Preview: Embrace the Madness Book

Embrace the Madness

A Journey Through UConn’s Championship Run and the Unforgettable Moments of the 2022–23 College Basketball Season

Purdue’s Zach Edey is making the most of his turn: ‘He’s a moose’

PORTLAND, Ore. — As Purdue’s photo op broke apart and players jogged off the floor to end a celebration, Zach Edey lingered on the PK85 logo at midcourt. He grinned a little. Like he’d planned for the possibility no one thought possible. Then the 7-foot-4 junior took a big step forward to get the full attention of a man in a black suit still standing there. And, from way on high, Edey pointed to his feet.

Or, more specifically, his pair of Nike Zoom Rise 2s. Size 20 schooners. Old reliables, looking beat to all hell. Edey doesn’t care much for fancy footwear. He just knows what he likes, and humans of his proportions tend to get attached to things that are actually comfortable to wear. Which brought Edey to his point, as the man in the suit’s eyes again met his own.

“I heard they stopped making these,” Edey told Phil Knight, the co-founder and chairman emeritus of Nike. “I need to get more.”

A little before 3 p.m. Pacific Time on Nov. 27, 2022, if you’re marking the moment the biggest man in college

basketball went bigger than anyone can imagine.

“He was right there,” Edey explained not long after he and No. 24 Purdue issued a 75-56 stomping to No. 8 Duke for the PK Legacy title, as he walked back to the locker room down to only black socks on his lower extremities. “I’m gonna ask him, hey, if you guys have any stockpile of size 20 in my shoes, send them my way. I would really appreciate them.”

And why not? At this point, it appears the Boilermakers’ go-to guy can get whatever he wants, after he used this event to clamp his waffle-iron hands on the Year of the Big in men’s college hoops. It was a talking point going into the season that did not necessarily always include the supersized Canadian doing work in West Lafayette, which was somewhat understandable, if only because he’d spent two years in a timeshare at his own position. But it is a discussion that starts with him now. He has outperformed, or gone straight through, everyone else in front of him in line. It’s Zach Edey’s turn.

A 21-point, 12-rebound, foul-everyDuke-big-out game on Sunday. A 23point, seven-board, three-block game to stifle Gonzaga and Drew Timme two nights previous. More broadly, adding about 10 minutes per night to his 2021–22 workload and ensuring there’s little effect to his production: from 30.3 points and

16.2 rebounds per 40 minutes as a sophomore to 29.7 points and 16.3 rebounds per 40 as a junior, going into the PK Legacy final. The weight of expectation heaped upon an already ponderous 285-pound frame, slowing him down not at all.

Pick a side in this, and you’re bound to find a stat or metric to support your cause. We’ll go with this one: There is indeed a big man atop the KenPom.com player of the year ratings as of Sunday night. It is not Timme. It is not Oscar Tshiebwe. It is not Armando Bacot, Hunter Dickinson or any of the other skyscrapers scattered across rosters nationwide.

Edey stands above them all.

“I noticed for sure,” he told The Athletic on Sunday, when asked if he felt left out of the big-man hype before the season. “I don’t really care, though. End of the day, what the media says about you doesn’t mean anything on the court. You go on the court, you have to prove it every single time. What they say about me now still doesn’t matter. I still have to go on the court to play hard, to hustle. The media talking about you isn’t going to get you points. Scoring the ball gets you points. Playing hard gets you rebounds. It doesn’t really matter how people perceive you. You just have to go and put the work in.”

Being 7-4 has its benefits — “He’s a hard guy to prepare for,” Duke coach Jon Scheyer said, “because there’s nobody

else like him” — but anyone shrugging off Edey’s success as simply a function of his frame is being hilariously reductive. The presence of Trevion Williams for the past two years necessitated the split workload at center. But Purdue coach Matt Painter always insisted Edey was athletic and conditioned enough, even at his size, to put in 30 minutes a night. And he’s averaging 29.8 this season, showing no signs of wear and tear. Edey also has the highest usage rate of any rotation regular while he’s on the floor, and his turnover percentage (11.8 percent) was at a career-low going into the Duke game. It only got better during it: In 32 minutes on Sunday, with Purdue playing through its big man out of both the high and low posts, Edey had zero turnovers against three assists. He’s also committed two or fewer fouls in four of Purdue’s six games; on Sunday, he got whistled just once while drawing eight fouls on the Blue Devils. Edey knows what he means to this group and doesn’t clumsily put Purdue at a disadvantage each night.

