Getting to Us Read online

  “I cry when somebody dies,” he says.

  Geno Auriemma

  “WOMEN TAKE ALL THE CREDIT, TRUST ME.”

  He couldn’t understand a word she was saying, yet he understood her perfectly. The nun at St. Francis of Assisi School sat across from him, behind a desk. His aunt, who served as his interpreter, was by his side. Luigi Auriemma was seven years old and fresh off the boat from Italy. He didn’t speak a word of English. Even worse, he was already two months late in joining the second grade.

  The message from the nun was simple: If the boy performed well enough in the classroom, he would move to the third grade at the end of the school year. If he didn’t, he would repeat. The aunt translated. Luigi nodded. Yup, got it. Smart ones move up, dumb ones stay back. “And there was no English-as-a-second-language lessons after school, or anything like that. No private tutors,” Auriemma says. “No any of that stuff. You just had to figure it out.”

  The nun was neither mean nor nice about the situation faced by Luigi, whom everyone called by his nickname, Geno. She simply told him the truth. So he went back to his aunt’s house, where he lived with her family as well as his parents and two siblings, and he started to figure it out. He studied the backs of cereal boxes. His older cousins, both girls, read him books. His aunt helped him with his lessons. Geno’s mom, Marsiella, didn’t speak English either, but she helped make that household run. His father was around too, but he worked long hours at the local steel mill and showed scant interest in his kids’ Americanized lives, preferring to spend his idle time smoking cigarettes and sipping espresso at the Italian club in town.

  Fortunately for Geno, he had a sharp mind. Somehow, some way, he made it through the second grade. Socially, however, things were not easy. The kids made fun of his clothes, his accent, even his lunch. They ate peanut butter and jelly, while his sandwiches teemed with sausages and peppers, the oil leaking embarrassingly through his brown paper bag. Fortunately for Geno, he did not have to get through it alone. Each time he stumbled, each time he struggled, there was a strong woman there to help him figure it out.

  Like Sister Joseph Theresa, for example. He’ll never forget the first day of class when she displayed a cardboard box that had been cut to look like a television. She warned the students that if they misbehaved, she would turn the box around and put on a special show: “You Asked For It.” Geno did his best not to ask for it. “We were in a constant state of fear, like, ‘Shit, this TV better not go on today,’” he recalls with a chuckle.

  Later on, his favorite high school teacher was Sister Rose Patrice. If she hadn’t helped him pass tenth-grade geometry, he wouldn’t have stayed eligible to play basketball, just at the point when he was falling in love with the game. He felt her empathy before he truly understood what that was. “She just saw a weakness in me,” Auriemma says. “You can tell when someone likes you.”

  The culture was a carryover from the country Auriemma left, where generations of strong women supported their families while the men were off fighting wars. From the very beginnings of his life, Auriemma understood that women were to be feared and respected, and ultimately loved. “Since I can remember, I have never ever ever had any doubt that the role of women in the life of everybody that I knew was overpowering,” he says. “You understood they were people that you listened to, that they would be stern, they would discipline you, but they would love you. They would tell you, ‘This is what you need to do to be better.’ They would criticize you when you were wrong. They would praise you when you were good. They would reward you, they would scold you, they made you work for everything. So this idea of women being the weaker sex, that’s just so foreign to me. Whenever I hear that I’m like, ‘What world did those people grow up in?’”

  The seeds of Luigi Auriemma’s PEAK profile were planted by strong feminine hands. It took persistence to return to that school day after day, despite the deep fear that he would be one of the dumb ones who got left back. He developed an innate insecurity that provided him with an empathetic core. He embraced his Italian heritage even when it put him at a disadvantage, because that’s who he was. And he acquired knowledge that begat the overriding skill he would use to navigate in this strange new world: the ability to read people. Geno didn’t always understand what people were saying, so he studied how they were saying it. He didn’t read the native language, so he learned how to read body language. That skill now enables him to get to Us as a women’s college basketball coach. He was never book smart, but he has great emotional intelligence. He sizes up rooms, analyzes situations, reads people, and reacts accordingly.

