The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
All in the DIII family with Calhoun
WEST HARTFORD — Jim Calhoun is talking organic pizza and area Asian restaurants with sports information director Josh Ingham when I walk into his office Wednesday. His hands joined behind his head, wearing a St. Joseph sweatshirt, Calhoun is remarkably relaxed behind his desk one day before a conference game.
Me? I’m pretty freaked out.
“I like the two guards,” Calhoun said before I open my mouth.
He’s talking about Lasell’s Stefan Masciarelli and Kevin Nunez, who recently transferred from UMass Boston. I tell him Masciarelli’s dad played football at AIC, where Calhoun played basketball. Calhoun nods, even at 76 a sponge for information.
My son Liam will play for a Lasell team against Calhoun’s Blue Jays on Thursday night at St. Joseph. It’s a simple matter, really. They’ll throw up a ball. One team will score more over 40 minutes in a Great Northeast Athletic Conference game. Liam will get on a bus returning to Newton, Mass. Calhoun will either count his 883rd career victory or he won’t.
Yeah, if only it were that simple.
“Just trying to win,” Liam texts. “It’s a privilege just to be on the same court as coach Calhoun.”
His unwritten message is: This is dad’s deal. Not his. He’s right. I’m the mess. Liam’s the one who had a
UConn poster, with his guy Niels Giffey, hanging in his bedroom. I’m the one with all the angry emails from UConn fans.
A number of people have asked me how I feel about my kid playing against Calhoun. And then they smile a mischievous smile. My editors encouraged me to write about it. They know the bumpy relationship we’ve had over a quarter-century, and that’s putting it politely.
A Google search will turn up the worst of it in 2006. It started over my contention that Marcus Williams should have been suspended for an entire season for stealing laptops. By the time it was over it had spilled onto the pages of The New York Times and the WFAN airwaves on “Mike and the Mad Dog.”
There were other times, too, but there were warm times, columns about his family and his Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame induction and, of course, his three national championships. In a little side room in Phoenix, I saw the worst loser, the toughest guy I ever came across, dissolve in tears when he made his first Final Four in 1999. People, though, they remember the ugly writer-coach moments.
Associate head coach Glen Miller walks into Calhoun’s office. Miller helped Calhoun to UConn’s 2011 national title and helped Kevin Ollie devise game plans to knock off Michigan State, Florida and Kentucky for the 2014 championship. And now here he is reading off his scouting report about Lasell’s No. 15. When he finishes, I say, “You forgot the part about leaving him open.” Miller smiles and says “Not happening.”
Liam struggled in the first half of the season. A buzzer-beater to upset St. Joe’s Maine last Tuesday seemed to give him confidence. He had 25 points, 11 rebounds, five 3s and five blocks against Rivier his last game.
Calhoun and I will never agree on everything written while he was at UConn. But Colby Sawyer and Regis? We’re pretty much DIII buds. And maybe that’s the best part of this story. There is something pure about Division III. When you erase a billiondollar industry, what’s left is the basketball.
“The perception these kids don’t want to win as much as the UConn kids is so far off the mark,” Calhoun said. “As much as Syracuse wanted to beat us, Emmanuel wanted to beat us. When I’m coaching, whether it’s 20,000 or 200, I’m not counting fans in the stands. The game is the game.”
Ingham said he has been told since Calhoun spent almost all his career at Northeastern and UConn, his St. Joseph win total gets grandfathered in and counted versus other Division I coaches. He passed Dean Smith in December and now trails only Coach K, Jim Boeheim and Bob Knight.
There is an ESPN crew following Calhoun around this season for a documentary. His return to coaching has been written about in several national outlets. Our DIII relationship takes us deeper into the weeds.
We talk about St. Joseph having to spend six hours on the bus for a game at Colby Sawyer in New Hampshire on Tuesday, return home for a game against Emmanuel on Thursday and then another six-hour round trip to St. Joe’s Maine starting Saturday morning. The Blue Jays lost all three games. Calhoun said he’s fine on the bus, reading a book and two or three newspapers. But three games in five days, with the travel, Calhoun didn’t think the scheduling was fair to his players’ preparation. He’s right.
In the program’s first year, St. Joe, made up of nearly all freshmen, is 9-8 overall, 0-3 in the GNAC. The Blue Jays, picked for third in the preseason, recruited a bunch of young talent. They’re going to be really good. Lasell, picked eighth of 12, is 2-0 in the GNAC. We talk about the 31 Connecticut kids from other conference teams. Emmanuel’s Joe Tamburro, from South Windsor, hit a 3-pointer with eight seconds left to beat the Blue Jays last week. Interviewed by Joe D’Ambrosio on WTIC, which carries Blue Jays home games, Tamburro’s voice was one of pure joy. Emmanuel has a bunch of Connecticut kids on its roster and a group of its fans evidently gave it to Calhoun pretty good. He got it at St. Joe’s Maine, too, when the Blue Jays lost by 11 on Saturday. What? You don’t think teams want to beat a Hall of Fame legend?
I can close my eyes and see Calhoun up on the podium at Madison Square Garden after those unforgettable Big East Tournament games. I can see hundreds of reporters at those Final Four events. I can see Calhoun staring out at Allen Iverson, at Shaq, at Grant Hill, at Vince Carter. And now he’s coaching in a game against my kid? Damn straight, it blows my mind.
I never mention that part. Instead we talk about how Division I players can take part in strength workouts under instruction in the summer.
“Meanwhile, Division III coaches can’t get near the kids until Oct. 15,” Calhoun said. “In the midst of games, kids never lose their concentration on offense. They lose it on defense. With us a lot of it is youth, but some of it has to with practice schedule, strength training. Amherst, those teams are set. They’ve got the pick of the litter. If we played better defense we’d be 12-5.”
We talk about how his “biggest surprise” is the work ethic of some players. He is still coming to understand the DIII student-athlete. He talks about molding teams like he did at UConn, even if it means sacrificing a few wins this season. So, will there be a next season for Jim Calhoun.
“The plan is to keep going forward,” Calhoun said. “We’ll have to make some changes how we think about it and how we approach it.”
At that point it struck me that 20 years from now my son will look at a list of all Calhoun’s wins and losses and see 77-74 UConn over Duke in 1999 alongside the score of a Lasell-St. Joseph game in 2019.
Surely, that will blow his mind as much as mine is today.