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It started out, as these things often do, with a little yarn spinning. Blessed with the freedom of time and an audience to entertain, a coach started telling a tale about his younger years, back when he had no money and no fame. He just had a harebrained idea to make a living coaching basketball and was blessed with the perfect combination of naivete and determination to make it happen, no matter the sacrifices.

The story was insanely hilarious, downright preposterous, and sparked an idea: Rare is the head coach born with the silver spoon. Most, no matter how much they might make now, scraped by at some far-flung outpost somewhere along the arduous climb up the ladder. They all have stories. Why not get some to tell them?

And here’s the result (and yes, the retelling of the caper that got this all started, is included).

Chris Beard, Texas

The goal was simple: free food. In 1995, Chris Beard made $400 a month as a grad assistant at Incarnate Word, barely enough to cover his rent, let alone hit a grocery store. So Beard got creative. From Thursday to Sunday, he’d park at the Bombay Bicycle Club where fellow GA Steve Lutz (now the head coach at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi) worked as a bartender for extra cash. The food wasn’t anything special, but the price was right. “Free,’’ he says. “I don’t think I even tipped Lutz.’’

That, however, still left three more days of meals to fill. So he took a gig giving basketball lessons to the son of a local businessman, who also owned another restaurant — Good Time Charlie’s. Rather than cash, Beard got paid in $15 gift cards. “Still think it’s the best chicken fried steak I ever ate,’’ he says. If he wound up short, he’d hit the Riverwalk, find a bar without a cover charge and hustle folks at the pool tables for an extra $20. “I was just trying to survive,’’ he says now with a laugh, and a $5 million per year salary from the University of Texas. “Wendy’s, McDonald’s, anything I could eat. I remember hitting my dad up one time for money and he said, ‘Let me get this straight. You just graduated from the University of Texas and you’re begging for food?’”

It took a while to shake the frugality, too. Three years after his run at Incarnate Word, Beard scored his first head-coaching job at Fort Scott Community College. The team had some money but not much, and Beard always was looking for a way to pinch a penny. Driving home from a game one night, the team stopped in Tulsa at CiCi’s Pizza, an all-you-can-eat pizza, pasta and salad buffet that then ran $3.99 a person. “I mean it wasn’t that much,’’ Beard says. “I think I was just so used to trying to get a deal.’’

The travel party consisted of 12 players, three coaches and a bus driver. Beard sweet-talked the cashier into comping the bus driver’s meal, and then sidled back to try and get another $3.99 knocked off the bill. The cashier went back to find the manager. Worried he might encounter an angry business owner, Beard was ready to back off. Instead, the manager asked, ‘Coach, at this point what do you want to pay?” Beard shrugged and suggested maybe 10 meals. “And then he threw in the drinks for free,’’ Bears says. “He was so nice. Just said, ‘Whatever you need.’”

Fast forward just a short year later and Beard, now a far better-paid assistant for Bob Knight at Texas Tech, rolled through Oklahoma on a recruiting trip. He spied the same CiCi’s Pizza and went in to ask for the manager. “He wasn’t there,’’ Beard says. “I just wanted to thank him, offer to pay him double.’’

Stewing in his own pot of nerves, Mike Brey sat inside the coaches’ locker room anxiously awaiting the start of his game at the University of Delaware when his lockermate walked in. Sweating profusely and pouring Gatorade down his throat, he proceeded to tell Brey how amped the crowd was and asked for a quick scouting report on Drexel, the opponent for that particular game. “It was YoUDee, the f—ing mascot,’’ Brey says. “My ass is tighter than you can possibly imagine, and every game he comes in, takes off his big head and starts. ‘Whoa coach, it’s hot out there. How we looking tonight?”

Brey, now the head coach at Notre Dame, pauses. “And then he’d come back at halftime. I’m screaming mad because we’re playing lousy, and here comes YoUDee, holding his head under his arm. ‘Gotta get the defense going, Coach.’ Yeah, I know, YoUDee.’’

For four years, a revolving cast of YoUDees shared the space with Brey — “never the same kid,’’ the coach says — until he finally worked up the courage to ask his athletic director for a new locker roommate. Or better yet, none at all.

A year later he left for Notre Dame, anyway. Brey has not, for the record, shared any space with the leprechaun.

