Jim Boeheim’s Big East impact felt all the way to his Syracuse end
Jim Boeheim couldn’t have picked a better day to start filing his retirement papers. He may have been getting his heart broken on a last-second shot by a Wake Forest player named Davis Williamson, a 3-pointer with half a second left that gave the Demon Deacons a 77-74 win over Boeheim’s Syracuse Orange.
The game may have been played at Greensboro Coliseum in North Carolina on the second day of the ACC Tournament. But the impact was surely felt 541 miles away, inside another basketball arena on Day 1 of the Big East Tournament at Madison Square Garden. Boeheim was an essential part of the Big East’s DNA for decades. He was a founding father.
And while Syracuse hasn’t played a Big East Conference game in almost 10 years — the Orange lost 78-61 to fellow soon-to-be-expat Louisville on March 16, 2013 — it still feels strange to look at a bracket for this tournament and not see Syracuse on one of the lines.
“They’re still a ghost here,” one Big East official joked Wednesday.
So while St. John’s made quick work of Butler in the tournament’s leadoff game before a polite 3 o’clock crowd, 76-61, earning an extra day of season against top-seeded Marquette on Thursday at noon, much of the chatter in and around the Garden was about Boeheim.
At first it involved a cryptic give-and-take in the postgame press conference between Boeheim and Donna Ditota, a reporter for Syracuse.com who has covered Boeheim for more than 30 years.
“I gave my retirement speech on the court last Saturday and I gave it to the press conference afterwards,” Boeheim said.
That elicited an awkward few seconds of puzzled silence.
Ditota followed: “Are you saying right now that you’re going to retire?”
“This is up to the university,” Boeheim said.
Ditota asked: “You want to come back?”
Boeheim replied: “I didn’t say that.”
One last question from the reporter: “When will you make a decision about whether you’ll come back?”
And one last answer from the coach: “You’re talking to the wrong guy.”
It was only two hours later when a statement released by Syracuse chancellor Kent Syverud resolved the mystery: Boeheim’s tenure was over. Former SU player Adrian Autry would be taking over. “I extend my deep appreciation and gratitude to an alumnus who epitomizes what it means to be ‘Forever Orange.’ ”
Boeheim won 1,115 games, every one of them at Syracuse. He arrived as a freshman in 1962, walked onto the basketball team and later teamed with Dave Bing to lead the first great Orange team to an NCAA Tournament. Outside of a couple of years playing minor league ball in the old Eastern League every paycheck he has ever drawn as an adult has come from Syracuse, first as a freshman coach, then as an assistant, and since 1976 as the head coach.
He is a Hall of Famer. He is a national champion. When Syracuse emerged as an original power in the Big East he was a regular foil in New York City, both because of the Syracuse-St. John’s rivalry and the fact that the Orange always considered themselves unofficial co-tenants of the Garden during the Big East Tournament.
“Sure, the Garden was always St. John’s home turf,” Boeheim said over the telephone a few years ago. “But we had plenty of nights there in March when the only color you saw in the stands was orange. Or maybe that was just my eyes playing tricks on me.”
Boeheim cackled at that. His sideline demeanor and press conference persona always unwittingly sabotaged the smart, funny way he carried himself in more private settings. Every few years there would be calls for Boeheim to step aside, judging him an old man in a young man’s game. Usually he would respond with an unexpected run deep into an NCAA Tournament. The last one was six years ago.
“I keep reading we aren’t any good,” he said a few days before facing North Carolina in the Final Four, “but we’re still playing and almost all of the good teams aren’t. That’s weird, you know?”
This time did feel different. The Orange will miss the NCAA for a second straight year, only the second time in Boeheim’s 47 years that they’ll have skipped back-to-back tournaments. They haven’t won 20 games since 2019.
Time is undefeated. There were four coaches who defined the Big East in its opening decade of dominance. John Thompson and Rollie Massimino have passed. Lou Carnesecca is 98. Boeheim was always the kid in that bunch, but even he’s 78 now. There was a time when he’d have sworn they’d have had to get a court order to get him out of his office.
Wednesday, he really did sound, at last, like a man ready to go on his own. So it is probably just as well that he is. It’s time.
