Getting to Us Read online

  They still talk trash about all the battles they had while growing up, but even though John holds the ultimate trump card, he told me he has never once teased his brother that his Ravens beat Jim’s 49ers in the Super Bowl. “I would never say that,” John said. “I feel like I don’t have to bring that up. I have too much respect for him. We played them three times, and we were very fortunate to win all three. I’m very proud of that, not because he’s my brother, but because I know how good he is. You beat Jim Harbaugh, to me that’s an accomplishment.”

  At the age of fifty-three, Harbaugh can still make a football whistle through the air, and though he is no longer able to run alongside his players until he pukes, he still embraces every opportunity to feed his competitive jones. Over Memorial Day weekend in 2016, he and John got together with their families at John’s cottage on Lake Huron in Michigan. One afternoon, the moms, dads, and kids were enjoying what they thought was a friendly little basketball game on the driveway. That is, until Jim’s family fell behind 5–1. Suddenly, Jim was seven years old again, and he was in a car driving back from a Punt, Pass and Kick contest, and he was pissed. He started boxing out John’s thirteen-year-old daughter and bullying his way past John’s wife to the basket. John playfully suggested that maybe Jim should let his kids touch the ball once in a while, but Jim wasn’t having it. So John had no choice but to guard him closely and throw a few elbows into his gut. At one point, he sent Jim into a nearby bush. In the end, though, Jim’s intensity carried the day, as his family came back to win 7–6. He let out a whoop of excitement, picked up his toddler son, and screamed, “Doesn’t it feel great to win?” He was still floating when he crossed paths with his brother an hour later in the backyard. “Hey John,” he crowed. “Have you won anything yet?”

  Jim Boeheim

  “IT’S ALL ABOUT LOSING.”

  He saw dead people.

  They were right there in his house, lying in caskets one floor underneath the bed where he slept. They were young and old, big and small, grandparents and parents and townsfolk, sometimes people he knew. There was a viewing room and an embalming room, and if it was a particularly busy time, a third casket would rest in the living room. That’s the good thing about the funeral business. Good times may come and go, but death is the one true constant.

  It was all so . . . normal. That was life for Jim Boeheim while he was growing up in the small central New York town of Lyons in the 1950s. The Boeheim Funeral Home had been founded by his great-grandfather in the mid-nineteenth century. It got passed down to Jim’s grandfather, and eventually to his father, Jim Sr. When Jim Jr. was twelve years old, his parents moved with him and his sister to the funeral home, in downtown Lyons. The family slept upstairs, the corpses downstairs. Sometimes, if the viewing room was empty, Jim’s sister, Barbara, would have slumber parties there with her girlfriends.

  Jim first remembers seeing a dead person when he was about five years old. When he became a teenager, his father put him to work. Jim would ride with his dad around town and help him pick up the bodies. The hearse served as a backup ambulance for the town, and Jim would go on those outings as well. “One time, I saw a woman give birth,” Boeheim says. “Now that was gross.”

  For anyone who has watched Jim Boeheim during his four-plus decades as the curmudgeonly head basketball coach at Syracuse University, it should come as no surprise that he grew up the son of a mortician, surrounded by dead people lying in wooden boxes inside his own house. Makes sense, doesn’t it? The loping gait, the pallid aspect, the haughty disdain, the won’t-suffer-fools-gladly attitude, the eye rolls, the shrugs, the condescending snickers, and, yes, the whiny, nasal voice—it all conspires to deliver the message of, What’s the point? We’re all gonna die anyway. Boeheim tends to be shy and thoughtful, but he is not one for introspection. Ask him how growing up surrounded by death formed his character, and he will shrug and roll his eyes. “I don’t think that it did. It was just a part of my life,” he says. “Maybe I can accept death a little bit easier than most people, because I lived it. I’m not sure that’s such a great attribute.”

