Getting to Us

by Seth Davis

  Boeheim was irked by the delay. He had been recruiting a 6´11˝ man-child from Rochester named Roosevelt Bouie, who was close to deciding between Syracuse and St. Bonaventure. Boeheim believed that if he wasn’t named head coach soon, he would lose out on Bouie. Boeheim had also interviewed for the coaching vacancy at Rochester University, which was about ninety miles away. Finally, he informed Syracuse’s search committee that he intended to accept that job.

  Later that day, he received a phone call inviting him to be the head basketball coach at Syracuse. He was only thirty-two years old, but he knew who he was, what he wanted to do, and where he wanted to do it. You can see it in the options he created for himself. Boeheim was either going to coach at Syracuse, or he would coach at Rochester. Either way, he wasn’t going far from home.

  * * *

  • • •

  Having lived his entire life in central New York, Boeheim knew the type of player who would thrive at Syracuse. He didn’t have the luxury of recruiting a ton of All-Americans, so he searched for guys who had raw potential and a combative attitude—like Louis Orr, a 6´8˝ forward from Cincinnati. Thanks to what became known as the Louie and Bouie Show, Boeheim’s success as a head coach was immediate. During his first four years, the Orangemen went 100–18, won 54 out of 55 games on their home court in Manley Fieldhouse, and played in four straight NCAA Tournaments.

  The program was galvanized by two major decisions made by the university. The first came in 1978, when the school broke ground on an indoor stadium that would host both football and basketball games. The Carrier Dome was going to have room for more than 30,000 fans for basketball. Boeheim thought the idea was preposterous—the entire town of Syracuse had only around 200,000 people, and his team almost never lost in Manley Fieldhouse—but the school proceeded over his objections. In the final game before the big move, Syracuse, which was ranked No. 2 in the country, lost a heartbreaker to Georgetown, 52–50. That led to one of the great shit-talking moments in the history of sports, when Hoyas coach John Thompson walked into his postgame press conference and bellowed, “Manley Fieldhouse is officially closed!”

  The other big change occurred in 1979, when Syracuse left the ECAC to join the Big East, a brand-new conference that was comprised of schools in major media markets along the East Coast. The increased television exposure, coupled with the unveiling of the jam-packed Carrier Dome, proved seductive for recruits, beginning most prominently with Dwayne “Pearl” Washington. The 6´2˝ dervish was a New York City playground legend before he put on a Syracuse uniform. He arrived in the fall of 1982, and the fans turned out to watch him whirl. Washington piloted the Orangemen to a 71–24 record during his three years there, but he was never able to get Syracuse past the Sweet Sixteen. In his final game, the Orangemen were knocked out in the second round of the 1986 NCAA Tournament by David Robinson–led Navy. Pearl left for the NBA that spring.

  Boeheim was rightly hailed for his recruiting prowess, but when that failed to translate into postseason success, he was branded an underachiever. The criticism bothered him more than it should have. He devoured the local newspapers and filed every slight into his steel-trap mind. To this day, Boeheim winces as he recalls reading a poll that tabbed him as one of the worst coaches in the country, even though his team was winning 81 percent of its games.

  The emerging negativity brought out the mortician in him. If the Orangemen went through a losing stretch, Jim would tell his wife, Elaine, whom he had married in the summer of 1976, to stop spending so much money because he was sure he was about to be out of a job. It didn’t matter that he was winning the vast majority of his games. The losses cut deepest, and still do to this day. “It’s all about losing,” he says. “When we win, I’m pretty happy for about an hour, and then I’m thinking about the next game. When we lose, I’m thinking about that game until we get to the next one.”

  Two years after Pearl Washington left, Boeheim welcomed the most gifted recruit he had ever signed. His name was Derrick Coleman, an All-American power forward from Detroit. Coleman was a strong, sturdy 6´10˝, 225-pound lefty, with a nose for the ball and a soft touch around the rim. He thought Boeheim was aloof, even when he was recruiting him, but he loved the way Boeheim gave his big men free rein to showcase their ball skills away from the basket. “If anything, Coach would get on me for not shooting enough,” Coleman says. “He was way ahead of his time with that.”

