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Penn State’s Chambers got coaching start after bar stabbing

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Patrick Chambers is psyched for his new gig at Penn State, which either makes him crazy or optimistic. Maybe a little of both.

“Get ready. We’re going to bring energy, enthusiasm and a great deal of passion,” Chambers told the AP. “You’ll love the style of play and new attitude.”

This is Penn State, the same place that booted its hoops team from its gym because Bon Jovi needed the rehearsal time. So why does he sound so excited? It all goes back to how he got started in coaching. As Mike DeCourcy writes, it wasn’t the typical beginning:

In 2002, Chambers was working in sales and administration for his family’s printing business and doing well financially. He coached high school basketball on the side, at Episcopal Academy in Philadelphia, where he’d played in the late 1980s. “My hobby,” is how he views that experience now.

He was a single man out on the town one autumn night when he ran into a woman he knew from high school and two friends of hers, a married couple. Soon afterward, the husband attacked Chambers, stabbing him twice in the neck with a broken wine glass. Chambers has said he believes the man was either drunk or high or both and suspected Chambers was hitting on his wife.

“That’s when I said, ‘That’s it. I’m done.’ I was close to death, so I’m going to go do what I want to do,” Chambers said. “And what I wanted to do was go coach basketball.”


Um, yeah. I think a stabbing might just make a person reevaluate their career and exactly what they want to do.

You also can follow me on Twitter @MikeMillerNBC.