  We are sitting in a hotel conference room in Colorado Springs during the summer of 2016. It is late at night, and Boeheim, seventy-one, has spent a full day overseeing a tryout at the Olympic Training Center. He doesn’t seem to understand my fascination with this line of questioning, so I tell him a story about the night my wife and I showed the movie Stand by Me to our three young sons. The movie tells the story of a group of teenage boys who go on a search for another boy who has gone missing and is presumed dead. At the end of the movie, they find the body. When that young dead boy appeared on our flat-screen, my boys freaked out. They had never seen an image of a corpse before, much less that of a boy their age. My wife and I tried to explain that the boy on the screen was just an actor, that as soon as the scene was over he got up and played with his friends again, but it didn’t matter. They had seen a dead boy and that was all there was to it. They had nightmares for days.

  Boeheim is nonplussed. Don’t read too much into it, he cautions. It was no big deal. As I reflect on our exchange, it occurs to me that maybe I was asking him the wrong questions. It wasn’t the dead people in Boeheim’s home that impacted him so much as the living ones who came to pay their respects. His childhood home was routinely filled with sad people speaking in hushed tones. That is the dynamic that became the foundation for his PEAK profile.

  Think about what it feels like to be at the funeral for someone you don’t know well. You look at those who loved the dearly departed, and you know that, sad as they may be, they must persist. As you watch them weep and grieve, you empathize with their sorrow. You ruminate on your own mortality, which makes you come to an understanding of what really matters—who you are authentically and what it is you really want out of life, brief as it is. Most of all, you’re grateful that you’re sitting in a chair instead of lying in that box. That is quite a piece of knowledge for a young boy to inherit.

  It all makes perfect sense to Jason Hart, who played for Boeheim at Syracuse from 1996 to 2000. He has given this matter much thought. “He grew up real spooky,” Hart tells me. “Think about it. The sun was never out. It was gloomy in that funeral home. The house was always quiet, with dead bodies around. That’s the kind of thing that would make someone real reserved. When I found out about all that, it tripped me out. But it made sense given what I know about Coach’s personality.”

  We think of great coaches as being naturally extroverted, but Boeheim does not fall into that category. He does not get to Us by firing up his players with inspiring speeches or sitting them down for long conversations. Rather, he gets to Us by earning their confidence in the knowledge he has accrued during his lifetime spent playing, learning, and thinking about basketball. Not just thinking—brooding. And as one of the very few coaches who have won so much for so long at the same place—his alma mater, no less—Boeheim is nothing if not persistent. His teams reflect that in the way they play.

  If the constant specter of death robbed Boeheim of a childlike effervescence, it also imbued him with an innate even keel. True, he never seems all that happy, even in the best of times, yet he also possesses a steely resilience that has carried him through the worst of times. That equanimity has been his teammate through the elation of Final Fours and a national championship and a Hall of Fame induction to the countless painful losses, a pair of devastating NCAA investigations, a pedophilia scandal that engulfed his longtime assistant coach, a divorce, and the constant, withering public criticism that nips at his ultra-thin skin. Boeheim is the first to concede he is not likable at times, but through all the ups and downs of his career he has remained authentic, never straying too far, in person and in spirit, from that small town and modest funeral home.

  In a profession where so many men suffer a nagging itch to seek out new challenges, Boeheim has been the one true constant. He has often quipped that each loss is like a temporary dea
th, but he doesn’t really mean it. If there’s one thing Jim Boeheim knows, it’s that there is nothing temporary about death.

  * * *

  • • •

  Juli Boeheim knows the look. She sees it on her husband’s face as he climbs into his car, pulls out of the driveway, and begins the brief trip to his office at the Carmelo K. Anthony Center on the Syracuse campus. “He’s not even out of the driveway,” she says, “but his mind is already a million miles away.”

  Mike Hopkins knows the look, too. He played for Boeheim for four years and was his assistant coach for twenty-one years before becoming the head coach at Washington. Boeheim is an avid reader, but there were times when Hopkins saw him with his nose in a book (or, lately, in front of his iPad) and knew the words are flitting into Boeheim’s head but not really staying there. “He finishes a novel every road trip, but then you see him put the book down so he can think,” Hopkins says. “Everybody has some form of meditation. Some people go to church. Some people work out. He’s a thinker.”