  Coleman joined a group that included Sherman Douglas, a lightly recruited point guard from Washington, D.C., and Rony Seikaly, a raw 6´10˝ center who was born in Lebanon and grew up in Greece. As a freshman, Seikaly averaged 11.9 points and 8.8 rebounds, helping Boeheim to reach his first-ever Final Four. After defeating Providence, Syracuse met Indiana in the final. The game was famously decided on a baseline jumper by Hoosiers guard Keith Smart with four seconds to play, delivering Indiana to a 74–73 victory. To this day Boeheim has never watched a video of the game in its entirety. It’s not just that he doesn’t want to relive a painful experience. It’s also a waste of his time. He knows how the movie ends—with his own funeral.

  * * *

  • • •

  A few years ago, Boeheim was shown an article that sought to divine which college basketball programs did the best job developing players for the NBA. Correlations were made between where players were ranked as high school seniors and how they performed as pros. Based on that metric, the writer concluded that Syracuse had done this better than any other school.

  Boeheim was proud but hardly surprised. He is rarely able to convince the very best high school players to turn down blue-chip programs and play for him. So over the years he has had to nurture his skills as an evaluator, one who is able to spy potential as much as physical prowess. Since his players don’t typically leave for the NBA after one season, he has time to impart his knowledge of the game. He and his players battle from time to time, but they usually end up trusting him because they understand he knows what he is talking about, and they believe he cares about them.

  Boeheim is not much of a speechmaker. He doesn’t have a lot of heart-to-heart talks in his office. He would rather take a few minutes before a practice to let his players know what he is thinking. Then he motivates them through the sheer force of his persistence. “The only way to get players to play hard is to push them every day,” he says. “Not just day to day but minute to minute. It has to be a constant challenge. To me, that’s really the key to coaching. There’s motivational things, there’s X’s and O’s, but the main thing is getting them to go after it every play.”

  “The biggest thing about Coach is the fact that he can motivate but still teach,” says Gerry McNamara, who played guard for Syracuse from 2003 to 2006 and is currently an assistant coach. “There’s no sugarcoating. You always know where you stand and what’s expected of you. If you’re seeking his approval, it’s not going to necessarily come.”

  It can be rather unpleasant to be on the receiving end of his daily doses of acid. Seikaly in particular had a hard time with it. Growing up in Greece, he did not take up basketball until he came to the United States to go to high school, which meant he had been exposed to very little coaching, much less the kind that he heard every day from Boeheim. Seikaly wasn’t sensitive so much as strong-willed. When Boeheim would correct him, he would argue.

  One day in practice, Seikaly finally got frustrated and asked Boeheim why he never yelled at freshman Stephen Thompson. Fine, Boeheim said, and spun on Thompson. “Stevie, stop working so hard! Stop making so many good plays! Stop doing what I tell you to do! Stop doing all the things I want without me having to say anything!” Boeheim turned back to Seikaly and said, “Happy now?” Suffice to say, Seikaly was not happy.

  “There was a love-hate relationship between us, and, yes, I did hate him at times,” Seikaly told author Jack McCallum, who cowrote Boeheim’s autobiography, Bleeding Orange, in 2015. “He was not a good communicator in the sens
e that, when gym time was over, you would get a hug or that tap on the shoulder that let you know everything was okay. And that was hard for some players, including me.”

  In the wake of that loss in the ’87 final, Boeheim’s teams continued to win consistently. Syracuse reached the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament in 1989 and the Sweet Sixteen the following year. And yet as he kept advancing in the tournament but failing to win it, the Boeheim-as-underachiever chatter took deeper root. Things got worse in late 1990, when the Syracuse Post-Standard published a two-part investigative series that detailed potential violations in Boeheim’s program. When the NCAA followed up with its own investigation, it banned Syracuse from the 1993 postseason.