In short: big player. Big basketball brain, too, maximizing playing time that’s not doled out in four-minute increments. “I’m allowed to get into more of my rhythm, play through some of my mistakes,” Edey said. “It helps me get in the flow of the game really well.”

Edey is not going to step out beyond

BRIAN HAMILTON • NOV. 27, 2022

OPPOSITE: Purdue center Zach Edey (15) dunks over Duke center Dereck Lively II, center, and center Ryan Young, left, during the first half of an NCAA college basketball game in the Phil Knight Legacy Championship in Portland, Ore., Nov. 27, 2022. CRAIG MITCHELLDYER / ASSOCIATED PRESS

UConn means something. This is how Dan Hurley made it matter again

BRENDAN QUINN • JAN. 10, 2023

STORRS, Conn. — People of a certain age speak of UConn basketball a certain way. The great UConn teams of the 1990s and early 2000s were their own thing, shouldering their way onstage with bluebloods and winning national titles at a rate they couldn’t keep up with. Tom Wolfe once wrote that the Beatles want to hold your hand, but the Rolling Stones want to burn down your town. That’s basically UConn hoops. Programs like Duke, Kentucky, Kansas and Michigan State have their little Champions Classic. But the Huskies’ four national titles since 1999 outpace ’em all.

Dan Hurley is most definitely of a certain age and of a certain bend. He turns 50 next week. He’s from the Northeast, born to a world where Big East basketball was sovereign. Georgetown, Syracuse, St. John’s, Seton Hall and Villanova reigned. That is, until Jim Calhoun showed up out of nowhere, dragging a former agricultural college from the backwoods of Connecticut into the fray.

Hurley speaks of UConn’s young ghosts like a lot of us do.

“I mean, Donyell? Ray? Rip? C’mon, man,” he says.

Today, Hurley can comfortably revisit the past because his current team looks the part. The Huskies are 15-2, back in the top 10, back in the Big East championship mix, and it feels right. That last part may sound abstract, but it’s true. Two recent road trips to Xavier and rival Providence amounted to certifiably big games for the home teams. In turn, UConn found out what it means to be “back.” They were dealt both teams’ best shots and fell in back-to-back losses. Winning on the road ain’t easy in the Big East, especially when you’re the top target.

It’s been a long time since UConn could say that. But this is what restorations look like. Shave it down to the splinters. Then bring it back.

Two weeks ago, Villanova visited for a game at XL Center, the aging concrete bowl in downtown Hartford where UConn is required by the state to play nine games a year. During that day’s afternoon shootaround, Hurley reminded his Huskies that ’Nova has ruled the Big East for most of the last decade and still carries championship DNA. “Beat it out of them,” he said. The whole scene, to any college hoops purist, was unmistakably romantic.

seen it like this in years!” The Huskies did their part, out-toughing Villanova, winning in a slog, and improving to 14-0. A sold-out crowd cheered, then refilled the barstools at Rocking Horse and The Tavern, and everywhere else with a row of draft handles.

In Connecticut, what’s good for UConn is good for everyone.

It was all very different last year. UConn beat Villanova at XL Center in February 2022, and students rushed the court. The Wildcats were good (they eventually reached the Final Four), but on that day were only ranked No. 8 in the AP poll and fell to 21-7. For a program of Connecticut’s stature, the celebration was … unbecoming. “Afterward, we were all kinda like, man, really, they’re storming the court?” remembers assistant coach Luke Murray.

over Villanova was the program’s first top-10 win in eight years.

“Now that I think of it,” says Jordan Hawkins, a UConn sophomore and the Huskies’ second-leading scorer, “my dad was more excited when I got the UConn (scholarship) offer than I was. To him, UConn was like the Dukes and the North Carolinas. I didn’t know all that.”

OPPOSITE: Connecticut men’s coach Dan Hurley speaks to reporters during First Night events for the UConn men’s and women’s NCAA college basketball teams, Oct. 14, 2022, in Storrs, Conn.

