Wright at ease leaving Nova after ‘fighting it’ as coach
VILLANOVA, Pa. — Jay Wright settled in a booth at the restaurant across the street from the basketball gym he called home for two decades and the cheerful waitress quizzed him at lunch if he had dined here before.
He had, the spot is a popular hangout at Villanova. So, naturally she asked, what does he do?
“I worked at the university for a long time,” Wright said, with just a tinge of modesty.
“Oh,” she said, ready with a fun fact, “the President comes in all the time and eats here.”
Yeah, it’s a favorite of this old university employee, too.
Could it be, Jay Wright, the Hall of Fame coach who built Villanova from sleepy Big East school into a national power and won two national championships before he shocked the sport in April and retired at 60 after one last Final Four, forgotten already? Yeah, not quite. Wright’s presence spreads and soon customers peer through poinsettias on the ledge of the booth and gawk at the Hall of Fame coach or politely ask between bites of his buffalo chicken salad if he can step out for a photo.
Sure, why not?
The Nova retiree is operating at a different pace — morning Bikram yoga, holidays at home with Patty, his wife of 32 years. But he hasn’t vanished from public view entirely. With 520 wins over 21 seasons at Villanova, he’s set to begin lending his expertise to viewers in a new gig as a broadcaster for CBS and Turner Sports. He’ll make his debut as a game analyst — alongside fellow former Nova coach Steve Lappas — for the CBS Sports Network on Wednesday night when his old Wildcats team plays Penn.
“I’ve got that rookie feeling,” Wright said.
Trim, refreshed, upbeat, Wright says he’s shed the self-inflicted strain that gnawed more and more each season as the impeccably dressed architect of an improbable national powerhouse in the tony Philly suburbs.
“Just being free, to really experience everything, has been incredible,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I know it sounds simple and stupid. But all of us coaches, we’re really out of our minds. People say it’s not healthy. No, it’s not. But it’s just what you do.”
Wright had tried to bury the thought when he coached that he wasn’t on the brink of burnout. That he wasn’t one more obsessed coach who couldn’t let the game go.
“And I now know I was one,” he said.
He could’ve pushed himself another year or two after last season’s Final Four run but would have felt like a fraud.
“I knew I was fighting it,” he said. “I would go into a meeting with the team and I would stop myself and kick myself in the (butt). ‘Yo, let’s go.’ Get yourself fired up. I never, ever had to do that. Never.”
Wright hasn’t totally abandoned the gym. But one time he attended practice, well, he fell into old habits and simply assumed command. The coaching staff was amenable, because of that whole Hall of Fame coach thing, and also because the coach running practice was Wright’s son. Taylor Wright, now the
interim head basketball coach at Episcopal Academy out in the Philly suburbs, had ceded power to dad for a practice the day after Thanksgiving.
“I just had a couple of things to say,” Wright said, laughing. “I’ve got to stay away from it. It’s just too tempting.”
He hasn’t strayed too far from Villanova. Kyle Neptune, a longtime Villanova
assistant who returned after one season as head coach at Fordham to succeed Wright, welcomed his mentor at practice. Stop by, any time.
“So much of what I know, and how I’ve learned the game, how I see the game, how I’ve learned to run a program, I’ve learned from being here,” Neptune said. “Of course, I’m not the same person. No one can be exactly Jay Wright.”