‘UConn’s iconic ambassador’
Everyone knew and loved Dee Rowe
Knowing he was leaving Friday to spend a month at Hilton Head, South Carolina, Tim Tolokan made plans to see Dee Rowe last Tuesday.
“Monday night,” Tolokan said, “the lead young woman of the four who take care of Dee — who has been unbelievable as an extension of his daughters — called me and said, ‘Tim, I don’t think you should come. He’s battling a bit of a cold.’
“In lieu of that, we were setting up one-on-one Zoom calls, so we’d be able to talk from down here, to keep his brain active.”
There would be no Zoom call with the man Tim Tolokan calls “my mentor and absolutely my best friend.” There would be no Zoom call with the man Dee Rowe loved to call “Timely” after the column Tolokan once wrote as sports editor of the Norwich Bulletin.
“There would be,” Tolokan said, “no last visit.”
Donald “Dee” Rowe died Sunday in Storrs at age 91. He retired from coaching at UConn at age 47, because his body couldn’t take it anymore. Because his heart and soul could, he spent the next 44 years spreading the gospel of basketball, UConn, family, friendship, mentoring all who sought advice and lending a willing ear to those who needed one.
“The words ‘iconic ambassador’ are probably an understatement,” said Tolokan, UConn’s former longtime director of sports communications. “Dee Rowe was an original.”
The first time I saw Rowe was December 1974. He was ranting and got a technical foul at the Show-Me Classic. I wrote that he acted like a “madman” in the University of Missouri student newspaper. A decade ago, I broke out a program from that night and told Rowe what I had written. He laughed like a madman …
Forty-six years later I can complete that sentence … “who also happened to be the finest man I ever met.”
Geno Auriemma, whom Rowe helped select as women’s coach in 1985, called him a father, the greatest storyteller of all time and said, if not for COVID, that Rentschler Field would be needed for his memorial service. Jim Calhoun, whom Rowe helped select as men’s coach in 1986, said as good a basketball coach as Rowe was, no one could surpass him as a person.
“Can you believe it?” Rowe used to say about the 15 national basketball titles UConn has amassed since 1995. “Can you believe where we were and where those two guys have taken us? We walk with giants now.”
He fell in love with basketball in the third grade and was there at the train station in Worcester to greet the Holy Cross team after it won the 1947 national title. Friends with everyone from Bob Cousy to Dave Gavitt to Dean Smith, Rowe never seemed to fully grasp that he was one of those giants. Yes, he built a powerhouse at Worcester Academy. He won 120 games and got to the Sweet Sixteen in eight years at UConn. He was responsible for raising $7.5 million to get Gampel Pavilion built. Still, the reason he won the 2017 John W. Bunn Award Lifetime Achievement Award from the Naismith Hall of Fame was for what he meant to the game, what he meant to people in the game.
And that was only everything.
Tolokan met Rowe at Brandeis covering the New England prep school championships in 1969. It was the last game Rowe coached at Worcester Academy against a St. Thomas More powerhouse coached by Nick Macarchuk and led by Ernie DiGregorio. Months later, Rowe was the UConn coach.
“Even though I was at the Bulletin from 1970-80 and covered his entire career, we became great friends,” Tolokan said. “When the game was over, he’d have people, including media, myself, Pete Zanardi, over his house at the edge of campus and have a drink. He’d rehash the game a little bit.
“Although John Toner was the one who hired me, Dee was clearly behind it. The doctors basically told him you’ve got to stop coaching — now. If not for his health, Dee would have been like George Blaney and Jim Calhoun coaching into
the 70s.
“Obviously I’m not comparing it to Jim and Geno and their notoriety and visibility, but until his late 80s, Dee might have been the most visible person in terms of outreach in the state and community. Without exaggeration he was out of the house five or six nights a week.”
