a truly national free-for-all. (He won 232
games in the nineties.)
After he finally won his championship,
he assistant-coached three U. S. Olympic
teams, under Mike Krzyzewski, in 2008,
2012, and 2016, and they won gold med-
als all three times.
He survived Syracuse’s departure from
the Big East in 2013 and a scandal for which
he was stripped of those 101 regular and
postseason wins between 2004 and ’12.
Since then he has guided the program into
position as an ACC powerhouse, and won
back more than half the 101 wins he lost.
He may not be the single greatest coach
in men’s NCAA history. But there’s a case
to be made that he is several great coaches,
over several great eras. He is a Mount Rush-
more on his very own—all four heads. Same
man, different challenges, a stunningly con-
sistent result in each iteration.We’re in the Melo waiting for his wife,
who’s going to tour with us through some
of the projects their charitable foundation
has funded.
While he waits in his office, Boeheim can
watch over two practice courts and dozens
of training devices designed to improve the
heaving of three-pointers, the pinpointing
of free throws, the act of exploding upcourt
with newfangled urgency.
The Melo may have saved his career, hewith the program and spent weekends for
the next five years playing semipro ball in
Scranton, driving downstate. “The games
were in Harrisburg, Scranton. Hartford
had a team. New Haven had a team. Al-
ways somewhere else,” he says. “I was the
fifth-best player on my team. I played with
Bill Spivey, who’d been banned for point
shaving. He was thirty-eight years old. But
he was seven-two and he could still play. I
drove ten hours each weekend. Five to get
to a game, three to get back to Scranton, two
to get back here. So, ten hours, played two
games. Which was all right.”
The money was pretty good, he says, when
added to what he was earning as graduate
assistant coach, and the golf coach.
Besides, he says, “I always liked driving.”
Syracuse basketball is centered in the
fifty-four-thousand-square-foot Carmelo
K. Anthony Basketball Center, a training
and practice facility opened in 2009, in
part from a large gift made by none other
than himself—Boeheim’s recruit and Syr-
acuse star for exactly one season, 2002–
03, the only championship season in Boe-
heim’s tenure.
Thereabouts they call it the Melo, which
may be the greatest designation in con-
temporary American architecture.
Boeheim stands in his office, then sits, be-
fore standing again to take a look at what’s
happening on the practice courts. He looks a
lot younger than he is. He’s slim, light in the
way he treads the stairs. Energetic. A combi-
nation of bored and springy, like a guy who’s
spent a little too much time on a treadmill.
Sure, he is unassuming.
Modest. Khaki pants, de-
cent shoes, a pullover. He
doesn’t exude a lot of won-
der at how he came to be
here. He isn’t puzzled by
his work. He has shown
from the beginning that he
is capable of evolution. As
player, assistant, and head
coach. He’s lived through
and thrived in so many dis-
tinct epochs of basketball
that he has become a kind
of memorial to them all.
A scrappy college player
and assistant coach in the John Wooden era,
and a knock-around minor-league pro in the
late sixties. Newly minted head coach at a
then-independent Syracuse, in the highly
physical seventies. Hired Rick Pitino as his
assistant in his first two seasons. No shot
clock, no three-point line, and big men were
the linchpin of a recruiting class. He aver-
aged twenty-five wins in his first four years,
playing in the old Manley Field House (you
could squeeze ninety-five hundred in there,
but it was tight) before the Carrier Dome
opened in 1980.
He was influential in the formation of
the Big East in 1979, a national, television-
friendly super-conference that pros-
pered in part on the big personalities of
its mouthy, chattering coaches—Mas-
simino, Carlesimo, Calhoun, Carne-
secca, Thompson, Boeheim. His teams
flourished when the three-point shot
was unleashed in 1986 and evolved in
the shot-clock era (introduced as a forty-
five-second clock in 1985),
winning 243 games in the
league’s first ten years.
His first real star, Dwayne
“Pearl” Washington,
brought out the crowds
like you’ve never seen.
There was Patrick Ew-
ing at Georgetown, Chris
Mullin at St. John’s, but
the Pearl—he was like dy-
namite going off.
Boeheim almost won
it all in ’87. Man, he had
Sherman Douglas, Rony
Seikaly, Derrick Coleman
on that team, and they were cruising. Then
Bobby Knight’s Indiana Hoosiers nipped
them 74–73 at the buzzer in the champi-
onship game. But Boeheim was big-time.
He survived the decade-long influx of tele-
vision money that created new rivals out of
mid-major opponents. When the century
rolled over, he helped make recruiting intoPG
94“I GREW UP
IN A FUNERAL
HOME. I’M
DIFFERENT
THAN MOST
PEOPLE.”