  He learned this without any real male role model aside from his high school basketball coach. And yet Geno figured it out. His is a quintessentially American tale, centered around a young immigrant navigating the transition from one world to the next, achieving great success without ever quite fitting in. Every traveler needs a bridge, and for Geno, that bridge was built by women. They did more than help him learn. They showed him how to teach.

  * * *

  • • •

  He laughed. Of course he laughed. All season long, Geno Auriemma had been waiting for his talented but young UConn Lady Huskies to cough up a game. Even as their epic winning streak climbed past 100 games, he believed it was inevitable. So when it happened in the most dramatic fashion possible—with a basket at the buzzer to deliver a 66–64 overtime win for Mississippi State at the 2017 Final Four—there was Auriemma on the UConn bench sideline, smiling like he had just been elected class president.

  The loss was seismic, not just for Auriemma’s program but for the sport of women’s basketball. It broke UConn’s 111-game win streak, the second time one of Auriemma’s teams had eclipsed the 88-game men’s record set by John Wooden’s UCLA Bruins. When I bring up Auriemma’s reaction to him a few months later, he concedes that in his younger days, the last thing he would have done after getting beat like that was laugh. He didn’t react that way because he wants to win any less now than he did then. It was because he knows so much more.

  “I’ve seen people get beat who are big-time winners over the years, and their reaction was totally disgusting. Like, ‘How dare you beat us?’” he tells me. “I mean, c’mon. Maybe no one in the history of sports has won as much as we’ve won. What are you gonna do, be an asshole when you lose? You’re gonna live up to everybody’s expectation of you? It took five freaking months for what I thought was gonna happen to happen. The moment just got a little too big for us. That’s all.”

  Even when you beat him, Auriemma gives you the feeling that he still knows just a little bit more than you do. The annoying part is he’s probably right. My favorite all-time quote about him came from Rebecca Lobo, the cornerstone of his first NCAA championship team at the University of Connecticut. “Geno’s natural walk,” Lobo said, “is a strut.”

  Lobo first noticed it when she was a senior in high school and Auriemma was recruiting her. There was no logical reason for him to be so confident. He was a relatively inexperienced coach with a relatively unestablished program. But he strutted anyway, and she found it irresistible. “He just had that air about him. I guess today they would call it swag,” Lobo says. “It can come across as arrogance, but I thought it was enticing more than off-putting. It made me want to play for him.”

  Phil Martelli noticed the same thing when he met Auriemma while the two of them were working a basketball camp in Philadelphia. Auriemma was a no-name part-time assistant coach at a local high school, yet to Martelli he appeared to have every belief he belonged. “He was magnetic even back then,” Martelli says. “Like, he could hang. He had that Philadelphia edge. He was a ballbuster like all of us were. If you didn’t think you were the best, then you weren’t in second, you were not even in the running. So you had to think and carry yourself like you were the best.”

  Debbie Ryan noticed it too, right after she hired Auriemma to be her assistant women’s coach at the
University of Virginia in 1981. To that point, Auriemma’s only coaching experience was a few years as a high school assistant plus one season as a men’s assistant at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. But from the time he arrived in Charlottesville, Auriemma had a swagger that belied his résumé. “For someone as young as he was, he had an amazing vision for what he wanted to do,” Ryan says. “He never feared sticking his nose into anything. He could drop into any conversation and hold his own.”

  We see that strut today while Auriemma prowls the sidelines for UConn—hair finely combed, tie perfectly loosened, ass back, chest out, a perpetual look on his face as if he’s thinking, Can you believe how fucking dumb these people are? Underneath, however, the story is much different. Auriemma may have strutted through life like he’s the baddest dude in the gym, but his insecurities practically ooze from his pores, like olive oil soaking through a brown paper bag.

  For example, when his UConn teams started winning and the crowds swelled, Auriemma learned to hate the long walk across the floor to his team’s locker room in the opposite corner. He felt naked with all those eyes on him. He’d call over a couple of players so he would have someone to accompany him. When the school built a new arena, Auriemma told his wife, Kathy, that the best thing about the new place was that his team’s locker room was next to the bench.

