Tennessee basketball assistant coaches Desmond Oliver and Rob Lanier have been friends since they were 10 and 12 years old, growing up in Buffalo, New York.
“Rob’s a big brother, he’s family and he’s always been family,” Desmond Oliver said.
“He was with me the night I met my wife. I was the best man in his wedding, he was the best man in mine,” Rob Lanier said.
VIDEO WEB EXTRA: In their own words: Rob Lanier and Desmond Oliver
Rob and Desmond lived on Donovan Drive in the Ferry and Grider Projects, a rough neighborhood in a high-crime area on the east side of Buffalo.
“I was exposed to a lot of things and I was mature for my age because I was making my own decisions since a very young age and I had to,” Lanier said.
Oliver and Lanier grew up without fathers in their homes.
My mom would always warn me, don’t hang out with that guy or stay away from that person, stay focused and right away, she latched on to Rob really before I did," Oliver said. "She kind of realized he was a young kid that had his head on straight, he was always super focused.”
"Trouble was easy to find, but it couldn’t find me,” Lanier said.
From Rock Bottom to Rocky Top...These dudes have come a very long way. pic.twitter.com/S8d4B6DYVN
From a young age, Rob was focused on the things he was passionate about - being a good student and basketball.
“I was into ball early. By age seven, I could handle the ball and I dribbled the ball around the projects everywhere I was going and people identified me with that,” Lanier said.
“He was a really good player early on and I was one of the worst players you could imagine at that age," Oliver said with a smile. "Not real coordinated, big feet, a little clumsy, I was a little heavier as a kid. And honestly, I kind of got tired of people heckling me early on for not being a good player which sparked my interest to just competitively get good enough to stop the heckling and then I realized that people treated you differently when you were doing something positive.”
“And in a lot of ways people wanted to live through someone who was doing things the right way," Lanier said. "So even if you found yourself in proximity to something undesirable, a lot of people would tell you, go the other way, this ain’t for you, you just keep doing what your doing.”
The summer before Lanier's senior year he started to hear from college coaches.
“I wasn’t good as I thought I was, but there was no doubt in my mind, basketball was going to take me some places that I wanted to go," Lanier said.
“Probably about my junior year of high school I realized this is a ticket to go to college," Oliver said. "To put myself in a situation where I’m out of the projects.”
Lanier didn't have a phone at his house, so college coaches would call Oliver's house to talk to him. He ended up at St. Bonaventure, about 70 miles south of Buffalo, while Oliver went to Division II Dominican College 30 minutes outside New York City.
Both started their coaching careers at Niagara University, Rob from 1990-92 and Desmond from 1994-97. For more than 20 years they remained very close friends but never worked on the same staff or even lived in the same city until Rick Barnes took the job at Tennessee.
“Rob and I had always talked about the idea, if the right situation occurred, having a chance to work together. The fact that I spent five years at the University of Georgia and covered this region in terms of recruiting, five years at UNC Charlotte, covered this same region, on top of the fact that Rob and I have a great relationship, I knew coach Barnes and his staff at Texas. It made sense,” Oliver said.
“I take very seriously the amount of trust that coach Barnes has in me, so I would never make a recommendation to him that I didn't think was a home run and the stars just happened to align,” Lanier said.
For the first time since their teenage years on Donovan Drive, Rob and Desmond were living in the same city and working together. Both are married with two children.
“My children refer to him as Uncle Des, his children refer to me as Uncle Rob," Lanier said.
“We can both attest to the importance of family growing up, so now I'm able to be an uncle when his kids don't have their grandparents living in Knoxville or cousins or aunts or real uncles," Oliver said.
"The fact that I'm here it makes a big difference, the fact that he's around and my kids can walk around the block or drive down the block and go by his house, coaches don’t have that. Most of us live in different states, different situations where the families are way in a different part of the country. So the fact that we’re together and have an opportunity outside of basketball to be connected and win, is big time,” Oliver said.
"We grew up without fathers in the home, both of us did," Lanier said. "We both dreamed together and the dreams that were bigger for us than basketball and coaching and all of this, was to have our own families. We talked about the kind of wife we wanted to have. All of that stuff was really important to us. For us to realize those things and then now to be together, experiencing those things together, we’ve been fortunate in terms of dreams come true, we both knocked it out the park. This is a tough business and it's a grind on your families. You really can't do it at a high level unless you have someone in your life that really supports this sort of lifestyle that comes with being a coach and Annette and Dayo, our wives, they’ve been true companions through this and that’s great that we all can be a part of it.”
Rob and Desmond have both been to the NCAA Tournament separately but they'll be on the bench together in the big dance for the first time when the Vols take on Wright State Thursday at 12:40.