Jason Capel: 'Right where you're supposed to be'
Sometimes the big payoff to a decision takes a little time.
Jason Capel got his first tattoo when he was a sophomore in high school. As he tells it, his mother didn’t know he was getting it but his father, then the coach at Old Dominion, did and gave him the money to pay for it.
Capel wasn’t old enough to get a tattoo but he looked like he was, so he got in the car with Odell Hodge, an Old Dominion forward who still stands as one of the Monarchs’ all-time players, and headed to the tattoo shop.
At the time, Capel was certainly pleased with the ink and he has gotten several more tattoos since then, but it took more than 20 years for the big payoff on that first one.
Because Capel’s first tattoo, the one Odell Hodge took him to get, the one his mother didn't know about and his father paid for when he was a sophomore in high school - that tattoo seems like a foretelling of the future that came to fruition this spring.
“It’s amazing - it’s a panther. It’s a panther with a basketball,” Capel told Panther-Lair.com from his office this week. And his office, of course, is at the Petersen Events Center, where he’s an assistant basketball coach for the University of Pittsburgh Panthers.
The tattoo was inspired by Darrell Armstrong, a point guard on Capel’s father’s Fayetteville State team who went on to play for the Orlando Magic and is now an assistant coach with the Dallas Mavericks; Armstrong had a tattoo of a panther, and Capel liked the imagery.
“It was ironic,” Capel said. “That was the first thing my four-year-old, that’s what he said when he knew that we were coming to Pittsburgh and the mascot was panthers, he was fired up: ‘Daddy, your tattoo’ and all of those things.
“It’s just ironic how the universe works sometimes and you end up right where you’re supposed to be.”
Capel ended up at Pitt after his older brother, Jeff, was hired to be the Panthers’ head coach in late March. Both Capel brothers played in the ACC - Jeff at Duke, Jason at North Carolina - so there was appeal in competing against those teams in that conference. But, much like Jason’s tattoo, there were elements that pre-date the brothers’ college careers that made a move to Pitt seem like a good fit.
For instance, the Capel brothers were fans of the Pittsburgh Steelers when they were young. They saw that team’s notorious toughness and attitude, attributes that have become attached to the city of Pittsburgh itself. Other Pittsburgh sports teams have internalized those qualities, and when Pitt basketball was at its heyday, the Panthers were known by those same descriptors:
Tough, hard-working, gritty and generally “Pittsburgh” in all the ways that Pittsburgh sports teams are “Pittsburgh.”
“I think that’s Pitt basketball,” Capel said. “And I think that’s what it has to be. I think that’s what it’s always been. That’s what the success has been built on. Is that a product of this city? Sure. I grew up and my brother was a Steeler fan and so was I, with ‘Slash’ Stewart and Bettis - I remember being in Italy, staying up late when Bettis fumbled that ball against the Colts and I was afraid the Colts were going to win. Plaxico Burress, I played against him in high school. He went to Green Run and we played against each other when I was at Indian River.
“So I’ve been a Steeler fan and just the grit of it, the toughness, the ‘Steel Curtain’ - you move that over to basketball, the successful Pitt teams have had that grittiness, a toughness about them, mentally and physically, a togetherness, a bond to, ‘Whatever it takes, we’re going to get it done.’ I think that’s what this program has been built on and that’s, again, something that I know we’re going to build on as well: being tough, being together, having a passion for what we do every day.”
Capel has a passion for coaching, but for the last four years, his passion was elsewhere. After a four-year stint as head coach at Appalachian State, he went into broadcasting and was content to stay in that field. Capel wasn’t itching to get back on a bench; the desire was there, but it came with a caveat.
“Yes, but it had to be the right situation,” he said when asked about his desire to return to coaching. “I was enjoying a career in television where I was progressing and covering some really good leagues, good coaches. And when I say the right situation, I was going to be working for someone - someone that I believed in, trusted and I could work with, and there’s nobody, in my mind, that I thought that it would be a perfect fit with than with my brother.”