The White brothers have a Garden party.
NEW YORK — The Wright brothers would have been very impressed by the White brothers.
One set of siblings — Orville and Wilbur Wright — invented and flew the world’s first airplane. The other set of siblings — Mike and Danny White — are reinventing basketball programs at their two schools and flying high into the sun.
“I couldn’t be more proud of my brother,” UCF Athletics Director Danny White says of Mike, the Florida Gators head coach whose team will play Wisconsin in the NCAA Sweet 16 tonight at Madison Square Garden.
“Danny made a great hire in Johnny Dawkins,” says Mike White of his brother’s decision last March to bring in Dawkins to coach a UCF program that has shockingly progressed to the NIT semifinals. “Johnny is a great coach and a great man and this has been a great run for the Knights. I know this is very rewarding for Danny.”
To say this has been a good week for the White Brothers would be an understatement of epic proportions for two men who’ve been imagining being on basketball’s big stage since
they were boys. And, seriously, does the stage get any bigger than the Garden, where the Gators are playing this weekend and UCF will be playing at TCU in the NIT Final Four on Tuesday night?
Kevin White, the father of the two men and the athletics director at Duke, had a perpetual smile splashed across his face as he watched the Gators practice at the Garden Thursday. Like any parent, he is reveling in the success of his kids and is ecstatic they are getting a chance to live their hoop dreams.
“It’s a magical moment for them and for our family,” Kevin said. “To have two of our sons up in New York on this stage doing what they love — are you kidding me? We are two standard deviations beyond euphoric.”
Danny told me the story recently of when him and Mike were kids, using every mail-order gadget and new piece of gimmicky training equipment on the market in order to build themselves into basketball players. When they lived on a golf course, they would use the cart paths to set up their equipment and run sprints with their weighted “strength shoes.” Eventually, Mike built himself into a four-year starter at Ole Miss. Danny became a walk-on at Notre Dame.
“We did every kind of offseason conditioning drills you could think of,” Danny recalls. “Mike had absolute tunnel vision about basketball. He was older, so he would drag me out to the driveway at all hours of the day and night. There were times when the neighbors would be complaining because the ball was bouncing in the driveway at 2 a.m.”
Says Kevin with a laugh: “I can’t tell you how many times the cops would come knocking on our door telling me the boys had to quit playing basketball in the driveway.”
Now Mike, in only his second year, has the Gators in the Sweet 16. Who would have ever thought UF would now be a slight favorite (over Wisconsin, Baylor and South Carolina) to reach the Final Four after losing 6-foot-11 center John Egbunu to a seasonending injury a month ago?
Likewise, who would have thought Danny would be sitting in sold-out CFE Arena at UCF on Wednesday night watching the coach he just hired beat Illinois to advance into next week’s NIT Garden party? The Knights don’t even have a full allotment of scholarships, have about half the budget of Illinois and don’t even charter flights like many teams do in their own conference.
Still, just like when he was the consummate kid brother 30 years ago, Danny will follow in Mike’s footsteps all the way up to this iconic Big Apple basketball mecca. Madison Square Garden will double as the “White” House over the next few days.
“I’m a coach and he’s an AD, but we’re both still college basketball fans,” Mike says of his brother. “We grew up as basketball junkies. I can remember watching these tournaments on the couch with my brothers from 5 years old to 8 years old to high school. I remember so many of them — the great players and the story lines. And for us to be just a small part of it is really neat.”
The White brothers, like the Wright brothers all those years ago, are finally off the ground and taking flight.
Off we go into the wild blue yonder.