A year before Purdue head coach Matt Painter was born in 1970, the Rolling Stones released the song “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”
In many ways that song became his anthem, not the least of which was Painter’s college basketball recruitment that led him to Purdue and set the stage for his tenure as head coach of the Boilermakers.
Painter has been open for years about the fact he was an IU fan growing up, and he spoke about that again on Saturday at a press conference as his team prepares for an Elite Eight matchup against Tennessee.
“I grew up an Indiana fan. Most of my family went to Indiana,” Painter said. “So I grew up an Indiana basketball fan.”
Painter was a talented guard at Delta H.S. in Muncie, Ind. He was on Indiana’s radar as a recruiting prospect, but that never really materialized as IU coach Bob Knight assembled one of his best classes ever in Painter’s year — 1989.
But Painter did have the full attention of Purdue coach Gene Keady in West Lafayette.
And initially, the idea of playing for Purdue was a tough pill to swallow.
“I rooted against Purdue. Then when they started recruiting me, I was emotional more than anything,” Painter said. “I was like, I don’t like Purdue. I don’t want to go to Purdue.”
Enter Painter’s father Mike, an IU graduate and huge fan of Knight and the Indiana basketball team.
The elder Painter seemed to recognize the tie that bound Knight and Keady — discipline — and thought Purdue could be a good fit for his son.
“My dad has two degrees from Indiana, and he just said — it was my first lesson in recruiting, and I’ve always used it in recruiting. He just said Purdue has good education, and he just says, and Purdue always wins more than they should, and they have a great head coach, and he’s got discipline. He just said, and you’re going to play for someone who has discipline.
“He was a big Coach Knight fan, so that was along the lines right there. It’s what I said earlier in here, you’re not going to do what you want to do. You’re going to do what’s best for you. That always resonated with me in terms of any decision I’ve ever made. So you’ve got to do some things you don’t want to do, but it’s still better for you to do that and don’t always think about yourself, think of others around you and stuff like that.”
Almost every player Knight pursued to play at Indiana tells a similar story about his no nonsense approach to recruiting.
And Painter still needed some convincing after listening to a recruiting pitch from Keady, who also had a unique style.
“When he (Keady) left our home, I was like man, back then you didn’t stay in the summers all the time or at all. So like everybody else gave me choices. You could do this in the summer, you could do this,” Painter said. “Coach Keady didn’t give me any choices. He said, ‘you will go to summer school, or if you don’t, you’ll get a job. You need to learn to get up and wake up early in the morning and get to work.’
“I was like the hell with that. You’re 17, 18 years old. You’re like I want to shoot jumpers and eat pizza and have a helluva time. So I walked out of there, and I told my dad, ‘man, I don’t know about that.’
“He said, ‘that’s the only person who told you the truth. You need him way more than he needs you.'”
Painter listened to his father, and he played in West Lafayette for four years. He earned honorable mention All-Big Ten in 1993, the same year Knight’s Hoosiers went 17-1 in the Big Ten.
That was really Knight’s last great team at Indiana.
Meanwhile, it turned out Painter’s father, the IU fan, was right. Painter didn’t get what he wanted as a recruit in 1989, but he got what he needed.
Painter would reunite with Keady in 2004 and succeed him as head coach a year later. They’ve been the only two coaches at Purdue in the last 44 years.
And while Painter didn’t initially like the idea of going to Purdue 35 years ago, he’s long since seen the wisdom in that decision.
“That was a good choice,” he said.
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