JESSICA HILL / ASSOCIATED PRESS

Later that night, the streets around XL Center buzzed. Crowds stuffed into bar doorways hours before tipoff. A line formed outside Rocking Horse Saloon. At The Tavern Downtown, a distressed manager near the host stand blurted: “Haven’t

But let’s look at it from the students’ perspective, no? They are not of a certain age. They’ve never heard of the 1989–90 “Dream Season.” They weren’t born when Donyell Marshall or Ray Allen or Rip Hamilton played. They didn’t see the ’99 championship. They were toddlers when Emeka Okafor and Ben Gordon did their thing in 2004. They were in middle school when Kemba Walker penned the 2011 storybook. They weren’t yet in high school when coach Kevin Ollie and star Shabazz Napier cut down nets in 2014.

A lot of that might feel recent. But it’s not. Not really, at least.

For those students, last year’s victory

From the 2014 championship through the 2019–20 season, once-mighty UConn posted a 110-90 record with one NCAA Tournament appearance. It got tagged with NCAA sanctions. It languished through an intense, messy divorce with one of its own (Kevin Ollie, ’95). It wandered an island of misfit toys, playing a string of ridiculous seasons in the mishmash American Athletic Conference. It hired Hurley in 2018, pinning the future to a 45-year-old with an eminent last name, but a questionable bedside manner. It wisely returned to the Big East in 2020 (sending its football program, instead, into the abyss of independent FBS status), and a gradual return to basketball relevance followed. Hurley brought the Huskies to the 2021 NCAA Tournament as a No. 7 seed, then to the 2022 NCAA Tournament as a 5 seed.

Now it’s 2023.

UConn arrived at New Year’s Eve at 14-0 and ranked No. 2 nationally before falling at Xavier. Afterward, coach Sean Miller, a Big East player at Pittsburgh in the 1980s, called it a huge win for his Muskies and

Gonzaga, Drew Timme and a program legend who always shows up in March Madness

BRIAN HAMILTON • MARCH 20, 2023

DENVER — It’s 10:41 p.m. and Drew Timme says he needs a hot tub. There is, of course, no hot tub in the locker room at Ball Arena. There is no possibility of a hot tub anywhere. But there is also no guardrail separating what Gonzaga’s star feels and what he says, and this is how he feels at the end of a long day. Jacuzzi-ish.

Timme then pauses and bends over to unlace his Nikes. As he does so, he makes a sound. It’s something between an idling diesel engine and a death rattle. Once his kicks are off and dumped in an equipment bag, he’s upright again, though not without some work, too.

“Man, I’m getting old,” Timme declares, and then it’s a short walk to a folding chair he wipes down, before sitting and smiling like it’s a reward. Another night of making history, another NCAA Tournament Sweet 16 appearance earned by his team, another full immersion in our undeniable college basketball reality. This is still Drew Timme’s world. It will stay that way until someone tears this world away from him.

An 84-81 win over TCU is no exception, before and during and after. Timme finishes with 28 points, eight rebounds and three assists on a night when the

opposition is faster and meaner for an uncomfortably long time, evoking another not-long-ago postseason meeting with a different Big 12 program that ended poorly for the Zags. But Timme is Gonzaga’s way through and out and over. The numbers make him the seventh player, ever, to score 20 or more points in nine NCAA Tournament games. “When we need him the most,” Zags forward Anton Watson says, “he shows up.”

And, as ever, the numbers are the least fun thing about it.

He plays a team filled with guys he knows from high school hoops, and hears it loud and clear when one of them — one of his buddies, actually — says it won’t be anything overwhelmingly new for TCU to deal with a big like Timme. He says he thought TCU was, as he puts it, a “highly educated school.” “I definitely took exception to that,” he says. “A bunch of those guys beat me in high school as well. They just had better teams. I was already pissed off, and I was like, this is my chance to get my lick back.”

He takes over when no one else can hit a shot consistently, scoring 11 first-half points to keep his team above water, and in the second half he hits what is maybe the shot of the game: a 3-pointer with the shot clock running down, of all things. It is his third made 3 of the season. He strokes his mustache as he backpedals to the defensive end. “He still wasn’t

supposed to shoot that 3,” Zags coach Mark Few says after the game, “but that’s what makes him good, is he does it anyway every once in a while.”