  Ask Auriemma why he drives his players so hard, and he replies, “We have to win every game, because I have to prove that I can coach.” This from a man who has won eleven NCAA championships and counting.

  He doesn’t strut so he can fool the rest of us. He’s fooling himself as well. He’s also carrying a lot of guilt—Catholic guilt, no less. He knows damn well his parents never had it this good. Geno may have been teased when he was a boy, but at least he was in a safe, promising environment. When Auriemma’s mom was that age, her family sent her away to work on a farm because they couldn’t afford to feed all five kids. She had no time for school, no time for learning. Geno’s mom never learned to read or write.

  Auriemma’s father, Donato, didn’t even want to come to America in the first place. He immigrated in 1960 because he felt he had to be with his brother, who had settled in Norristown, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia. A year later, Donato sent for his wife and three children. Geno and his family left their tiny village of Montella, traveled on a boat for thirteen days, and eventually arrived in Norristown.

  Between his illiterate mom and his indifferent dad, there was no one to push Geno in school. He did just enough to get by, and then he signed his own report cards. He loved playing baseball at first, but he soon fell into basketball, and when the coach at his high school took a liking to him, Geno was all in. Sports was the one area where he felt validated. He certainly had no “game” with the ladies. “I didn’t have a car,” he says, laughing. “So where was I going?”

  Needless to say, he wasn’t making grand plans back then. He wasn’t making any plans. He was too busy helping his mom buy groceries, cash checks, pay bills. They took taxicabs to the store. He rode the city bus to school. He made a few friends, especially his teammates, but there was a part of him that felt as if he would always be an outsider. “When you’re an immigrant, you’re caught between two worlds,” he says. “You’ve got to fake it a little bit. So you develop an attitude of embracing the difference, but still trying to prove you belong.”

  By the time high school ended, Auriemma hadn’t given much thought to his future. His coach tried to persuade him to go to a four-year college and keep playing basketball. He wasn’t good enough to earn a scholarship, but maybe he could walk on at Saint Joseph’s or LaSalle, and in four years he would have a degree. Auriemma pretended to consider it, but deep down he sensed he wasn’t good enough. So he decided to go with the flow and join some buddies who were headed for a local community college. Some strutter, this guy.

  * * *

  • • •

  She first spotted him shooting hoops in an empty gym, wearing sweatpants and no shirt. He was easy on the eyes, that’s for sure. Kathy Ostler, a cheerleader at Montgomery County Community College in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, mentioned to her girlfriend that she thought the guy was cute, so her friend conspired to arrange for Geno to give her a ride home after a game. Along the way, Kathy asked what he planned to do with his life. Geno said he wanted to be a lawyer. “I thought, Oh really? We’re in community college,” Kathy says. “The quality that I first recognized in him was that he seemed a little older than other guys, a little more serious. I felt like there was texture to him, this depth that I just found really cool.”

  She directed him through her hometown of Cheltenham, a well-to-do suburb of Philly located on the Main Line. He liked what he saw. This girl was cute, she seemed cool, and she came from money. That is, until they reached her home, a tiny apartment above a drugstore next to a railroad track.

  At least they could empathize with each other. Like Geno, Kathy knew about assuming responsibilities at a young age. She also understood what it was like to have an absent father—in her case literally so, since her dad died of illness when she was a young girl. “I grew up fast,” she says. “I had a single mother, so I was really responsible in my household. I had to pay bills and start dinner. I knew how to go to the grocery store.”

  He liked her looks, her spunk, her wit, and that she wasn’t a “girly girl,” as he puts it. Even though she was raised without a father, Kathy was a big sports fan. They dated for the remainder of their time at Montgomery County and became engaged after graduation. She found a job as a teacher but was laid off before they got married. It was not an extravagant wedding, to say the least.

