It will seem a bit like back in the day at Duquesne tonight.

Twenty-five years after Mike Rice coached the Dukes for the final time, Mike Rice will coach in a game involving Duquesne.

But it won't be that Mike Rice.

Mike Rice Jr., son of Mike Rice Sr. who coached the team 1979-82, will guide his first Robert Morris team into the A.J. Palumbo Center to play the Dukes.

"It means a great deal," Rice Jr. said. "My mother [Kathy] was a Duquesne women's basketball player. She's an alum. And it will be exciting for my dad.

"I spent a lot of time there growing up. Those were fun days -- successful days -- at Duquesne. It means a lot."

"It's really special to see him going against the Dukes," Mike Rice Sr. said. "I still have a soft spot in my heart for the Dukes, but I [won't] be cheering for them [Friday] night."

Rice Sr. won't be able to watch the game in person. In his role as a television analyst for the Portland Trail Blazers of the NBA, he will be working the Blazers' home game against the Minnesota Timberwolves.

"I haven't missed a Blazers game in 18 years," Rice Sr. said. "I tried to get off, but they had a million reasons why I couldn't."

Still, Rice Sr. will "watch" the Robert Morris-Duquesne game.

"I follow [Robert Morris] pretty closely," said Rice Sr., who has score updates given to him through his headset or monitors the game online. "I get so nervous when they're playing."

Rice Sr. also tries to get in plugs for Robert Morris during Blazers' broadcasts.

Recently, he mentioned on the air that the San Antonio Spurs "are playing defense like Robert Morris."

Rice Sr. laughed.

"People out here ask me, 'Who's this Robert Morris you're always talking about?' " he said.

No question, Rice Sr. is extremely proud that Rice Jr. is a college basketball coach.

"I think he was cut out to be a head coach," Rice Sr. said. "He loves what he does. You can't coach in Division I without really looking forward to the next day."

No question, either, that Rice Sr. groomed his son to follow him into coaching. Rice Jr. was never going to do anything but coach.

"And I knew it when I was a high school basketball player," Rice Jr. said. "I started doing camps and I ran his camp when he was at Youngstown State [1983-87].

"It wasn't like he was ever yelling at me to go up and finish my homework. He was yelling at me to 'come down and let's break down the film. Let's watch the game together.' He's very passionate about the game, so there wasn't much choice in the matter."

Rice Sr., originally from Detroit, coached at Valley High School before going to Duquesne. He got Rice Jr. involved very early, taking him to pickup games all over western Pennsylvania.

"And he would cause a melee every time we played," Rice Jr. said, laughing. "He was completely out of his mind. Everyone would be screaming. And then, after the games, it was like he was all their best friends.

"My mother would spend the summers with my sisters playing tennis all over the country, and I would go with my father recruiting. That was when you could recruit every single day. I would go all over Pennsylvania. He knew no one's name. Everyone was 'Chief' or 'Partner' or 'Captain' or 'My man.' "

Did Rice Sr. even know his son's name?

"No, he didn't," Rice Jr. said, laughing again. "He called me 'Boy.' "

Rice Sr. was -- and still is -- highly competitive.

"The first time my sister [Susan] beat him in tennis, he tried to run her over with the car," Rice Jr. quipped. "He threw a racket at her. She was tough-minded and started walking home. He tried to run her over with the car because he was that mad at her.

"That's what you're dealing with here. You're dealing with an ultra-competitive person. He loses his mind at times."

Even now.

Stephanie, Rice Jr.'s other sister, lives in Colorado and has two daughters who are highly ranked tennis players in the state's 12-and-under division.

"My granddaughters always ask, 'We don't have to play Papa anymore, do we? He gets so mad when we beat him,' " Rice Sr. said.

Same with stuff off the tennis or basketball court.

"If you play Monopoly with him, you know it will be heated and nasty and competitive as it can possibly get," Rice Jr. said. "That's the way he is. Many times, my mother had to separate us."

"That's totally true," Rice Sr. said. "I don't play board games anymore."

These days, Rice Sr. occupies himself with his Blazers broadcasts, playing tennis four days a week and "probably not acting my age" -- which he says is, like giving a weather forecast, "in the upper 60s."

He also does a radio talk show in Portland, fittingly called "Wild Rice."

"That kind of describes him perfectly," his son said. "He's truly a character. He's an interesting man."

Rice Sr. had a 62-49 record at Duquesne and took the Dukes to the National Invitation Tournament in the 1979-80 and 1980-81 seasons.

He was 75-67 at Youngstown State. His 1984-85 team lost by 3 points in the Ohio Valley Conference championship game, narrowly missing a chance to play in the NCAA tournament.

"He always had a different angle on things," Rice Jr. said. "And he was very passionate about the game of basketball. He loved the intensity of the game. He was a player's coach in that he didn't look to discipline all that much. I don't remember too many of his best players being suspended."

Which brings us to Rice Jr.'s recent suspension of RMU leading scorer Jeremy Chappell for violating a team academic rule.

When that news reached the Blazers, Portland assistant coach Bill Bayno, who coached under John Calipari at Massachusetts, approached Rice Sr.

"You know what Calipari would have done," Bayno said. "He'd have told the player, 'You're not starting the next game.' And then 10 seconds into the game, he'd have said, 'OK, you've suffered enough. Get in there.' "

Rice Sr. laughed while relating that vignette, but he knew Chappell's suspension was for longer than 10 seconds. It was for two games.

"Mike has a lot more of his mother's personality," he said. "He does the right thing at the right time. He has a lot more common sense than I did. I was always trying to short-cut [things]. He grasps the big picture better than I did."

Rice Jr. said he didn't seek his father's advice before disciplining Chappell.

"But he supported it," Rice Jr. said.

"He told me, 'You have to set the tone.' But you know in the back of his mind, he was like, 'What? Are you out of your mind?' "