Getting to Us by Seth Davis

Author:Seth Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-03-06T05:00:00+00:00

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Boeheim may not be fond of long talks in private settings, but that doesn’t mean he is not empathetic. There would not have been so many players over so many years who have played so hard and so well for him if they didn’t believe he genuinely cared. Even Seikaly got over his hurt feelings, eventually. The two have been snippy with each other over the years—Seikaly once publicly questioned Boeheim’s coaching, to which his former coach replied that Seikaly “has been an idiot all his life and continues to be one”—but Seikaly is also the first to admit that the knowledge he gained at Syracuse propelled him to a successful twelve-year NBA career. And when the Orange won the championship in 2003, Seikaly, who was playing for the Miami Heat, chartered a jet to New Orleans, cheered on his alma mater, boarded the bus after the game to congratulate the guys, and then flew home. You don’t do that for a coach who lacks empathy.

Boeheim knows he is not good at dishing out compliments. This is part flaw, part design. “I’m not great at it,” he says, “but when I do it, they know it. If you do it all the time, they’ll expect it.” On the other hand, heaven forbid if someone else says something negative about one of his players. Boeheim will sometimes criticize a player to Juli, but as soon as she starts to agree and chime in, he’ll flip the script and say, “Well, he’s not that bad.” One of his more epic rants came in February 2007, when the Syracuse student newspaper published an article that included an anonymous quote from a Big East assistant saying that McNamara was “overrated.” With McNamara sitting beside him on the dais, Boeheim addressed the matter during a postgame press conference at the conference tournament at Madison Square Garden in a most authentic manner. “Without Gerry McNamara we wouldn’t have won ten fucking games this year. Okay? Not ten!” he said. “That’s the most bullshit thing I’ve seen in thirty years.” McNamara’s mother later told him that hearing Boeheim defend her son like that validated his decision to go to Syracuse.

Making himself literally and emotionally distant from his players might make for good basketball, but there have been times when Boeheim separated himself too much from the operations of his program, and it cost him. He can be quite lax, for example, when it comes to enforcing discipline off the court. He argues that it is not his job to be the program’s policeman, but whether he likes it or not, his responsibilities to his players, his program, and his university do not end when practice does. This fault led to a second postseason ban in 2015, which the NCAA handed down at the end of an exhaustive ten-year investigation into Boeheim’s program.

Those episodes, however, paled in comparison to the storm Boeheim endured in November 2011, when his longtime assistant Bernie Fine was accused of sexually molesting two former Syracuse ball boys more than a decade before.

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