‘The Cage’: Inside Shane Beamer’s legendary pickup basketball games at Tennessee
The basketball court at The Willows apartment complex in West Knoxville, Tennessee has changed plenty over two decades.
A recent photo shows the poles designed to hold up a tennis net have worn some from weather. Leaves coat the basketball lines that, too, are scarred by the skid prints of old sneakers sliding in and out of the paint.
The memories of that green cement court encircled with a black chain-link fence, though, remain vivid in the minds of those who raced up and down the court in the early 2000s.
“I still text Matt (McMahon) and Eric (Konkol) regularly,” South Carolina’s Shane Beamer told The State. “And if you make any mention of ‘The Cage,’ they all know what we’re talking about.”
The list of names that participated in games in “The Cage” is long and distinguished. Beamer — who’s South Carolina team plays Tennessee on Saturday — Konkol (Tulsa men’s basketball) and McMahon (LSU men’s basketball) have all gone on to head coaching careers at the Division I level.
Fellow hooper Mike Gilstorf spent time in administration at UT, East Carolina and West Virginia before moving to his current post as a senior athletic director at Tarleton State in Texas. Ex-Ole Miss women’s basketball coach Matt Insell was also a regular on the court.
Those who were integral parts of the legendary pickup games during their days as graduate assistants, student managers and other varying roles at Tennessee spoke with The State about their time battling between the lines and the friendships that remain inextricably linked to that apartment complex basketball court 10 minutes from UT’s campus.
“I totally missed this message (asking to be interviewed) — I don’t know if it got caught up with my other text messages or whatever,” Gilstorf said recently. “But I saw it and was like, ‘Hell yeah, I want to talk about “The Cage.” ’ ”
‘WWE steel cage match playing ball’
McMahon and Konkol were roommates at The Willows in 2001, working on head men’s basketball coach Buzz Peterson’s staff at Tennessee, when they started hunting for guys to play pickup with them at the court just outside their apartment.
Eventually Beamer, Volunteers assistant men’s basketball coach Kerry Keating and a number of other folks working for UT in a handful of different capacities linked up for regular games during the spring and winter.
Konkol: “Matt was super meticulous (as a roommate). Always passionate and always full of energy. Both of us loved all sports. We got addicted to ‘Bill Walsh College Football’ (on PlayStation) late at night. They had a dynasty mode where you could recruit and build your own team.”
McMahon: “I didn’t get to spend as much time with guys like Shane and others that first year, because it was Buzz Peterson taking over the program there. So it was kind of a 24/7 job.”
Gilstorf: “I think Keating was actually, for a while, living at Konkol and McMahon’s apartment sleeping on an air mattress when he first got there with Buzz until he got a condo or something like that. On Sundays, I would walk over to their apartment and we would watch ‘The Sopranos,’ because Keating was from West Orange where ‘The Sopranos’ was filmed and he’d buy us Backyard Burger.”
Insell: “You didn’t have a lot of time outside of the office. And when you did have time outside of the office, you wanted to exercise, whatever it is. And so you decided to play pickup basketball. … A lot of your men’s basketball guys were there. And we kind of all ran in the same circle (with the football staff).”
Gilstorf: “Those guys (Konkol and McMahon), they were basketball junkies. They found this court there. Then we started playing pickup. We had relationships with Shane, those guys did, because they were in grad school and I was still student manager.
“… We just all built relationships and next thing you know, it just kind of turned into this big ordeal. We’d be so excited to go play three-on-three or four-on-four. It would be a lot of fun. A lot of trash-talking.”
Konkol: “(The court) was like a tennis court, but the net was never up. It did have the poles on the side and you had to be careful. It had a basketball net at both ends and it was perfect for high-possession games. You could play three-on-three full court. You did have to worry about those poles from the tennis net. It was all enclosed with at least a 10- to 12-foot fence, and so we called it ‘The Cage.’ ”
Hal Wilson, ex-Tennessee men’s basketball video coordinator and current assistant professor of kinesiology at Georgia Southern: “There was just a bunch of us like-minded young guys, and those competitive juices — you gotta find a way to get them out somehow. You’re working like crazy. Got limited time. We had people on similar schedules. In the season, we got an hour or two over here, ‘Hey, let’s go hoop it up.’ ”
Insell: “When you went to the rim in those games, you were going to get fouled. There were no freebies at the rim. And when you did call a foul and it wasn’t a hard foul, you were going to hear that all night later at the bar, or wherever else you were at.”
Wilson: “I think how it usually started was everybody was kind of in a good mood at first and then the competitiveness starts to come out — somebody questions a call or somebody takes an elbow. I don’t think it’s any different than anywhere else. It was super competitive, because those guys, they were all good athletes. It was no NBA All-Star game where you lit up the scoreboard. It was hard-fought, tooth and nail every basket.”
