So, you want to hear a story? Fine. Joey Meyer will tell you a story.

He’ll take you back 50-some years, to a time barely remembered, to a place, the old Chicago Stadium, that lives only in memory now itself. He is 4 years old, maybe 5. The College All-Stars – whom his dad, legendary DePaul coach Ray Meyer, coached for years – are playing the Harlem Globetrotters. It’s halftime.

Out trots little Joey Meyer to perform with the Globies.

“I don’t remember because I was too young, but everybody always talks about it,” says Meyer, the new head coach of the Fort Wayne Mad Ants, sitting in a sideline chair in Memorial Coliseum on the Ants’ media day. “They still have a picture of me. I had a College All-Stars outfit with pants coming down to here and everything …”

He trails off, smiling faintly.

“See, that was part of the hanging around with my dad,” he says. “That was a chance to be around him when he was coaching the All-Stars.”

And if you want to see it also as the first stirrings of destiny or fate or the family bloodlines taking hold, Meyer won’t stop you. It’s just a story. You can take it and run with it anywhere you please.

Remember the only thing about it he remembers, though.

“I was scared,” Meyer says.

I was scared …

And now it’s 15, 20 years later. Joey Meyer is in college. And here’s another story for you.

It’s a story about a guy who grew up around basketball (“I was a gym rat; I bounced the ball an awful lot,” Meyer says), and who scored 1,233 points playing four years for his dad at DePaul, and who still wasn’t thinking that there was destiny or fate or bloodlines at work in any of it. No, sir.

“I wanted to get my master’s and wanted to get my doctorate and teach physical education,” Meyer says.

But here’s the thing: He could get all that paid for by being a graduate assistant. So he did. And then he coached the DePaul freshman team. And that, he says, “got me hooked.”

Again, it’s just a story. Or not.

“Here’s the thing,” Meyer says. “All coaches say they don’t want their sons to be coaches. My son works for the Bulls, and I always told him don’t go into coaching side of it. We all say it because of the hassles and pressures.

“I think Dad was comfortable when he saw I was comfortable coaching. But if I would have asked him, I think last on the list would have been … OK, not last, but somewhere near the bottom would have been coaching.”

And yet now all these years have flown by, and Ray Meyer has passed, and here is his son, coaching.

He coached for 24 years as an assistant and head coach at DePaul, where as head coach he had six 20-win seasons and seven NCAA Tournament appearances.

Then he moved on to the pros, first in the ABA and then, beginning with its inception, in the D-League.

And now here he is, in what he characterizes as the best pure coaching environment for coaching there is. A coach’s coach (“His attention to detail is amazing,” says Mad Ants president Jeff Potter) whose ambivalence about his chosen profession is long gone.

“I like that it’s all basketball at this level,” Meyer says. “I like working with young men and seeing them get better. And, surprisingly, I do like the challenge of having a new group every year to challenge, to find the right system that’s gonna make them the most successful. And that’s always changing.

“Sometimes you have to do it weekly in this league, which I’m not really fond of. But here you’ve got to see what you’ve got and try to blend that into a good team. I’ve enjoyed that aspect of it.”

He’s even enjoyed the aspect you’d think a coach wouldn’t: what to do when the NBA comes for one of your players.

“I’ve had 15 10-day (NBA callups),” Meyer says. “I’ve had them at all different times.

“The first one, I’ll never forget, was Jason Hart from Syracuse. We picked him up for eight games and we won all eight.”

Then one day, while driving to game-day shootaround, he got a call from the Spurs. They were calling up Hart.

“I go in and see Jason, and Jason’s running around the gym yelling and stuff,” Meyer recalls. “And I leaned to (assistant coach Mike Sanders) and I said, ‘We don’t have him anymore. Great for him, but how about us?’ ”

A pause.

“But you know something? It’s a thrill.”

One last story.

It’s long years after Joey Meyer decided he would, in fact, go into coaching, following destiny or fate or the family bloodlines, or maybe something less pat than that.

He’s at his father’s funeral, delivering the eulogy. He’s remembering a piece of coaching advice his dad once gave him.

“ ‘Eat after games,’ he said,” Meyer says now. “I go, ‘Eat after games? What are you talking about?’

“He said, ‘You’ll get an ulcer if you don’t.’ So the first thing I do, I go eat after games so I don’t get an ulcer or have stomach problems.”

He pauses. Smiles faintly again.

“Unfortunately, I’ve had stomach problems. Eating after games didn’t help.”

Well, of course not. He’s a coach, isn’t he?

bensmith@jg.net