Timme checks out of the game with 32 seconds left and waves to the crowd to encourage their adulation. He leaps in the air in unison with Hunter Sallis as the sophomore guard punches in a dunk that punctuates the win. He does a postgame interview on live television and drops an F-bomb. He hugs his mom and his dad. He runs off the floor with a big, goofy smile and high-fives all the cheerleaders making a tunnel for his exit.

He walks into the locker room and wonders if someone can find him a hot tub.

“That’s what it takes to win,” Timme says, sitting at his locker stall, down to a tank top and compression shorts. “You gotta put it all on the line. You can’t save yourself for the next round, because there could be no next round. It’s ballsout, pedal-to-the-metal, every time. It’s never over until it’s over.”

This is the interesting part. Timme has coarse edges, because he has to. His skill is self-evident, but his raw physical gifts are, we’ll say, less so. They’re probably even coarser now, when every night can be his last in this uniform.

This Gonzaga team, meanwhile, is now living on coarse edges, too. It wore out Grand Canyon in the first round as much as it out-talented the Lopes. It

shuddered when TCU started out with a speed and general meanness that evoked Baylor in the 2021 national championship game, and then it regrouped, holding the Horned Frogs without a field goal for a four-minute stretch and outrebounding the Horned Frogs by six after halftime. “They were trying to punk us in the first half, kind of like Baylor did,” Watson says. “We’re not the type of dudes that just take that.”

Each player on the roster, subsumed into the collective, designed by a guy in a headband. “Sometimes it takes a while to figure out how to fight,” Timme says after his team figures that out once again and reaches the Sweet 16 for the eighth straight time. Gonzaga has the standard Gonzaga talent. It also has an asperity to it, and a belief that things are going to work out. It lives in a world curated by a 6-foot-10 Texan, consuming all the other worlds in its way until someone does something about it.

And until someone does something about it, Drew Timme’s college career will live for another night, and maybe another one of those 3-pointers that turns everyone into believers, like it or not.

“All you can do is smile and laugh,” Timme says about that one shot Sunday, and he certainly is not leaving the rest of the world much choice.

OPPOSITE: Gonzaga forward Drew Timme in the second half of a second-round game in NCAA Tournament, March 19, 2023, in Denver.

DAVID ZALUBOWSKI / ASSOCIATED PRESS

UConn, Dan Hurley are in the Final Four, 30 years after he almost quit basketball

BRENDAN QUINN • MARCH 27, 2023

LAS VEGAS — They met at Dohoney’s, a local bar owned by one of Bob Hurley Sr.’s oldest friends in Jersey City, N.J. Danny Hurley, the younger of Bob’s two sons, asked Seton Hall basketball’s three primary beat writers to meet him there. Danny sat in the back, waited for them to arrive. One by one, they filled the table — John Rowe from The Bergen Record, Mike Amsel from the Asbury Park Press, and Tom Luicci from The Newark Star-Ledger.

Immediately, Danny leveled with them. He hated basketball.

And he was done with it.

The three writers sat stunned, staring back at the 20-year-old. Then they scribbled this all down. Danny was under too much pressure. Couldn’t do it anymore. Being Bob Hurley Sr.’s son was too hard. Being Bobby Hurley’s brother was even harder. The Seton Hall fans were too much. The ones who booed during supposed home games at the Meadowlands. The ones who wanted their own version of Bobby — the Duke star — but instead got Danny, the other Hurley. He wasn’t good enough for them, and they let him know it. Bob Sr., the patriarch of both

the family and New Jersey basketball, attending every game alongside wife Chris, seethed, needing to be talked out of confronting fans and popping ’em. But it wasn’t as if road games were that much better. Opposing fans could be even worse. Chants of, “You’re not Bob-by!”

Danny laid it all on the table, telling the writers he was broken. He said he was drinking too much, partying too much, chasing coping mechanisms. He explained why he was taking a personal leave of absence from Seton Hall basketball. A seismic decision, unheard of in 1993. Luicci, the last remaining of the three Seton Hall writers there that day, remembers: “He said he needed time to think. He was brutally honest with us.” So that was it. The end, potentially, of Dan Hurley’s basketball life.

“I wanted nothing to do with it,” he says, sitting here today. “When I took the leave, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever play again. I locked myself in my dorm room for like two days. No one could get at me, no one could find me. F—, man, I didn’t want to play. I didn’t even want to watch it.”