  He inherited this inclination from his parents. Jim and Janet Boeheim were master bridge players who traveled all over the East Coast competing in tournaments. Jim Sr.’s abilities at the card table were abetted by a dogged competitive streak and a prodigious memory. If he won a hand, he might turn to the other fellow and remind him that he made the same mistake in a hand many years before. It usually did not go over well.

  So one of the first things young Jimmy learned was the importance of knowledge. He had to cultivate his mind because his body was unimpressive. He was skinny and awkward, all arms and legs and sharp elbows. He may have been born wearing glasses. Like many small towns, Lyons was mad for its high school football and basketball teams. Football was out of the question for Jim, but basketball suited him. He loved the game right from the start. As a little kid, he would toss wadded-up socks into the hoop that was hanging in his bedroom. When he was in grade school, he joined a program run by Richard Blackwell, the coach at Lyons Central High School. Blackwell put the kids through brutal four-hour workouts on Saturday mornings. Jim would grind through that practice and then remain at the gym for hours more. “I was the only third grader that went to all the varsity high school games,” he says. “I wanted to play basketball from the beginning. There was never any doubt that was what I was going to be.”

  As Boeheim got older, he’d spend much of his spare time playing with friends on the driveway behind his house. The garage at the funeral home was in a separate structure, leaving a substantial space to serve as the court. His dad put up lights so Jim and his buddies could play at night. Jim may not have looked the part of a good basketball player, but he was tough, and his eye-hand coordination was off the charts.

  Playing with his friends was a lot healthier than going up against his old man in anything. When Senior and Junior competed, it rarely ended well. Blackwell was also the golf pro at the town country club, and whenever he saw the Boeheims getting ready to tee off, he would ask how many holes they would play before one of them stormed off the course. He wasn’t kidding.

  Jim’s descriptions of his old man are not flattering. “He had a good side, but he kept it well hidden,” is how he likes to put it. Jim Sr. had a withdrawn, stoic manner that owed to his German heritage. He was also in chronic pain. When he was a young boy, his brother accidentally shot him in his back during a hunting trip. His doctors thought it would be too dangerous to try to remove the bullet, so Jim Sr. carried that bullet in his back the rest of his life. One of his legs was shorter than the other. A major reason why he gravitated toward playing cards was because it was something he could do while sitting.

  Boeheim’s best friend growing up, Tony Santelli, says Jim Sr. was “about as cold a person as you could imagine.” Jim agrees. “He was like me in my bad Jim Boeheim mode,” he says. “We were never close. He always wanted to win. He’d try to beat me as much as he could at everything we played. Eventually, I beat him at everything, so of course he quit playing me. I can be nice sometimes, but my father never really could be.”

  Their arguments weren’t just limited to sports. At any moment, a battle could erupt. “Jim and Dad were alike in so many ways,” his sister, Barbara, says. “Each one of them was always right. They butted heads constantly.” Boeheim’s father taught Jim how to fish and hunt pheasants, but there were many times when Jim would simply go fishing by himself past midnight, alone with his thoughts.

  His mom, on the other hand, was pure sugar. Janet was an athlete herself, an excellent golfer who used to be a pretty good high school basketball player. Unlike Jim Sr., however, it didn’t crush her to lose. Jim remembers one year when she failed to win the club golf championship but was still happy because her best friend claimed first place instead.

  The twin strains of his parents’ personalities gave Boeheim his authenticity, for better and worse. He loved basketball and he loved to compete. When his high school career was done, Boeheim had a chance to go to Colgate or Cornell on a partial academic scholarship, but he preferred Syracuse because it was a Division I program. He pitched his services to the head coach, Fred Lewis, who told him he didn’t have any scholarships available. However, Lewis promised him that he could try to walk onto the team as a freshman, and if he was good enough, he might be able to earn a scholarship later on.

