Bob Cimbollek has been called a lot of things in his life. It’s that way sometimes when a person is good at what he does. It’s also that way when he did it, to paraphrase Frankie Blue Eyes, his way.

But therein lies the rub. He was successful at it. And next month Cimbollek will be inducted into the Hall of Honors by the Maine Sports Legends.

“Cim” definitely did it his way. He won five state basketball championships while coach at Orono High School and John Bapst.

And his way sometimes infuriated the opposition.

It wasn’t anything personal. It’s just that “Cim” could slow down things on a basketball court to a point that Job would have become impatient.

He would grind it out. He would have his players set and go through so many picks you would have sworn he was running the old picket fence.

Meanwhile, the Bangor Auditorium crowds would be howling at him. Taunting him. Screaming at him.

“When I was at Orono, we had the horses,” Cimbollek said. “But at Bapst, if we weren’t one of the best three teams going and I wanted to win it, then I had to do something to take the athleticism away.”

And did he ever. He didn’t play stall ball. He played snail ball. The hated, the despised, the loathed, the stomach churning, sickening – all together now – THE SHUFFLE.

The ball would go into the post and his players, 16- and 17-year-old sons of MTV and Super Mario Brothers, would do what the old ball coach had asked.

They would bust in and cut and then bust and cut some more until a player was standing alone under the basket with the ball for an easy layup.

“The thing at Bapst was the kids were intelligent and they bought into the system,” Cimbollek says.

He doesn’t coach anymore. He jokes about being on Medicare. He makes an endless string of old fogey jokes. He played in a seniors softball league that he organized this past summer, and he plays for a senior basketball team. He tells me that he reads this space every week because it’s just a page away from the senior citizens report.

He clearly misses coaching but says he couldn’t do it these days.

“Forty years. It’s a different animal today. You’ve got so much parent involvement. When coaches leave or get forced out, it’s usually because of parental pressure,” Cimbollek says.

He watches as coaches are petitioned out of their jobs or are forced to keep players they had previously cut from the squad, and he doesn’t like it.

“It’s really tough for coaches. Let’s put it this way, I don’t think I’d last very long right now,” he said. “When you give in, you give up a piece of yourself.”

And the thing that he says pleases him most – more than the five state titles as a coach, more than the years he gave to his profession – is the 50 former players who went on to become coaches themselves.

But there’s something else he should be proud of, and it’s something he’s probably forgotten over the years. It was the kindness he showed me some 12 years ago.

Not long after a Bapst team – my personal favorite Bapst team, led by Brett Soucy and Rod Buswell – won a state championship, the newspaper I was working for closed up shop.

It’s always bad when a newspaper closes down. Something dies. I’ve worked for three that have gone under but that time was the worst because I thought that closure would likely force me to leave the state.

A couple of days later, I received a letter from Coach Cimbollek. In it he thanked me for my work in covering his team. He had also attached a page-long letter of recommendation. He was so gracious in his wording that I had to reread it to make sure he was talking about me.

Largely because of that recommendation, I stuck it out up here. Things turned out OK.

It was a slow process. I kinda shuffled my way along until things finally worked out.

I had a good coach.

Don Perryman can be reached at 990-8045, 1-800-310-8600 or dperryman@bangordailynews.net.