  The scandal, the pressure to win, the public criticism, the long hours, the worrying, the brooding—all of it took a toll on the Boeheims’ marriage. Jim and Elaine had been unable to conceive a child, but they adopted a baby girl in 1985 and named her Elizabeth. They divorced in 1993, but as separations go, this one was quite civil. Boeheim could come home after a long road trip and be able to see his daughter whenever he wanted. He is quick to give Elaine the credit. “My ex-wife, she never liked me much,” he says. “It was largely my fault the marriage broke up. She was upset, but she wanted our daughter to have complete access to me. She really made it seamless.”

  Boeheim enjoyed a vindication of sorts during the 1995–96 season. Though Syracuse lost eight games and was given a No. 4 seed in the NCAA Tournament, it unexpectedly reached the Final Four, losing to a powerhouse Kentucky team in the final game. Besides forcing his critics into a grudging sense of appreciation for getting to Us with that team, Boeheim also evinced an uncharacteristically sunny persona that season. That was largely due to the presence of a new lady in his life. He first met Juli Greene during a trip to the Kentucky Derby in 1994. She was a native of Lexington, and they struck up a conversation at a party. Greene was beautiful, intelligent . . . and twenty-two years his junior. She had graduated from the University of Kentucky, but she didn’t know who Boeheim was. They talked for a while and played some backgammon, which Juli won. They’ve never played since.

  The romance budded quickly, first with phone conversations that lasted upwards of four hours, and later with visits by Juli to Syracuse. Juli came from a large family (she is the youngest of six brothers and sisters), and they were understandably skeptical. He was much older than she, and they were concerned that he was just trying to charm her the way he did recruits. It wasn’t until Boeheim went with Juli to her sister’s wedding that her family came around. “They all met him and fell in love with him,” Juli says. “I said to them, ‘See? He recruited you guys, too.’”

  Boeheim had no desire to rush back into marriage, but he did ask Juli to come live with him in Syracuse beginning in 1995. Once again, Elaine was immediately welcoming to her ex-husband’s new (and much younger) girlfriend. “I have to give Elaine all the credit. She was bigger than any circumstance,” Juli says. The two women even developed a close friendship independent of Jim. Elaine shared recipes she used to make Jim’s favorite dishes. Sometimes when Juli would head over to Elaine’s house, Jim would ask her to take an alimony check.

  Jim and Juli got married on October 10, 1997. Elizabeth was the maid of honor. Juli was well aware of the fertility problems that Jim had experienced during his previous marriage, but she kept faith that whatever happened would be for the best. They were both surprised when she got pregnant and had a son, Jimmy, in May 1998. Just eighteen months later, she got pregnant again with twins, even though Jim had been away for most of the summer and they had had very few “opportunities,” as she puts it. “I want to go back to that doctor who said that I had a bad sperm count,” Boeheim says. “Guess he was wrong about that.”

  * * *

  • • •

  It would be seven years before Boeheim would get another crack at the Final Four. He got there courtesy of a stellar freshman class that featured Carmelo Anthony, a supremely talented 6´9˝ small forward from Maryland, and Gerry McNamara, a knockdown shooter and point guard from Scranton, Pennsylvania. Boeheim set his usual tone from the start of the season, not only with regard to the freshmen but also to Kueth Duany, the 6´6˝ fifth-year senior who was looked upon as the team’s leader. “We all knew how hard Kueth worked and how much it meant to him because it was his last year,” McNamara says. “When we saw how hard Coach was on him, we all fell into line.”

  The team sailed through the early part of the season, when Boeheim typically loads up on home games against weaker teams, but even as the wins piled up Boeheim was concerned with the team’s chemistry. He may not have been a sugar-with-the-medicine kind of guy, but he was plenty empathetic, and he had a knack for discerning what was happening between his players’ ears. The Orange stubbed their toe a couple of times once Big East play started, most notably in a late January loss at Rutgers. Boeheim didn’t like what was happening between McNamara and Anthony in that game. Before the start of the next practice, he sat the two of them down and told them in no uncertain terms that he would not tolerate players who were so pissed that they weren’t getting enough shots that it threw them off their game. McNamara was surprised to hear Anthony say he was frustrated at not getting the ball enough, and he promised he would run the offense through Anthony from that point forward. “Coach Boeheim really read the situation perfectly,” McNamara says. “I was like, ‘Hey man, if this is how you feel, this is easily correctable.’”