  When Boeheim got to school, he became discouraged. That’s because one of the scholarship freshmen was a smooth, 6´3˝ shooting guard from Washington, D.C., named Dave Bing. Boeheim had never lacked for confidence, but he knew he wasn’t remotely in this guy’s league. When he expressed his insecurities to his mom, she asked him about the other players. “They’re good, but not nearly as good as Bing,” Jim said.

  “Well,” Janet replied, “you’ll just have to be better than those other guys.”

  In other words, persist. It didn’t take Bing long to realize that the skinny nerd with the glasses was plenty tough. He remembers an occasion early in their freshman season when an older player tried to bully Boeheim in a game of one-on-one. “One time he ran into him, and Jim’s glasses broke in half,” Bing says. “I think the guy felt that Jimmy was going to quit, but Jimmy just got some tape, put his glasses back on, and continued to play. I knew right then this was a guy who didn’t back down.”

  Later that fall, Boeheim invited Bing and two other teammates to stay at his house for Thanksgiving. The three teammates walked through the front door, went into the back room . . . and saw an old white guy lying in an open casket. They weren’t having it. “We knew his father was a mortician—he looked the part, quite frankly—but we didn’t know the funeral parlor was connected to the house,” Bing says. “I had never seen a dead person before. Right away, all three of us said, ‘There’s no way in hell we’re spending the night here.’ As soon as dinner was over, we went back to school.”

  Boeheim knew he would never be as good as Bing, so it was up to him to figure out how to be good while playing with him on the freshman squad. (Freshmen were not eligible to play varsity ball back then.) If there’s one thing Boeheim could always do on a basketball court, it was shoot. He saw that every time Bing beat his man off the dribble, he drew extra defenders. So all Boeheim had to do was move into the open space, catch Bing’s passes, and convert the shots. He did well enough that first year for Lewis to put him on scholarship over the summer.

  The players at Syracuse and around the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC) soon learned what the folks back in Lyons had already known. Looks aside, the Boeheim kid was not to be trifled with between the lines. Not surprisingly, Boeheim was also a smart-ass in practice, asking Lewis lots of questions and constantly challenging his decisions. Lewis could be a merciless scold, but Boeheim wasn’t fazed. He was used to that kind of treatment from his father. “Lewis was hard on everybody. He cursed you out all the time,” Boeheim says. “Nobody really liked him, but he rebuilt the Syracuse program and was a very good recruiter.”
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  Boeheim’s parents made the hourlong trip with Barbara to Syracuse to attend every one of his home games. When the Orangemen were on the road, Jim Sr. would repeatedly ask Barbara to go into the kitchen to check the score on the radio. “Dad was always proud of Jim,” Barbara says. “He just never said so.”

  By the time Boeheim was a senior, he was starting alongside Bing in the backcourt. The team went 22–6 and reached the 1966 NCAA Tournament, where it suffered a disappointing loss to Duke in the East Regional final. Boeheim was the third-leading scorer on that team with a 14.6 average. Over the years, Lewis often said Boeheim was “the worst leaper I ever had,” but he also called him one of his smartest players. “It’s amazing how you can be the smartest player and then you can be a dumb coach later on,” Boeheim says.

  After he graduated in 1966, Boeheim pursued a playing career for a short while. When his former coach in Scranton became head coach of the Detroit Pistons of the NBA, Boeheim went for a brief tryout, but he quickly realized he wasn’t good enough to make the team. He had known for a while that he wanted to coach, so he returned to Syracuse to take a job as a graduate assistant under its new head coach, Roy Danforth. In 1972, Danforth promoted Boeheim to full-time assistant. The grinding nature of recruiting, which required long hours, a keen eye for talent, and persistent pursuit, fit his personality.

  Over the next four years, Syracuse averaged 21.5 wins and reached the 1975 Final Four, where it lost to Kentucky in the semifinal. Things took a surprising turn the following year, when Danforth left to become the head coach at Tulane University in New Orleans. Syracuse put together a search committee to find his replacement, partly because the school was hesitant to take a chance on someone who had never been a head coach.