Dream weekend

For coaches, Final Four offers chance of a lifetime

As a rule, I feel a creeping cynicism when people start deifying college coaches. It happens all the time, largely because college players (basketball, in particular, but football, too) come and go, and quickly. Coaches are forever. The coach is the constant. You want to talk about Duke, you talk about Coach K. You want to talk about Temple, you deal with John Chaney. Connecticut? Jim Calhoun. That's just the way it is. The coach becomes synonomous with the program. (It's worse in football, but this is March, not October.)

Result: Whatever success (or failure) comes to a program is dropped in the coach's lap. This weekend during the Final Four in Atlanta, four coaches will have their movements monitored as if they are world leaders. We will see their every reaction, read every available detail of their lives, and, most unfairly, be told they alone are responsible for winning or losing. The players who actually perform will be ignored for long stretches, as if they are nothing more than stage furniture in a one-man show. The entire culture is sad and naïve, born of the media's unwillingness to understand athletes who might not be around next year for their use. (Oh yes, I'm guilty of doing this, too).

Then comes a night like Thursday, when I found myself genuinely moved by the sight of four grown men overwhelmed by the prospect of winning a national championship. A night like that makes me rethink their entire profession.

The four Final Four coaches: Kelvin Sampson of Oklahoma, Gary Williams of Maryland, Roy Williams of Kansas and Mike Davis of Indiana, were sitting on a stage in a downtown Atlanta theatre at the NCAA Final Four Salute, essentially a house operation during which CBS and the NCAA salute themselves for making lots of money off 18 to 22 year olds. Jim Nantz emceed the evening and, near the end, asked the coaches to tell him how they should be described should they win the national title.

Sampson got the ball rolling, telling Nantz to cut away to an image of his wife and children. It was poignant, Sampson choosing his family, because Sampson's father became ill last week during the West Regional in San Jose, Calif., yet flew to Atlanta to be with his son.

Next to Sampson, Gary Williams could scarcely compose himself when he spoke about his daughter and grandson. Roy Williams and Davis followed likewise. (I spent a chunk of last Friday night with Davis at the South Regional in Lexington, Ky.; he alternated between answering my questions and trying to locate his 3-year-old son, Antoine, who was scampering around the hotel lobby.)

Now, it's not unusual to hear a Final Four player talk about making it to this point as the fulfillment of a dream. Indiana senior Dane Fife did just that last week, describing how he had been imagining playing in the Final Four since he was a little kid. Probably true.

Yet for the coaches, the emotion of getting this far -- and of winning -- is entirely different. Say this: Nantz pushed the right button on Thursday night. Coaching is an emotional profession, tied to wins and losses and reliant on teenagers. You ask a grown man about reaching the Final Four, and possibly winning a national championship, and he doesn't see Saturday afternoon or Monday night. He sees a lifetime. Mike Davis sees C.M. Newton, the man who recruited him at Alabama. Gary Williams sees his daughter and probably remembers how much he missed her while he was working his way up through the business.

I still believe the game belongs to the players. I still believe the media spends too much time praising coaches. Yet now I understand something else just a little better: For the coaches, reaching the Final Four is not just the realization of a dream, it's the culmination of a lifetime's work, with no guarantee of returning.

Sports Illustrated senior writer Tim Layden is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com. Click here to send him a question or comment.

 

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