Gilstorf: “We’d get in there and play for the first time, everybody gets in there and then ‘Boom!’ You shut the cage, it closes and it’s like you’re in Hell in a Cell or, a WWE steel cage match playing ball.”
Shane Beamer’s basketball prowess
Konkol and McMahon were the best players of the bunch, their college playing days on full display as they spotted up from everywhere on the court. Wilson and Gisltorf had plenty of savvy themselves from working on the basketball staff.
Beamer, then a graduate assistant on Phillip Fulmer’s staff, was the lone football coach among stalwarts of the group, but he held his own.
Gilstorf: “The white line was actually underneath the fence, so there’s no out of bounds. And the fence is just like right behind both baskets. You would be bumped into the fence. Beamer would put you into the fence boxing you out when you’re trying to rebound. Konkol and McMahon would just take like two dribbles and pull up and shoot.”
McMahon: “I think back and (Beamer) had to adjust for the wind on the outdoor courts. I will tell you, he’s more of a driver and creator than he was a jump shooter.”
Konkol: “Shane was a football player by nature, but he played extremely hard. He had some sneaky game. And he was all about winning, too — I can tell you that.”
Insell: “(Beamer) could shoot it a little bit and attack the basket. He was a little unorthodox, because he was obviously a football guy trying to play our sport. But he could really play. He had some game about him.”
Bryan O’Neill, former Tennessee men’s basketball student manager and current boys basketball coach at Waggener High School outside Louisville, Kentucky: “I definitely think Beamer was the enforcer out there. Matt was the ultimate high-energy guy. Konkol (was) definitely Mr. Cool all the time.”
Beamer: “I’m the football coach that was playing pickup basketball with all these basketball coaches — so I certainly knew my role and I didn’t want to get out of my lane. I got in there and battled hard and tried to compete and have a good time.”
When the group wasn’t playing pickup basketball or working, they were living as 20-somethings in a college town obsessed with their respective teams.
Gilstorf: “You’d hang out at some of the local establishments around that area. We liked going to that place (Toddy’s Backdoor Tavern). You didn’t get a lot of college students there. No basketball players were gonna go to Toddy’s, put it that way.
“They had a jukebox and you could actually get Old Style drafts for three bucks. They were 30- to 32-ounce Old Style drafts.”
Beamer: “We had a fun time. It was a good three years, for sure.”
Lasting friendships from Tennessee to Louisiana
Beamer left Fulmer’s staff at Tennessee for a position coaching at Mississippi State under Sylvester Croom in 2004.
McMahon was only at Tennessee a brief time, returning to Appalachian State, his alma mater, to be an assistant coach in 2002. He eventually became the head coach at Murray State, recruiting Ja Morant to play for the Racers, before being named the head coach at LSU on March 21, 2021.
Konkol, like McMahon and Beamer, climbed the coaching ladder and was named the head men’s basketball coach at Louisiana Tech in 2015. He went 153-75 over his seven seasons in Ruston, Louisiana before taking the head coaching job at Tulsa the same day McMahon was named head coach at LSU.
Gilstorf: “There’s always that connection with all of us, wherever we are. … I met up with McMahon and he yelled at me across the street in Phoenix one year.
“I have a nickname. I’m called, ‘Torch,’ to those guys. It wasn’t because of my jump shot. It’s because my clothes caught on fire in the dryer at Thomson Boling (Arena) when I was drying my T-shirts one day.
“I just hear, ‘Torch!’ yelled from across the street in Phoenix, because I was out there taking donors to the Final Four and kind of cultivating them, stewarding, stuff like that. … We talked for a few minutes, but, ‘The Cage,’ was probably mentioned at least once or twice in conversation within like five minutes.”
McMahon: “Those are the things you look back on where you learned a lot, but you also started to develop a network of people you know. Other people in that program are now ADs, SEC football coaches, Power Five coaches in other sports. It was a great experience to learn, but also to build a network of people to try and climb up through the profession they can lean on and learn from.”
Insell: “If you watch each one of our bench demeanors or sideline demeanors, that’s about what those games were like. Very stressful, very intense. Nobody really wanted to lose. And when you lost, you were pissed off and you were ready to run it back for another game.”
In the years since, Beamer has often referenced the old basketball court where his friendships with McMahon, Konkol and the rest of the crew originated.
During a recruiting trip when he was on staff at Virginia Tech, Beamer drove through Knoxville and stopped by the old court. He made sure to let his buddies know he’d swung through their old stomping grounds.
Wilson: “Man, it was a special group. It really was. I’m so happy for everybody’s success. It’s amazing. I teach coaching education. ... I’m always telling (students), ‘Look around this class right now, because what somebody’s doing in 20 years is going to blow you away.’
“If you think about here, 20 years later (we had a) head football coach in the SEC, head basketball coach in the SEC, another big-time Division I head coach, (Gilstorf) doing great things in administration. I don’t know how to describe it.”
This story was originally published November 17, 2022 at 8:00 AM.
