’85 ’Nova coach dies of cancer
WEST PALM BEACH, FLA.» Rollie Massimino, who led Villanova’s storied run to the 1985 NCAA championship and won more than 800 games in his coaching career, died Wednesday after a long battle with cancer. He was 82.
Massimino’s death was announced by Keiser University, where he was still the men’s basketball coach. He spent the final days of his life in hospice care.
Best known for that national title at Villanova, Massimino also coached at Stony Brook, UNLV and Cleveland State. He spent the last 11 years of his life at Keiser, where he started the program and turned it into an NAIA power.
And even though he left Villanova 25 years ago, he was still considered family by the Wildcats and coach Jay Wright.
“If not for Rollie Massimino, I’m not even a part of this,” Wright once said. “If not for the Big East, Rollie Massimino is not Rollie Massimino. I know it. He knows it. And if not for the Big East, no one knows about Villanova.”
Wright was given a championship ring from 1985, and Massimino was given a championship ring from 2016. Wright wasn’t working at Villanova during the first title season; Massimino wasn’t officially there for the second one. But Wright worked Massimino’s camps in the mid-1980s before coming to Villanova, so that made him part of the family.
Massimino went out of his way to take care of those he considered family. So Wright got that 1985 ring. And the only moment when Wright teared up at Villanova’s 2016 ring ceremony was when he handed Massimino his piece of championship jewelry.
“When you’re a young coach and you grow up in Philly, Rollie Massimino is a Rollie legend to you,” Massimino Wright said.
Roland Vincent Massimino was born Nov. 13, 1934, in New Jersey, played his college basketball at Vermont and got his master’s degree from Rutgers. His first head coaching job was at his alma mater, Hillside High School, in 1962. His college coaching career started at Stony Brook in 1969, and after two seasons he became an assistant at Penn — under Chuck Daly.
Massimino and Daly would remain close until Daly’s death in 2009. Like Daly, Massimino was always dapper on the sidelines. So when Daly died, Massimino took Daly’s collection of sharp dress shoes and wore a pair in every game he coached for the remainder of his life.
“Chuck is always with me,” Massimino said earlier this year.
After one season at Penn, Massimino took over at Villanova. He spent 19 seasons there, best remembered by the 1985 NCAA title run that was anything but easy — for many reasons.
Villanova needed a last-second stop just to escape over Dayton (a game played at Dayton, no less) in the first round, went scoreless for the first eight minutes of the second half and somehow still beat top-seeded Michigan in the second round, and toppled Maryland in the regional semifinal — winning those three games by a combined nine points. And to get to the Final Four, Villanova erased a halftime deficit against North Carolina.