Dee Rowe took one look out of his dorm window back at Middlebury College and announced, “I’m going to marry that girl.” His wife of 64 years, Ginny, passed in the summer of 2018 and it wasn’t the same. She was Dee’s rock. Tolokan, who traveled with Rowe for 40 years, said Dee never did operate great independently. He’d say, “I don’t do light bulbs.”
He didn’t love technology. He loved people. It made him a stellar fundraiser for athletics when it was a foreign concept to New England public schools. After Gov. Bill O’Neill said the state would come up with $22 million, Rowe was asked to try to raise $4.5 million. He talked to Harry Gampel. He came up with $7.5 million to seal the deal.
His children made sure he was able to stay at his home on Farmstead Road, and even in the last year and a half the women who cared for him would bring him to a fundraising event or a funeral. Dee Rowe could deliver a eulogy.
“All those days, all those months and years he was out of the house, I call it ‘Helping people and doing good,’ ” Tolokan said. “He used to say to me all the time ‘You never know how you can impact someone’s life.’ ”
This was a man who nearly to the end was making phone calls on behalf of grandchildren, even greatgrandchildren, of lifelong friends to help with a job or at a college.
“His reach was unparalleled,” Tolokan said.
I remember talking to Rowe at the women’s 2013 NCAA Final Four before Louisville and UConn played. All of a sudden, we heard “Coach! Coach!” It was Rick Pitino coming down the aisle. He needed to say hi. Dee knew everyone. And if he didn’t, just give him a minute.
Tom Espinosa, whose teams at Putnam Science have produced innumerable college stars, was at an XL Center game. He hadn’t met Dee. We went up a few rows. Within 30 seconds, they were going on like old friends about Espinosa’s father-in-law, Don Cushing, a star at Worcester State
and longtime coach in Central Mass.
“He’s unbelievable,” Tolokan said. “When he found out about the John Bunn Award, he just started telling stories about John Bunn (born in 1898). What was amazing to me, as his shortterm memory took a hit, his long-term memory was like a steel-trap. Until the last time I visited with him, he would talk about Dave Gavitt, Doggie Julian, Joe Mullaney, being at summer camps and drawing up the 2-3 zone with a stubby pencil, Jim and Geno. It made his day.”
Yeah, Dee was always selling the virtues of the 2-3 zone to Auriemma. Although Rowe was named an assistant for the 1980 Olympics, he never got the chance because of Jimmy Carter’s boycott. In 2012, when Auriemma coached the women’s team to the gold medal, Rowe was able to attend as an ambassador of the university.
“Geno said within a week or two, everyone at USA Basketball knew him,” Tolokan said. “If you were oneon-one with Dee Rowe, you felt like you were the only person in the room. People used to say that about President Clinton. Dee made you feel so special. It wasn’t fake. It was real.”
Rowe would put his hand gently on your forearm; Tolokan called it an automatic mechanism. It was a connection.
“If he just met you, he wanted to get to know you,” he said. “If he knew you fairly well, he wanted to get to know you better.”
In his four decades at UConn, Tolokan traveled all over the place with Rowe. When basketball games were within driving distance, they’d go together. On charters, they sat next to each other.
“He was so excited when we started winning,” Tolokan said. “I remember being in the bowels of Madison Square Garden and we beat Ohio State to win the NIT in 1988. He couldn’t believe it, that Jim beat Ohio State with Spider Ursery, Jeff King … he wasn’t being negative. We had finished last in the Big East, this was Ohio State which won national championships with Jerry Lucas. He had the whole thing in context.”
Three months ago, Tolokan brought Rowe over to the new baseball stadium on campus. Rowe loved Jim Penders. He loved the new place. Only a week later, Tolokan took him out to lunch and showed Dee the new turf baseball practice field.
“Where’s the baseball stadium?” Dee asked.
“His short-term memory was shot, but thank God he didn’t lose his memory of great portions of the amazing life he had,” Tolokan said.
We will remember Dee Rowe with his rolled-up program, his always stylish ways, the blue blazer and pocket square that Auriemma said made him look like an old movie star. And we’ll remember how much we loved him.