Boyle, Ewing lesson in contrasts
Tad Boyle was a heady guard discovered in the basketball backwaters of Greeley, where he led Greeley Central to the 1981 state championship and was Colorado’s Player of the Year.
Across the continent, a 7foot man-child from Jamaica named Patrick Ewing was, perhaps appropriately for an international recruit, headed to Washington D.C., where he was set to continue his basketball journey under the tutelage of coach John Thompson.
Having their names included amongst the recruiting class of 1981 is about where the similarities of the playing careers between Ewing and Boyle end.
Boyle played sparingly at Kansas but eventually embarked on a coaching career that has made him one of the all-time greats at Colorado. Ewing became one of the most decorated collegiate basketball players in history before developing into one of the NBA’s most dominant centers during a Hall of Fame career spent mostly with the New York Knicks.
One is a coaching lifer. The other, a name far too big to be considered an up-and-comer. And on Saturday their teams, the fifth-seeded Buffs and 12th-seeded Georgetown, lock horns in the first round of the NCAA Tournament on Saturday at Butler University’s historic Hinkle Fieldhouse (10:15 a.m., KCNC-4).
“I’m not an expert yet (on Georgetown). I hope to be by Saturday at noon,” Boyle said during a media session on Tuesday. “The one thing I’ve learned from watching them, they’re a true inside-outside team. They’ve got the (Qudus) Wahad kid inside, who’s a really good low-post scorer. But they’ve also got guys around him who can shoot the three. So they’re very balanced. If you look at their scoring, they’ve got four guys averaging in double figures, and then the guys that aren’t in doublefigures are right there.
“It doesn’t seem like they’re a real deep team. They don’t play a lot of guys. But in the NCAA Tournament, you don’t have to.”
Ewing was a three-time consensus All-American at Georgetown and led the Hoyas to three appearances in the national title game. The Hoyas lost two of those in a couple of the more memorable finals of the era, dropping the 1982 championship game on a late jumper by a North Carolina freshman named Michael Jordan and losing in 1985 when the heavily-favored Hoyas were upset by Villanova. Georgetown won the title in 1984 as Ewing captured the tournament Most Outstanding Player award after outdueling the other top center of the era, Houston’s Hakeem Olajuwon.
Ewing was the top overall pick in the 1985 draft and spent the first 15 seasons of a 17-year career with the Knicks. When that playing career was winding down with Orlando during the 2001-02 season, Ewing said a transition into coaching wasn’t at all on his radar. But Ewing recounted a story this week that it was at the urging of thenOrlando assistant Johnny Davis that he was convinced to at least dip his toe in the coaching pool.
Ewing spent 15 seasons as an NBA assistant with four teams before taking over at his alma mater before the 2017-18 season, when Boyle was beginning his eighth season at CU with a freshman class that included current starters McKinley Wright IV, D’Shawn Schwartz, and Evan Battey, in addition to 2020 NBA draft pick Tyler Bey.