus for three weeks … it's time to grow up!'

For Garris, it was Collins who lifted his spirits after the then Illini freshman missed two crucial free throws that would have sewn up a UI victory against Missouri.

"Coach Collins was always messing with me," Garris said. "I remember him telling me 'Missouri just sent me some bricks in the mail and they say that you folded.' When he did that, I knew that he was trying to light a fire under me. As a freshman, you can go one of two ways. You can either say 'Alright, my career is over' or you can do something about it. Him knowing what type of person I was and talking to me that way, he knew that it would light a fire under me and make me want to do better. And it did. I ended up going on a free throw streak after that."

Thomas credited his grandmother's esteem for Collins in helping him decide on the University of Illinois as his college destination.

"My grandmother was a great judge of people's character," Thomas said. "She had great admiration for Coach Collins."

It was a controversial NCAA investigation in the early 1990s that will forever link Thomas with Collins.

"During that freshman year at Illinois, we were forbidden to speak to one another by the NCAA," Thomas said. "Still, I knew he was there and that he was in my corner if I needed him. We were still connected. After we made it through (the NCAA investigation), we focused on the future … to be the man that I was supposed to be and to stand up and be a person of character."

According to Small, Jimmy Collins served as a buffer between him and his more critical head coach.

"If Coach Henson made you mad, Coach Collins was that person that would come over and say 'Hey, it's going to be alright. We're going to figure it out,'" Small said. "He went to Coach Henson on my behalf several times. I know that for a fact."

The quartet of Illini players will forever remember their mentor and friend.

"Whenever I got off the phone with him, I would always say 'I love you, Coach,'" Liberty said. "He's old school and wouldn't say it back as much. He was so cool and just say, 'Yeah man, alright'. I just wanted him to know how much he helped me become the person I am today."

For Garris, Collins was a fountain of life lessons.

"When I got to Illinois," Garris said, "Coach Collins was just like my parent. He was there for me for anything. He'd teach me about always looking someone in the eye, to owning up to your mistakes, and about always being on time. Everything that I didn't get when I was younger, father-wise, Coach was there for me."

Collins may not have noticed, but his players were always watching and learning.

"Being around Coach Collins, you started to pick up this aura of being a good person … how you're supposed to treat people," Small said. "We'd watch how he and his wife would interact with each other and how he would interact with his kids. I was like 'I want that kind of love.' As college students, we were watching everything that our coach and our mentor did, and it allowed us to shape and form our lives as to how it's supposed to be done."

Thomas says the single word that connects him to Collins is love.

"I just tell him that he is loved," he said, "not just by me but by so many. He changed and bettered the lives for so many. What he did during his time as a coach at Illinois and at UIC was to change the lives for a whole lot of men that looked like me. First and foremost, what you want to do as a coach is to be a positive influence on young men. That's exactly what he did."