It’s twilight at the Turn-
ing Stone Resort and Ca-
sino, and the curtains glow
a dim blue. Jim Boeheim
stands on his heels at the
lectern, the night before his annual charity
golf tournament. Weight back, hips supi-
nated, eyes down. The thunderheads are
in. The bad weather is jammed in to the
west and headed this way.
Golf tomorrow is probably off.
But this is upstate New York, the Mo-
hawk Valley, east of Syracuse. People
know the weather doesn’t make any guar-
antees as to your happiness. Boeheim
smiles and addresses the room from the
cockpit of his trademark what-are-you-
gonna-do shrug. Then he sets about his
business for the night.
He’s wearing a sport
coat over a logoed golf
shirt atop expensive khaki
pants and some kind of
boat shoes. The hoops
coach in summer. Boe-
heim’s not playing in the
tournament anyway. His
game has slipped—he
doesn’t like that one bit.
And there’s the business
of tomorrow: a hearing
regarding an accident in
which he struck a man on
the interstate on his way
home from a game last
winter, and the man died.
It’s no secret. Boeheim
was never charged with
any wrongdoing. But a tragic accident, a
gut punch for the born-here, played-here,
coached-to-the-tippy-top-here legend.
Grim business for an often misread guy.
He will be cleared, but first he’s going
to have to live through the reconstruc-
tions of the incident, the vetting of his
reactions and intentions. Like anybody
in a fatal accident. For the record. He
knows this.
But that’s tomorrow.
He tells a few jokes from the lectern.
Outlines projects funded by the Jim and
Juli Boeheim Foundation and its $4.4
million in grants, all within the region.
He auctions off a trip home from a road
game with the team. Floor seats at an-
other game. He’s done this for more than
ten years now, since before the foundation
he and his wife started to help kids in need
and fight cancer cut its first check.
He knows these folks—local contrac-
tors, executives, coaches, alumni. He uses
their first names, and breaks the chops of
various donors accordingly.
Thunder rumbles outside. The rain
starts in. Boeheim doesn’t give it a thought.
Boeheim will tell you: There’s a lot to
love in Syracuse in late June. The sky that
very afternoon, before the banquet? Clear
and enamel blue. The trees? Verdant ceil-
ings on the city streets. Men and women
cook meats on their porches, smoke twist-
ing away from their grills, hopeful fingers
to the night sky.
He ticks off the lakes: There’s one in the
city itself. A bigger one to the north, loaded
with walleye. Beyond that, the Great Lake,
Ontario—practically an inland sea, horse-
shoed into an eastern shore. The foot-
hills of the Adirondacks are minutes from
downtown. You can hunt there. Golf. Hike.
You can kayak the ancient canal with your
wife. Whatev. So much. Boeheim knows.
“It’s like a secret,” he
says. “Sometimes I don’t
even want to tell people
how great it is.”
And “Boeheim” is ex-
actly what they call him
in Syracuse. Not Jim Boe-
heim. Not Coach Boeheim.
Not Coach. Boeheim. Syr-
acuse men’s basketball
coach for forty-three years
now. Before that, he was an
assistant at Syracuse, a cap-
tain at Syracuse, a player,
and a kid who walked on.
At Syracuse. In his time
as coach? Six Final Fours,
eleven All-Americans,
thirty-four twenty-win
seasons, and a national championship, all
while playing in the two best conferences
of their respective eras.
In Syracuse they say his name from the
back of the throat, like something guttural. A
complaint. Bay-hime. Two accented syllables.
Solid. Like con-crete. Or expel it into the air
quickly, like a sneeze. Boeheim. Gesundheit.
Everyone agrees, Boeheim plays things a
little crabby during games. He prowls court-
side, contorts his face, shrugs and smirks up
to the refs. When he sighs, he’s like a groan-
ing Whisperliner on the tarmac. He is the
face of exasperation. What you see in him
is that he’s already seen enough.
It’s not a true love-him-or-hate-him thing
for Boeheim in Syracuse. He’s all they have.
In this frontier town of minor-league sports,
Boeheim, six-foot-three, seventy-four years
old, with the trademark looks of bafflement
shot from the Syracuse bench, is the only
real sports star for a hundred and fifty miles.
No one much hates the gangly, perpetu-
ally balding Boeheim. Not in Syracuse. It
turns out haters don’t gotta hate Boeheim,PG
92but in Syracuse, some claim to suffer Boe-
heim. Him with his 73 percent career win-
ning percentage. Him with his puzzling,
sometimes stifling Zone.
That Zone is a subject of debate in up-
state VFWs from East Rochester to the out-
skirts of Schenectady, the general bounds
of the region that supplies the Orange with
attendance topping twenty-five thousand
for a full slate of home games played in sleet
storms, blizzards, and snow squalls. And
Boeheim explains the Zone often—but he’s
imperious, they say. Short-tempered.
Again and again, Orange fans want to
know what he knows that they do not.
For this type of fan, Boeheim is just a guy
who won’t get out of the way. He agreed to
retire in 2018, but then he recruited his own
son to play for him. He’s nearly two years past
his intended retirement, planning for three
more. Boeheim is now a devoted father, a guy
who backed out of a deal in order to watch
his son play out the string for the Orange-
men, not to mention two other children who
play regularly for nearby colleges. He lives
amid a wealth of basketball blessings. Good
money. Good program. Good conference.
He has outlived scandals, losing 101 wins
from the official record due to a program
scandal for which he took the blame.
And cancer (of the prostate, in 2001).
And personal turmoil. The accident, and
the window it opened on grief.
He almost certainly should be in the mix
when talking about the greatest coaches ever.
He pretty much snuck up on that territory.
He’s never been a short-list kind of guy. He’s
labored at the far geographic limits of NewBOEHEIM HAS
SHOWN
FROM THE
BEGINNING
THAT HE IS
CAPABLE OF
EVOLUTION.