John Calipari, Kentucky

His basketball camp completed, Kansas coach Ted Owens summoned the young counselor who’d driven all the way across Interstate 70 from Pittsburgh for work. Owens liked John Calipari, liked his hustle and how he interacted with the campers, and decided to offer him a position on the Kansas staff. “What position?” a giddy Calipari asked. Informed he’d be a volunteer coach, Calipari replied, “How much does that guy make?” Nothing via basketball, it turned out. Instead, Calipari’s lone salary came via Paul and Margaret, the two people who headed up the athletes’ cafeteria. They assigned Calipari to the vegetables and for team meals, Calipari dished out the peas and corn.

As you might guess, there wasn’t much cash in peas and corn. Calipari shared lodging with fellow assistant Dolph Carroll — a shotgun house so small that you could see the back door as soon as you opened the front door. Together they could barely make ends meet (the house at least was gifted from a Kansas donor). “We had no furniture because we had to make a decision — furniture or ESPN,’’ says Calipari, who now ranks as the highest paid coach in men’s college basketball. “We could rent furniture or get ESPN. We chose ESPN.’’ Carroll at least had a bed, but Calipari made do with the floor until one day he walked into the basketball offices and spied a floorful of empty cots.

Did you know John Calipari was an assistant coach at Kansas from 1982 to 1985? pic.twitter.com/6WRzeGUbI8

— SI Vault (@si_vault) February 10, 2014

Crews were busy filming the post-apocalyptic made-for-TV movie “The Day After” in town and Allen Fieldhouse served as the film’s triage scene. “There are beds all over — well, cots really,’’ Calipari says. “And there was one, a double-wide cot. I looked at Dolph and said, ‘Stick this in your Jeep. This is my new bed.’’’ Calipari left $50 where the bed sat and took it home. Because it was a cot, of course, it tended to envelop him like a wrap at night, so he found a piece of plywood to keep the thing flat. “You know what? It was the greatest time of my life,’’ Calipari says. “No worries, no money. I’m showering in the same shower Phog Allen showered in.’’

Steve Forbes, Wake Forest

Steve Forbes likes to joke that his biography one day will be entitled, “From Gravel Roads to Tobacco Road.’’ He could add a subtitle: “And sometimes on a scooter.’’

Wake Forest is Forbes’ 13th stop on a circuitous career route that began in Iowa, where, as a high schooler, he worked at McDonald’s and occasionally served the Iowa basketball team. “I might be the only coach in college basketball that worked at McDonald’s and helped sign two McDonald’s All-Americans (Tobias Harris and Scotty Hopson at Tennessee),’’ he jokes.

As an assistant at Barton Community College, for instance, Forbes remembers leaving a high school game in Detroit and finding two guys sitting in his front seat. They scattered when he yelled, but by then the damage was done — the ignition hanging on by a thread. Forbes somehow got the car to start and drove the 1,000 miles to Great Bend, Kan., not even turning it off when he stopped for gas. “I got back to school and they told me I needed a police report,’’ Forbes says. “I told them they were lucky they had a car.’’

Fast forward eight long, hard years and the Tennessee staff, with Bruce Pearl as head coach and Forbes one of his assistants, has the Vols rolling. After beating Memphis in 2008, they climbed to the school’s first No. 1 ranking and attracted the nation’s top recruiting class in 2010. A year later, the entire staff was fired amid an NCAA investigation. Forbes’ severance consisted of backpay for his accrued vacation time. That’s it.

Broke and out of a job, Forbes got rid of his car and bought the scooter, riding it for an entire year … until its untimely death. He proudly kept every gasoline receipt from his scooter life, proving that he paid just $60 for gas all year. Alas, he failed to spring for oil, and blew the engine.

Within the year, Forbes was back on his feet — albeit with a huge pay cut — as the head coach at Northwest Florida State, and two years ago, climbed all the way back, to his first Power 6 head coaching job. Tucked in the basement of his home in North Carolina, though, sits the scooter. “As a reminder of where I was, and the climb to make it back to where I am today,’’ Forbes says.

Leonard Hamilton, Florida State

Raised humbly, Leonard Hamilton remembers going out to dinner at the local Howard Johnson’s, staring wide-eyed as his junior college coach taught him how to twirl his spaghetti on a spoon. At his first coaching job, at Austin Peay, Hamilton made do with whatever food he could find, and crashed at whatever hotel had a vacant room when he was out recruiting.