  With his unique combination of size, skills, and basketball IQ, Anthony also brought out the best in Boeheim as a basketball tactician. Boeheim utilized Anthony as the queen piece in Syracuse’s offense, first establishing him about 12 feet away from the basket, and then pushing him behind the three-point line when the defense started collapsing. Inevitably the defense gave Anthony too much attention, at which point Boeheim turned him into a passer. Such was the case during the first half of the NCAA championship game against Kansas, when the Jayhawks were so intent on crowding Anthony’s space that they repeatedly left McNamara wide open. McNamara hit six three-point baskets in the first half, three of which were on assists from Anthony.

  Boeheim closed that game with some savvy maneuvers. With just under three minutes to play and Syracuse leading by eight points, Orange center Craig Forth picked up his fifth foul. Normally, Boeheim would have replaced Forth with the backup center, Jeremy McNeil, but he knew that Kansas would have to make some threes to get back into the game. So he replaced Forth with 6´4˝ freshman guard Billy Edelin in order to apply more pressure to Kansas’s shooters. The problem was that meant moving 6´9˝ sophomore forward Hakim Warrick to the center spot, even though he had not played that position all season.

  At first the strategy appeared to backfire. Syracuse’s zone looked disjointed, and Kansas scored a couple of easy baskets to trim the lead to three with a minute to play. From there, Warrick made the two biggest plays of the game. The first came with 13.5 seconds left, when he snared a huge defensive rebound and was fouled. The next came after he missed the front end of a one-and-one, giving Kansas the ball and a chance to tie.

  The Jayhawks worked the ball around the perimeter as the clock ticked toward zero. When KU guard Kirk Hinrich caught the ball behind the top of the key, Duany, who was at the forward spot, rushed out to contest him. Hinrich pump faked and swung the ball to sophomore guard Michael Lee, who was wide open in the corner. Warrick, who had been standing directly under the basket, sprinted in Lee’s direction, jumped in the air, and, utilizing his long arms, blocked the shot out of bounds to seal the win. Had the stronger but slower McNeil been at center as he had all season, it is highly unlikely he would have been able to cover that ground so quickly.

  The final score was Syracuse 81, Kansas 78. Jim Boeheim, mortician’s son, was an underachiever no more. That the triumph came in New Orleans, the same city where Syracuse’s championship dreams were buried by Keith Smart sixteen years before, made it all the mo
re poetic. He had returned to the scene of his most painful temporary death and gotten to Us in emphatic fashion.

  As soon as the game was over, Boeheim’s wife and ex-wife shared an embrace. “This is as much yours as it is mine,” Juli told Elaine. About twenty minutes after the final buzzer sounded, Juli stood on the platform with Jim and indulged in the celebration. The championship had been won. The confetti had fallen. The trophy had been presented. The wait was over. “What do we do now?” she said.

  Boeheim gave her a weary smile and replied, “Let’s go home.”

  * * *

  • • •

  When Jason Hart flew from Los Angeles to take his official recruiting visit to Syracuse during the 1995–96 season, one of the team’s players, a 6´8˝ forward from Rochester named John Wallace, warned that if he couldn’t stand up to the head coach, he shouldn’t bother going there. It didn’t take long for Hart to figure out why. “Coach doesn’t have time for bullshit,” he says. “Look at the guys he’s had there that have done well. They wasn’t pussies. They were tough-asses. They stood up for themselves. That’s how you have to be to have success there. Coach don’t like no punks.”

  Hart grew up in the inner-city neighborhood of Inglewood, so he was not unfamiliar with confrontation. Still, he was put off by Boeheim’s aloof manner. “I was like, Damn, how do I penetrate this? This dude don’t even know me,” Hart says. He voiced his displeasure to Mike Hopkins, who suggested that he make a habit of stopping by Boeheim’s office every day to check in. Hart took that advice, spending hours of one-on-one time with his coach, peppering Boeheim with questions about all those uniformed men whose framed pictures adorned his walls. He discovered that Boeheim was a lot more empathetic than he let on. “He’s not a guy who’s going to build a relationship with you,” Hopkins says. “You have to build it with him.”