BALTIMORE — Ron “Fang” Mitchell dealt in pressure, not affection.
Mitchell injected adversity — 5:30 a.m. practices, sideline rebukes delivered with a spray of the peppermints he chewed — into the lives of his Coppin State basketball players. He brooked no excuses when they failed to meet his exacting standards. If they could survive him, he believed, adulthood would not seem so daunting.
Near the end of a new ESPN documentary “On & Coppin,” Mitchell, retired since 2014, says: “Through all this, you guys really didn’t know how much I loved you.”
The film uses Coppin’s 1997 NCAA Tournament upset of No. 2 seed South Carolina as a hook to tell the story of what Mitchell built in West Baltimore. As the story unwinds, it becomes clear that his former players, now grown men, appreciate exactly how much this gruff character meant to them.
“Great players, they want to be told the truth, and Fang told me the truth,” Larry Stewart, one of Coppin’s best, says in the film. “Without that, I would not have been able to walk into an NBA training camp and make a team.”
Jerry Bembry covered Mitchell’s teams for The Baltimore Sun before moving on to write for ESPN The Magazine and more recently, Andscape (formerly known as The Undefeated), an ESPN platform focused on the intersection of sports, race and culture. For years, he had stored the possibility of a Coppin documentary in the corner of his mind.
“From the moment I started covering the Coppin team, which was in 1989-90, just as they grew, I knew it was such a special story — where they came from to where they went,” Bembry recalled. “So I think it was in the early 2000s when I started to think this could be a documentary.”
In May 2020, his daughter, Ashley Bembry-Kaintuck, was wrapping up work as an associate producer on “Summer of Soul,” Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s Oscar-nominated documentary on the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival.
“That was telling the story of a Black community, a Black story, and I was like, ‘There’s more stories out there like this,’ ” said Bembry-Kaintuck, who works as a producer for Andscape and grew up attending Coppin games. “I had transcribed a lot of the Coppin interviews my dad did in the early 2000s, so I called him and was like, ‘We need to tell this story. It’s just so relevant right now.’ ”
Father and daughter teamed up to pitch the documentary to ESPN.
Over the years, Mitchell had brushed off suggestions that he write a book; he never had much use for self-promotion, figuring he’d done the work he was paid for, simple as that. “But people told me it’s not all about you; there might be players who would be happy to be a part of something like that,” he said last week, on the phone from his home in Kennesaw, Ga. “So that’s when I changed up, and then Jerry came along.”
The documentary will begin streaming on ESPN+ on Monday, the 25th anniversary of Coppin’s NCAA Tournament win.
It begins not with the 1996-97 Eagles or their monumental thumping of South Carolina but with Mitchell’s 1986 arrival in West Baltimore. At the time, Coppin was a commuter school with no home court to call its own and no recruiting connections at the city’s powerhouse high school programs. The film takes viewers on a drive out North Avenue, showing the dilapidated row houses would-be Eagles glimpsed as they visited campus for the first time. But Mitchell, who proudly calls himself a business person first and a coach second, had the support of Coppin president Calvin Burnett. So, he improvised his own means of building a formidable program.
“What happens in the business world, you learn that you have to get the job done, period,” Mitchell said, summing up the credo he passed on to generations of players. “I learned that if you wanted to get anything done, you had to go out and do it yourself.”
He would take the Eagles anywhere to play anyone as long as the host team coughed up a reasonable appearance fee. Those revenues would bolster Coppin’s entire athletic department. “I’m not going to be a cheap prostitute,” Mitchell jokes in the documentary. “I want the big money.”
He could not out-recruit the ACC or the Big East for the best high school players in Baltimore, so he turned to old connections in Philadelphia and New Jersey to scoop up tough kids who had been overlooked by bigger schools.
Coppin went from 8-19 in Mitchell’s first season to 26-7, with its first NCAA Tournament appearance, in his fourth. Players such as Stewart, Reggie Isaac and Phil Booth laid the foundation. The Eagles would go on to win the MEAC regular-season championship nine times in 10 years and make another NCAA Tournament appearance in 1993 to set the stage for 1997, when everything came together.
The documentary drills in on that team — the early-season ego clashes that gave way to unity after a pregame brawl at Howard, the furious rally against UMES in the MEAC tournament opener and the no-nonsense thrashing Coppin laid on a South Carolina team that was ranked No. 6 in the country.
Before that first-round game, a reporter asked Coppin star Antoine Brockington what he would do about South Carolina’s decorated trio of guards. “What are their guards gonna do about me?” he retorted. Not much, as it turned out. Brockington scored 20 points as Coppin pulled away in the second half to win by 13.
“I’ve been to World Series games, I’ve covered Super Bowls, the U.S. Open in golf, the Australian Open in tennis, and that was one of the most memorable moments for me,” Bembry recalled. He had only booked one night at his hotel in Pittsburgh, because he assumed the Eagles would lose. So he had to scramble in the aftermath. “But having watched this school come from their origins at the Coppin Center, where sometimes you had a crowd and sometimes you didn’t, to this arena packed with 18,000 people and everybody’s behind this team … it was an amazing moment,” he said.
Tears fill Mitchell’s eyes and he has to pause in the documentary as he reflects on how much the game meant to him. Not, he said, because it was the culmination of what he accomplished at Coppin, but because of how much he cared for the players who pulled it off.
“They didn’t have quit in them,” he said. “When I see people who don’t have quit in them … that means that they got the message.”
Though he’s still “basically a no-nonsense person,” the 74-year-old Mitchell wishes he was a more balanced person in his coaching years. He’s not sure his love always needed to be so hard. But it worked.
As the father-daughter directing team pulled its story together, Bembry threw out an idea. Why not ask Baltimore native and actress Felicia “Snoop” Pearson, best known for her work in The Wire, to lend gravel-voiced authenticity to the narration of the documentary? Pearson agreed, and the package was complete.
“Her voice took the doc from one level to the next level,” Bembry-Kaintuck said.
Now, Coppin’s story, and Mitchell’s, will be seen and heard beyond the city’s borders.
Asked what he hopes viewers will take away, Mitchell said: “I came up in a poor area in the inner city, but I still believed that things could get done. I just wanted to make sure that I gave people opportunities.”
