speaks. He wants me to understand. And the
thing about Boeheim when he’s trying to ex-
plain something? To me, to a ref, to a player
during a time-out or a practice or from across
the floor at the Carrier Dome at full decibel?
You can’t not understand him. You can’t
not get him.
He speaks so plainly, and with such con-
viction, that there’s not a lot of room for mis-
understanding. He’s boiling it down, hard
as he can, all while watching out of the cor-
ner of one eye the practice routine of a lo-
cal player who’s training for an upcoming
season in Italy.
“Now, if you play all Zone, you gotta
spend an hour on it,” he was saying. “Once
you start spending an hour on your Zone,
you can’t just go back, spend fifteen minutes
on man-to-man, and try to use it. Man-to-
man is different every game. It’s just not go-
ing to work. So we did away with it.”
It’s like a lesson plan, then. He purses his
lips again. Shrugs. “Not many people know
that, but it’s factual. It’s a fact,” he says.
Is he ever tempted to experiment with
man-to-man defense?
“This isn’t an experiment,” he says sharply.
“You only get one chance, and if you experi-
ment during a game that you need to win and
you lose it because you experimented, what
did you learn? And then you miss the tour-
nament by one game? It’s not good.”
Understood.His wife picks us up in the parking lot
of the Melo for our tour of the good works
of the Jim and Juli Boeheim Foundation.
It’s a big SUV, with a pile of golf clubs sit-
ting in one half of the backseat. Drivers—
big, fat-headed drivers that appear to have
been tested and rejected by someone fill-
ing out their bag. She offers me my choice.
“Take one,” she says. “They belong to no
one at this point. You should take one.”
This is Juli Boeheim, his second wife, for
more than twenty years now. The mother of
three of his four kids, all three of whom are
playing college basketball within a reason-
able driving distance from one another—a
son at Cornell, a daughter at Rochester, and
Buddy, at ’Cuse. Boeheim attends their home
games religiously. He loves those moments
in the stands. It’s a part of the hoops heaven
he lives in at present. He doesn’t feel pulled
apart by competing obligations. “Not at all,”
he says. “That’s what holds me together.”
Juli is Boeheim’s energetic counterpart,
talkative, challenging, focused like a laser.
She drives. Boeheim’s future as a driver is at
this point still uncertain, pending the state’s
decision following the hearing. (His license
would be fully reinstated several weeks
later.) It is an unstated tension.says. Extended it, anyway.
“This job is all time and space,” Boe-
heim says. “This building, this office and
the view—that takes care of the space. It
saved me. I’m not always walking around,
building to building, to get a look. The team
wants to be here, in this space; they can get
in here twenty-four hours a day.”
He looks at me, purses his lips. “They have
key cards,” he explains.
So the Melo gives him the space he needs.
What about the time?
That’s where the trademark Zone defense
enters. I ask the standard question: What’s
with the Zone?
Boeheim smiles and states that his per-
sistent use of the Zone is strictly a method of
budgeting practice time so he’s most free to
teach. “Time and space,” he repeats. “There’s
an economy to every practice. We practice
two hours. When you play man-to-man, you
have to devote an hour and fifteen minutes
to drill work. Every day. You have to practice
Zone, too. That’s thirty minutes. So that’s
the whole practice. Two hours. No choice.”
Boeheim looks out at the court as he
SUCCESS
Led by future NBA star Carmelo
Anthony (top, right), Syracuse won the
national championship in 2003,
beating the Kansas Jayhawks 81–78.
It was Boeheim’s third trip to the
final game; he has led the Orange to
three Final Fours since.