He thinks about when he told the world he hated basketball, and says: “When you’re from Jersey City, and your dad is tough as nails, and your brother is tough as nails, and everyone in your neighborhood is tough as nails — for me, I needed to show some vulnerability. I didn’t have a lot of people I could open up to. I felt like I needed to tell people I was hurting, that I was in a bad way.”

On the other side of the wall, the 2022–23 Connecticut men’s basketball team is packing its bags for a flight back to Storrs. It will be a brief visit home. This group, a ruthless combination of offense and defense, just pulverized Gonzaga, what was thought to be a challenger. Now, it’s off to Houston, off to the Huskies’ sixth Final Four since 1999, but first since 2014. Hurley was hired in March 2018 to fix the place and has done it. For a man wired by a preoccupation with self-deprecation, the moment marks a long-sought validation. He might not come out and say that this is a fulfillment of his lineage, but his wife will.

Sweet 16. The top button of Savino’s dress shirt was undone, the knot on his necktie pulled down. He felt terrible for his guys, but also …

“I’m just so happy for Danny,” Savino said, remembering UConn rolled over Arkansas in the night’s opening game.

Savino grew up on the same block as the Hurleys in Jersey City. He’s as close to being the third Hurley brother as is possible — same age as Bobby, two years older than Danny. The three did everything together, running the streets, playing stickball, punchball, kickball, basketball. Bobby and Danny could usually be found on the front steps of White Eagle Hall, the former bingo parlor that served as St. Anthony High School’s gym, either waiting to go in or because Bob Sr. just threw them out.

DAVID BECKER / ASSOCIATED PRESS

It’s a little after 10 p.m. local time in Las Vegas, 30 years later, and Dan is in a side room attached to a locker room in T-Mobile Arena. He’s wearing suit pants, a UConn basketball T-shirt and an NCAA Tournament West Regional champions hat. From this seat, he can see it all. He sees where he was, he sees where he is. He sees who he is.

“Surreal,” Andrea Hurley says at midcourt, confetti stuck to her shoes. “He’s just fought and fought and fought. He’s wanted to prove that he’s legit.”

He just had to do it in his own way.

UCLA assistant Darren Savino paced around a bathroom late Thursday night, fighting mixed emotions. His Bruins fell to Gonzaga in the West Regional semifinal, ending a promising season in the

St. Anthony, a life raft for those who needed it in Jersey City, operated with an enrollment under 500, sometimes with fewer than 200 boys. A Catholic school with 10 classrooms, no gym, and tutoring in an outside trailer. Gym classes were held at the Jersey City Boys and Girls Club, eight blocks from the school.

From here, you likely know, Bob Sr. coached the Friars to a 1,185-125 record, 28 state titles, four national championships and a place in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. He is perhaps the greatest high school coach in basketball history.

And from here, you also likely know, Bobby Hurley went from being a 5-foot-1,

OPPOSITE: UConn head coach Dan Hurley celebrates after cutting down the net following the 82-54 win against Gonzaga of an Elite Eight game in the West Region final of the NCAA Tournament, March 25, 2023, in Las Vegas.

UConn, San Diego State for the NCAA Tournament title started with 2 dreamers

DANA O’NEIL • APRIL 3, 2023

HOUSTON — One used to send his manager out with six minutes left in a game to fetch Jack in the Box — 30 Jumbo Jacks burgers and as many chicken sandwiches, to be exact — so the players would have a postgame meal to eat. The other repeatedly had to explain to residents outside of his tiny state borders that, no, his team was not in the Yukon territory. One school hung its hopes on a beautiful new arena, believing if they built it, they would come; the other played in a place so leaky that, when a recruit came to town, assistant coaches hastily hid the buckets used to catch the water dripping from the ceiling.

San Diego State and Connecticut today seem entirely at odds, disparate in the tinge of their blood and the depth of their success. Until 10 days ago, the Aztecs had never made it out of a Sweet 16, let alone played for a national title. UConn is vying for its fifth championship and making its sixth Final Four appearance.

But in reality, these two programs are more alike than they are dissimilar, each erected on a foundation built by the

singular stubborn hopefulness of one man. Steve Fisher eyed a campus steps away from the Pacific Ocean with a tepid basketball history and believed he could make it a winner. Jim Calhoun moved into a state school plopped in the middle of a cow patch, with a basketball program that enjoyed regional success at best, and bulldozed it into a national brand.