So when he arrived at Kentucky, Hamilton was ill-prepared for the privileged world that his coach, Joe B. Hall, lived in. When the two went recruiting in New Jersey, it never occurred to Hamilton to pre-book a hotel, so when Hall asked where the reservation was, Hamilton scoured up the first place they could find. After struggling to follow the good old Rand McNally and making at least 15 wrong turns, the two pulled up to their room for the night. “I knew it was bad when we had to hand the credit card through a bulletproof window,’’ Hamilton says with a laugh. So bad, in fact, in the middle of the night an intruder banged on the room, trying to get in. “The only thing that stopped him was Joe B. screaming, ‘I’ve got a gun,’’’ Hamilton says. “Joe B. retold that story for 11 years. And every time it got worse.’’

But Hamilton hustled, taking not just basketball cues from Hall, but learning how to become more of a sophisticate. At Campell’s House, a swanky place in Lexington famous for its roast beef, Hamilton held his nose and ate the red meat that he swore “was still wiggling,’’ and learned the hard way what horseradish was. “Joe B. told me it was pretty good, so I plopped a big spoonful of horseradish on my meat. What did I know?” Hamilton says. “I must have cried a river. My nose was burning, my ears, my eyes. I had never seen horseradish before and now I’m eating it, burning up, on meat that I swear still had blood running out of it.’’

Over time, though, Hamilton figured he’d picked up enough cues to spy a good spot. During a recruiting trip to Orlando, Hamilton discovered an out-of-this-world fish place — “the best fish I’d ever eaten,’’ he says — and couldn’t wait to take his head coach to his new discovery. Hamilton built the place up, telling Hall over and over how delicious the food was, and how swanky the digs were. On that same trip, Hamilton finally got to take Hall to his new find, giddy for what he was sure would be Hall’s impressed reaction. Instead, they ate the whole meal and Hall never said a thing. “I couldn’t believe it,’’ Hamilton says. They went back to Lexington and a few days later, Hamilton drove down the street, and wouldn’t you know it? There was the same restaurant.

“It was Red Lobster,’’ Hamilton says.

Playing in just its second NCAA Division II Tournament, Northern Michigan rolled all the way to the quarterfinals of the then 32-team bracket, and better yet: The Wildcats got a home game against New York Tech. The opponent, though, was entirely unfamiliar and this was long before game film was easily acquired and readily exchanged. Scouting also wasn’t permitted but head coach Glenn Brown had an idea.

He called over his brand-new assistant and pointed up to the glass-enclosed control room some 50 feet above the arena. “Why don’t you go up there and just watch?” he said. What was Tom Izzo going to say? No? Just a year earlier, he’d been a high school coach. This was his big break. So Izzo followed Brown up the catwalk, armed with brown paper to black out the windows and a pair of scissors to cut slits so he could peek out and watch mighty New York Tech practice. “I was nervous, worried they’d hear me or something, so I said, ‘You better lock the door,’’’ Izzo says. Brown agreed, and as he was leaving, turned the lock on the doorknob, securing Izzo inside the 20 feet by eight feet space.

Izzo did as he was told, spying from high above as New York Tech went through its practice from 7 to 9 p.m. When it ended, he waited for Brown to come and spring him. “So now it’s 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock,’’ Izzo says. “I take off my shirt and ball it up like a pillow. I figure I’m here for the night.’’ Unbeknown to him, Brown had invited the opposing coach, Sam Stern, out for a beer. Halfway through, he realized he had stranded his assistant. “But it wasn’t like he could leave and say, ‘Oh hey, I have to go get my guy who was watching your practice,’’’ Izzo says. Finally, at 11:30, the lights came back on in the arena and an apologetic Brown came to free Izzo.

The next day, New York Tech scored on a buzzer-beating tip-in to win the game, 58-57, and advance to the Final Four. “The basketball gods got me,’’ Izzo says. “I got what I deserved.’’

Tod Kowalczyk, Toledo

Beat out by Tom Crean for a grad assistant position under Jud Heathcote at Michigan State in 1989, Tod Kowalczyk jumped at an offer (orchestrated by Heathcote) to work with Jim Boylan at New Hampshire. Told on a Thursday to be in town by Monday, Kowalczyk packed up his Ford Escort and started driving. He spent the first night at Boylan’s home, whereupon the coach told his new employee that his salary was $5,000 for the year — with no benefits.

