promised only that I’d do my best. This
feels like an opportunity, unless I’m mis-
reading things. I apologize and let him
know that I’m wading in.
“Asking?” he says, repeating the last word
I used. He’s leaning back in his desk chair,
arm wrapped over his ribs, as if suppress-
ing an ache.
“Yeah,” he says. “That’s fine. I don’t have
a problem with you asking.”
I offer him another out. We can do it later.
“I don’t have a problem,” he says. “The
crazy thing is, I’ve had five hundred emails,
minimum—perfectly serious—more than
five hundred emails from people that had
the same thing happen to them. The testi-
mony, the inquest, or whatever—it’s hard.
And it should be hard. They looked into it.
Every minute was accounted for.”
Going over one small set of reactions, one
sequence of actions where you do your level
best and it’s not enough. “It’s a miserable
thing because a man was killed,” he says.
He pauses then, sighs. Pushes his glasses
up his nose. He’s worrying.
“And his family...”
He lets another moment pass, then:
“You know, I’ve been very smart, in a way.
I stopped drinking completely.”
Do you mean that day?
“I mean altogether,”
he says—he means years
ago. “I stopped drinking.
Not that I ever drank that
much. Because if I’d just
had two drinks that night?
Just two.” He holds up two
fingers, a reverse peace
sign. “Even if I had one,”
he says, staring at the wall
above my head. “They’d
ask: Were you drinking?
Again and again. And I
would have had to say,
Well, I had one drink.
That would be the head-
line. They’d say ‘drinking.’
So even if you had two, or
say you were just at the limit.” He holds out
his hand, splays out his fingers, ticks off the
register of events that would surely follow.
“Fired, prosecuted probably—all that.”
Even sober, it was an impossible scenario.
“I came over a hill and it was pitch-black,
and the other car was black. So I’m coming
over the hill; I didn’t see it. I thought I was
going to just go straight into the car, but I got
around. I actually made a move—because
there was nobody in the road—to get past
the car. As I’m going by, the guy steps out.”
There’s a pause then. Boeheim stares pastthe front of his desk, thinking it through.
“He’d gone back to the car. He went back to
get something and then tried to get back out.”
There were reports that Boeheim was di-
recting traffic afterward. “I heard you were
trying to keep people away and warn them,”
I say.
“I got a letter from a guy who said I saved
his life because he was going too fast and he
saw me and slowed down and was able to
get off. But it’s a terrible thing. You know
that you did everything you could and it just
didn’t work and then somebody’s dead and
it’s just terrible. There’s no way to talk about
it or explain about it.”
Jim Boeheim stares straight at me. He’s
rock-solid, not choked up or overly emo-
tional. Not that I can see. He leans back in
his chair and widens his eyes. “Well, the
only thing that shouldn’t be said maybe,”
he begins. He reaches out and puts a finger
squarely on his heart. “I grew up in a funeral
home. I’m different than most people. I grew
up with people dying, and picking up peo-
ple who had died, and bodies. I mean, it’s
different for me.”
He falls into a palms-up demeanor. “It just
is. I was close to my grand-
mother. I loved her and ev-
erything. When she died, I
went to the funeral and that
was it. I felt that I could take
it. It’s just life. That’s what
happens,” he says. “I felt
like I could take it.”
He thinks back then, not
looking for what makes
him especially resilient.
He wheels out one of his
soda-fountain stories. “In
my sophomore year, high
school, I had a really big
game, just great, and I went
down to the local soda foun-
tain, and the guy waited on
four people and didn’t say
anything. He ignored me. So I just sat there,
until he came by and said, ‘Well, what do
you want?’ ”
Boeheim raises his eyebrows then, to be
sure I’m still with him. He’s got his hands
folded on his belly, his feet up on his desk.
“And he was just joking around, you know:
small town, you’re like everybody else.
There’s no difference. I was brought up like
that. It’s what I believe. I don’t think I’m bet-
ter or different than anybody else.”
He raises one eyebrow, holds his palms out,
tilts his hand a little. It’s a look he sometimes
gives when he thinks people don’t get him.
But I get him.
You couldn’t not.Back at the Melo, Boeheim reflects on
forty-three years in the game.
What’s the biggest change? I offer one:
the transfer portal that allows student-ath-
letes to transfer their eligibility from school
to school, a fairly free-market process. It was
initially thought to favor large programs like
Syracuse, because players might seek to
work up from smaller schools to the premier
programs as their prospects improved. Of
course, players might leave Syracuse as well.
To which Boeheim says: “I think it’s great
for kids to go if that’s what they really want,
but what if they just work through it? Would
it have worked out better? Brandon Triche
played very little here when he was a fresh-
man and he became a great player for us. We
had a kid leave here and go to Vanderbilt, he
didn’t play, and Vanderbilt didn’t win a con-
ference game last year.”
The biggest difference, he says, is the cul-
ture of impatience and expectation that’s
taken over amongst the players. “They just
want to play in the NBA. Twenty years ago,
nobody even thought that much about the
NBA. And they’re not going to get there.
The NBA thinks it’s a problem. They’re
worried about it. They don’t—there’s no
place! There are six hundred players in the
G-league. Every one of those guys thinks
they’re going to go to the NBA. Not even
thirty of them are going to. There’s no place
for these guys, and we’re making it a culture
of ‘Let’s go. Now.’ They don’t want to go to
college. They don’t accept what it means.”
And the effect?
“What we’ve needed to do is give kids
more money, which we have. People don’t
realize that. Nobody writes this. These kids
get paid. My son gets $1,300 a month. He’s
a scholarship player because we give him
cost of attendance.”
In cash? I ask.
“In cash. And they take their board
money, instead of eating meals, and they
buy their own food, but we also provide food
for them, legally now, twice a day.”
Boeheim shakes his head.
He makes that look, like, You get me?
Finally, we are alone, talking about pot-
boilers and detective novels. He’s a Mi-
chael Connelly man. I decide I have to
ask about the accident, the man he hit on
I-690. The PR guy had politely asked me
to keep my distance from the subject; I’d
HE SEES A
CULTURE OF
IMPATIENCE:
“THEY JUST
WANT TO
PLAY IN
THE NBA.”
LEGACY
In his forty-fourth season, Boeheim
will coach his own son. He and
his wife run a charity that gives away
millions. His program is a powerhouse.
Of the fatal accident, he says,
“It’s a terrible thing. You know that you
did everything you could.”