ple. “But I could have gone back and done
that. Possibly. Sure. But I was always going
to teach, if I didn’t coach. I could teach. Or
I could go do that.”
He walked on at Syracuse in 1962 and by
his senior year was cocaptain of the team
with future NBA Hall of Famer Dave Bing,
who was also his roommate. The civil rights
movement made its way to Syracuse while
Boeheim was there, and the school became
an unlikely pioneer. The white walk-on from
upstate and the black star from Washing-
ton, D. C., became close. “So Syracuse was
the first school that really recruited the
black athlete,” Boeheim says. “Dave was a
really good role model, and he did every-
thing right.”
Bing, who went on to own a steel factory
and served as mayor of Detroit from 2009
to 2013, remembers Boeheim as an antic-
ipatory player. “He knew how to get to ex-
actly where he was supposed to be at the
end of the play,” Bing says. “He sat around
all night talking about how we could work
from point A to point B to the shot. Same
stuff he’s doing now.”
I ask about other similarities between
past and present. He says: “He was a good
shooter, but he communicated first. A lot of
people must look at his antics on the floor
now and see a crybaby. But I watch him, and
he’s still communicating. He knows how to
play the refs. Jim’s a sincerely introverted
guy. It wasn’t easy, it couldn’t have been, to
learn this new language on the floor.”
After he graduated from Syracuse, Boe-
heim took a position as graduate assistantYork. He’s always been at Syracuse. Upstate.
Up there. Never wants to leave. Never will.
And Syracuse is still winning: 20–14 last
season, good for an eight seed in the tourna-
ment. He smiles back at the cameras some-
times now. I’m still happy here, he seems to
say. So sue me.
Days after the golf tournament, he leans
over the neatly stacked desktop in his of-
fice. “In ninth grade my German teacher was
the high school counselor,” he says. “And
one day, I don’t know, random, he says to
me, ‘Jim, everybody isn’t going to like you.’
I don’t know why he said that to me. I never
thought I was that worried about what peo-
ple thought, but maybe he saw something.
It’s a good quote because everybody’s re-
ally not going to like what you do or who
you are. It’s like you win the national cham-
pionship, and next day you take a poll, and
20 percent of the people think you’re not a
good coach. You’re just not going to make
everybody happy. That’s just the way it is.”A LIFE IN ONE PLACE
From left: Working the ref, circa 1981. • Playing for
’Cuse in the 1960s, Boeheim (wearing glasses)
guards Princeton’s Bill Bradley at Madison Square
Garden. • Former Georgetown coach John Thompson
and Boeheim were both part of the original Big
East; Thompson retired two decades ago.
The term upstate doesn’t mean anything
specific in New York. It mostly means
somewhere other than here. In Manhat-
tan, upstate could mean Westchester—
you could walk to Westchester from Man-
hattan—or Poughkeepsie, a mere two
or three counties up the Hudson. But in
Poughkeepsie, cities like Utica, Rome,
and Syracuse are distant upstate outposts.
Whereas in Syracuse—five hours from
Manhattan by car—upstate might mean
the austere and windblown city of Water-
town, the forgotten village of Canton. Or,
God forbid, Potsdam.
In a lot of ways, being “upstate” just
marks you as being from somewhere far
from the action.
That’s Boeheim. He’s a Syracuse guy. He
comes from somewhere else. Upstate.
He was born in Lyons, New York, a sweet
and sleepy burg about forty minutes from
Syracuse. Boeheim tells stories about going
down to the soda fountain after his games in
high school. His father was an undertaker.
They had an embalming room directly off
the kitchen.
He gives a Boeheim shrug at the memory
of it. “The other side of the house was the fu-
neral home,” he says. “At a busy time we’d
have two or three bodies in the house and
one would be in our living room.”
Would he just look at them? It feels like
a lot to look at.
“Not really,” Boeheim sniffs. “We had to
be respectful. You know.”
The undertaker’s son. Was that what
made him leave Lyons?
“I just didn’t want to do that,” he says.
He’s most earnest when his answers are sim-