  Geno may have dreamed of having a law degree, but he didn’t pursue it. He didn’t pursue anything, really. Knowledge was not his thing, at least not the classroom kind. After finishing up his two years at Montgomery College, he enrolled at West Chester (Pennsylvania) University, but he dropped out a few credits shy of graduation because he had a chance to take a job as a teacher and athletic director at a local high school, and he needed the dough. (He went back and finished up his degree several years later.) Then one day a friend from college, Jim Foster, asked him to be his assistant coach for the girls’ basketball team at Bishop McDevitt High School in Harrisburg. The pay for the entire season was around $600. Auriemma thought it was a silly idea—coaching girls’ basketball?—but Foster talked him into it.

  Auriemma coached for two seasons, and he liked it more than he anticipated. Basketball was the one thing he knew something about. He had a knack for motivating those girls. He liked that they respected him. “I knew a little more than they did, and they seemed to be responding,” he says. “Whenever I showed ’em something, they thought it was pretty cool.”

  Auriemma had to leave his athletic director job to coach, so he needed another way to make ends meet. Fortunately, Kathy had a friend whose father owned a grocery store. She got Geno a job stocking shelves from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. Having found something he enjoyed doing, Auriemma rediscovered his childhood persistence. It was an odd way to begin marital life—no plans, no prospects, no real logic in place. Had he been any different, and had he married someone who didn’t think like he did, then he probably would have chucked the whole thing long beforehand. To outsiders it may have seemed foolish, but to Geno it felt authentic.

  “The breadwinner in our house was a guy stocking shelves in the supermarket so he could coach basketball in the afternoon. That’s pretty scary,” he says. “If either of us had traditional parents, they would have looked at us and said, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I mean, basketball coach? Where the hell are we going with that? The whole time I’m chasing basketball, and for no reason whatsoever. It made zero sense because it didn’t have any future to it. I’m taking all these part-time jobs so I can coach and make six hundred dollars? Like, what the hell is wrong with you? I wouldn’t recommend that as a life journey to anybody.”

 
; To Auriemma’s surprise, Foster got hired in 1978 to coach the women’s team at Saint Joseph’s. When he asked Auriemma to come with him, it was an easy call, even though it still wasn’t a full-time job and didn’t pay all that much more than the one he had at Bishop McDevitt.

  Working at Saint Joseph’s was a great experience, but the real benefit was the invitation that came with it to Cathy Rush’s basketball camp. Rush had won three national championships as the women’s coach at Immaculata University, a small private girls’ school outside of Philadelphia. Her camp presented Auriemma with a golden opportunity to learn about the game and network with local coaches. Philly was an incredible hotbed back then. Two future NBA coaches, Jack McKinney and Jim Lynam, worked at Saint Joseph’s. Paul Westhead, the future Lakers and Loyola Marymount coach, was at La Salle. The head coach at Penn was a guy named Chuck Daly. Auriemma worked alongside those guys during the day and joined them for beers at night. They dropped some serious knowledge on him.

  One of the men whom Auriemma bonded with at the camp was Phil Martelli. He had just gotten hired as the head boys’ coach at Auriemma’s old high school, Bishop Kenrick. When Martelli invited Auriemma to be his assistant in 1978, Auriemma thought he had it made. The job still didn’t pay much, but it had some cachet. He was back coaching boys, and in the hypercompetitive Philadelphia Catholic League. “I’m thinking, Okay, this is it,” Auriemma says. “I’m gonna get a teaching job in high school and coach boys’ basketball. This is gonna be my life.”

  He spent two happy years working by Martelli’s side. They were a couple of Italian Americans from Philly, busting balls, coaching hoops, having a blast. It could have gone on forever, except in the spring of 1981, Martelli got a call from Debbie Ryan, who was the head women’s coach at the University of Virginia. Ryan knew Martelli from the Cathy Rush camp, so she reached out and asked if he would be interested in coming on board as her assistant. Martelli had no desire to leave Philadelphia, but he suggested she consider Auriemma, given his experience in coaching high school girls. Once again, the notion made little sense to Geno, but Ryan persuaded him to come to Charlottesville for a visit.