Kowalczyk’s parents didn’t have a lot of money — his father was a schoolteacher, and his mother had passed away — so he knew he had to figure things out on his own. The next morning, he bought a newspaper and scoured the classifieds, finding both a part-time job and two roommates. The job was at a local moving company, and every Sunday Kowalczyk, now the head coach at Toledo, lugged office furniture — a 10-hour shift for $8 an hour.

As for the roommates — “one just graduated from architecture school and the other two were girls who just got out of Narcotics Anonymous,’’ Kowalczyk says. “They wound up being great, great people.’’ They each paid $200 a month for a rundown house in Portsmouth, decidedly lacking in amenities (they didn’t even have a TV) and pooled their money for groceries. The women also showed Kowalczyk how to navigate the system, and every few months he’d go down to the county offices and get food stamps.

A few years ago, Kowalczyk brought his wife, Julie, to New Hampshire, and the two navigated their way to check out the house. “It’s still rundown,’’ he says. “But you know what? That’s what you have to do to make it. You have to get comfortable being uncomfortable. Embrace the suck, I call it. And that place definitely sucked.’’

Frank Martin, UMass

The lady who worked the front desk at the Northeastern cafeteria remains a saint in the eyes of Frank Martin. Each week, she’d hand Martin and his fellow assistant coaches extra lunch passes, and they’d not only use them to eat a meal then and there, they’d make extra sandwiches and shove them in their backpacks, straight up lunchmeat contraband. “Food for a week,’’ says Martin, now the head coach at UMass. “Smuggled sandwiches — turkey, ham, whatever, I could get.’’

Martin would head back to the dismal apartment he shared with another assistant in East Providence, R.I., (there was no way they could afford Boston). Two folding chairs and a futon served as the rudimentary furniture. The lone bright spot — an 11-inch TV, a loaner from Jody Mooradian, an associate athletic director. “We’d sit there on the folding chairs and watch that little TV every night,’’ Martin says.

Martin took the job in September 2000. The Huskies had been struggling, failing to reach .500 under head coach Rudy Keeling, and the coach knew his seat was burning. In the conference tournament that year, Delaware torched Northeastern, 110-66. “We’re getting fired,’’ Martin says. “I know it.’’ Still Martin got up and went recruiting the next morning, leaving town for two days. He returned late at night, taking the train to North Attleboro, Mass., and driving back to the apartment. When he walked in, he realized the TV was gone. Mooradian, his roommate explained, asked for it back. “Dude that’s it,’’ Martin says. “We’re getting fired. Why else would she take the TV back?” Sure enough, the next day the entire staff got canned. “I’m not even on the job a year,’’ Martin says. “Here’s your two weeks pay, thanks for everything.’’

By good fortune, Northeastern hired Ron Everhart, now an assistant at West Virginia, and Everhart opted to keep Martin on staff. “He even got me a raise,’ Martin says. “I made $31,000, which sounds like a lot, but you try living on $31,000 in Boston.’’

Many years later, a restless and frustrated Martin called his mentor Bob Huggins. By then Martin was head coach at Kansas State but the team was mired in a four-game losing streak. He unloaded on Bob Huggins, ranting and raving about every small grievance. “And then, as only Huggs can do, he says to me, ‘Are you done?’’’ Martin says. “And then says, ‘Do you like your salary?’ I tell him that I do. And he says, ‘Then shut up and go do your job.’ And he hangs up on me.’’

Kelvin Sampson, Houston

On the day her husband was offered the assistant coaching position at Montana Tech, Karen Sampson grabbed the atlas and opened it to the Montana page, tracing her finger to Butte. Spying a black star by the city, she told Kelvin it would work. “A black star meant it had a U-Haul stop,’’ says Kelvin. Armed with a $1,000-a-year salary, the young married couple hauled from East Lansing, Mich., to Butte, settling in the married housing on campus. Karen, a teacher, got a job tutoring and Kelvin secured them an extra bit of cash, agreeing to clean the apartments in their complex when people moved out. Karen took care of the kitchen, Kelvin scrubbed the toilets, and they rented a steam cleaner and shampooed the carpets.

