DETROIT — Tell me if this sounds like a familiar tale that hits a little close to home, St. John’s fans:
This was the spring of 2001, and the once-proud, vibrant program that was the Villanova Wildcats had fallen on ambivalent times, not powerful enough to legitimately inspire visions of a deep run through the NCAA Tournament, but not awful enough that there was widespread revolution on the minds of the men who ran the athletic administration (and held the purse strings).
The Wildcats were just bad enough to be dull, but just good enough that people seemed willing to accept that their good-guy coach, Steve Lappas, should be brought back for another year, a state that someone who was there back in the day labeled as “inertia, pure and simple. It was just easier to do nothing. And so we were going to do nothing, and that didn’t seem to bother anyone.”
Well, that’s not entirely true. It did bother someone, and that someone happened to be the man who’d coached Villanova to its greatest hour. And despite the fact that he’d been gone from Villanova for nearly a decade, Rollie Massimino still carried a soft spot for the school on Philadelphia’s Main Line that had made him a star and a folk hero rolled into one disshelved ball.
So it was that in that spring of 2001, Massimino was in Florida, golfing with some Villanova people, the kind of people with large enough wallets that the priests have always thought it prudent to listen to what they had to say. And so it was, somewhere in the course of 18 sunny holes, that Massimino snuck in a very interesting question.
“You mean to tell me,” Daddy Mass asked, “that you guys are gonna sit back and let my boy whip you twice a year?”
OK. This is a good time to hit the pause button. Once upon a time, Lappas had been Massimino’s “boy,” too, a longtime assistant, but it was generally acknowledged that the two had fallen out when Lappas agreed to succeed Massimino at Villanova. By that spring, though, the strongest branch on the Massimino coaching tree belonged to Jay Wright, who had just led Hofstra to back-to-back NCAA berths, and who was hours away from signing on to coach Rutgers, and for big money.
Villanova’s money men shook their heads. What could they do? The school was committed to the status quo.
“Really?” Massimino asked.
Well . . . no, it turns out. Former Rutgers AD Bob Mulcahy once told me, “I was so sure we had him I already saw Jay in the team photo.” It was as done as a done deal could be. Except Villanova changed its mind. It seized its destiny by the shirt collars, the money men raised enough to buy out Lappas (who wasn’t out of work long, hired at Massachusetts) and suddenly Wright was being introduced as the head coach at Villanova.
And after a series of near misses that were every bit as enjoyable as they were excruciating (hard-luck losses in March sure beat playing out the string in February, after all), Villanova will play North Carolina in the Final Four in the featured game tomorrow night.
St. John’s? By all accounts, it remains ready to stand by its good-guy coach, Norm Roberts, endorsing another year of inertia, which certainly must capture the imagination of alumni, students and fans. Maybe someone should think about arranging a tee time somewhere. And fast.