Within a year, Kelvin was promoted to head coach. It was not exactly arriving. The NAIA team’s budget was barely much more than his assistant salary. The coaches, in fact, co-opted a 1968 Trailways bus that the Butte Copper Kings, a Pioneer League baseball team, used in the summer and hired a local high school custodian as the bus driver. “He liked to tip ’em back,’’ says Kelvin, now the head coach at Houston. “I don’t blame him. That thing had the worst gear shift on the floor. Sounded like you were grinding hamburger meat.’’

The bus, though, served its purpose … except when it didn’t. On the way back from a three-game trip to Canada — against the University of Lethbridge Pronghorns, the Calgary 88s of the World Basketball League and the University of Alberta Pandas (yes, Kelvin has committed the nicknames to memory) — someone opened the door in the middle of a snowstorm. With winds whipping upwards of 60 mph the thing came straight off its hinges. With 700 miles to cover and no budget for repairs, the team dispatched the two smallest players outside, arming them with a roll of duct tape. The pair taped the team in. “It had to be the smallest guy because the only way he could get back in was to squeeze through the window,’’ Kelvin says. At pit stops, the smaller players squished back out for drinks and provisions, returning with bottles for the guys who were stuck on the bus “to do their number one.’’

No surprise, the bus didn’t survive much longer. The Orediggers set out for another three-game swing — Friday night at the College of Idaho, Saturday against Northwest Nazarene and Sunday at Eastern Oregon State. The team managed to get about four hours from campus, just inside the Crater of the Moon National Park, when the bus, having climbed some 5,000 feet above sea level, quit. It was dead winter, a good five degrees below zero and 10 p.m. This is in the 1980s, well before cellphones, so the team sat idling, hoping someone would come by. “No one is coming by. Why would they? Who’s out driving at night at that time of year?” Kelvin says. Eventually, they all got out and started walking, finding a small family-run store where, gratefully, the family lived upstairs. “They felt sorry for us and gave us potato chips,’’ Kelvin says. The team waited hours to get a new bus, finally checking in at 5:30 in the morning.

The next day they ended College of Idaho’s 56-game win streak, drove on to Northwest Nazarene and won there in overtime, and then topped Eastern Oregon State in triple overtime. “And then we had to turn around and go back,” Kelvin says. “I tell my assistants all the time, ‘I better never hear you complain. None of you broke down in Craters of the Moon.’ They roll their eyes like, listen to the old guy who walked five miles to school barefoot. But I practically did.’’

Brad Underwood, Illinois

The front door didn’t necessarily open directly onto the microwave, but pretty close. It didn’t, of course, belong in the living room but there was no room in the kitchen. There was no room, in fact, for two people. “At the sink, you could turn around and touch the oven,’’ says Illinois coach Brad Underwood, of the maybe 500 square feet apartment he shared with his new bride, Susan, in Abilene, Texas.

Married all of eight days before Underwood took the job as a GA at Hardin-Simmons, the couple relocated from Kansas City to Texas, but Susan couldn’t get a job as a schoolteacher in the state. Instead, she took a job at the J.C. Penney at the mall across the street, helping to make up the difference between her husband’s $299 a month salary and $300 rent. “Our big date night was chicken fried rice and egg rolls at this little corner place in the mall,’’ Underwood says. “We could eat for like $10.’’

He did not exactly fast-track his way to easy street from there. From Hardin-Simmons, Underwood became head coach at Dodge City Community College, but the school had no budget to pay him. Instead, Underwood worked as the audio-visual coordinator on campus, tasked with doing inventory and making sure all of the equipment worked in the classroom buildings. “I made $12,500 and I thought I was rich,’’ he says. In 10 years as Jim Kerwin’s assistant at Western Illinois, Underwood never made $50,000 and when he finally topped that medium-water mark, he was the head coach at Dayton Beach Community College, living in a much higher-rent district, with three kids. “We had one of those months where the ductwork in the house had to be replaced because of black mold, and the refrigerator died,’’ Underwood says. “Do I fill up my car with gas or do we eat? I got a ride from the AD and we ate.’’

Many years later, Underwood now makes north of $3 million a year, coaching the Illini. He still likes chicken fried rice. “It’s been the basis of our relationship for 35 years.’’

(Top photo of Mike Brey: Chuck Burton / AP)