On Monday when their pet projects go head to head with a national title on the line, the two coaches will be relegated to elder statesmen spectators. Fisher, who retired in 2017, will be watching from the stands. Calhoun, who intended to be in Houston before a virus fouled up his plans, stepped away in 2012.

Don’t misunderstand, though. This national title game matchup wouldn’t happen without either of them.

The current Connecticut head coach, the one reared across the river from New York and the belly of the Big East in New Jersey, raised in a family where basketball conversation is passed around with the rolls at the dinner table, remembers watching Chris Mullin and Pearl Washington and Patrick Ewing. He does not remember Connecticut. “I didn’t think much about them,” Dan Hurley says. “I’m not even sure I knew they were in the Big East.”

It is yet another opposites attract in this national title game; just like no one seems

to remember that San Diego State has been pretty good for a long time (the Aztecs have won three of the last four Mountain West regular-season crowns and have made 10 of the last 13 NCAA Tournaments), everyone’s forgotten that Connecticut was an afterthought once. Understandably it’s a hard memory to flame, the sepia tone of the early-year struggles glazed over by the blinding glitter of success. But in 1979, when Dave Gavitt was piecemealing together his soon-to-be colossus Big East, “Nobody wanted UConn,” former Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese says. The school didn’t fit the private, Catholic profile but more, it didn’t resonate. Successful in the small-time Yankee Conference, the Huskies lacked the panache of everyone else invited to the conference and had Father John Brooks, the president of Holy Cross, accepted Gavitt’s invitation, who knows if UConn would have made the final cut.

Recognizing the reluctance, Gavitt gave UConn athletic director John Toner three days to decide if they were in or out; Toner said yes immediately, without even consulting his administration, figuring it was best to ask forgiveness later than permission up front and risk delaying the decision. “If we hadn’t joined the league, we’d be Vermont,” Calhoun says now. “A good program, steady, successful but not at all what we are now.”

The league, however, did not immediately imbue the Huskies with relevance. Instead it ate them alive. By 1985, while St. John’s, Georgetown and Villanova were going to the Final Four, UConn was 6-10 in the conference and the subject of a 20-person university task force investigation that questioned the athletic department’s attachment to the rest of the school. “The Northwestern of the Big East,” people snickered in print about the Huskies, convinced the ill-fitting school would never be more than a drag on the league’s reputation. Coach Dom Perno resigned, and the school sought a coach that could match the rigors of the new conference.

They found Calhoun, a fast-talking Southie from Boston who stoked his reputation on rebuilding, first at Dedham High School and later at Northeastern. But not quite the same as rowing against the likes of John Thompson Jr., Jim Boeheim and Lou Carnesecca. “We were not ready basketball wise,” Calhoun says. “At that time, Manhattan had a better program, But we had some history, and people loved basketball. It was just very parochial.” So much so that, when Calhoun tried to recruit outside of the state or tell people about it, they’d hear ‘UConn Huskies,’ and think “Yukon Huskies.” “People thought we were in Alaska,” Calhoun says.

OPPOSITE: San Diego State coach Steve Fisher, lower center, talks to his team during a timeout in the second half of the game against New Mexico in Albuquerque, N.M., March 4, 2017. New Mexico won 64-59. JUAN ANTONIO LABRECHE / ASSOCIATED PRESS

Adama Sanogo is now a UConn legend — and has the national championship ball to prove it

BRIAN HAMILTON • APRIL 4, 2023

HOUSTON — As the next great UConn big man ascended Monday night, bound for a net half-dangling off the NRG Stadium’s north rim, Emeka Okafor paused and held out a hand. The kid from Mali who was a soccer player until he was 15, who didn’t even want to come to America at first, cutting his strand of nylon as midnight struck back east. The ballast for a national champion. The NCAA Tournament’s most outstanding player. Everything the Huskies needed, whenever they needed it.

A sight that defied description. So a gesture had to do.

Adama Sanogo’s moment arrived, and would you look at that?

“Every team needs a dominant big,” Okafor told The Athletic, hovering near the fringes of a celebration with a handful of other program greats on hand for the occasion. “When your team has a dominant big, that team does well. And he’s a testament to that.”

One man standing at the end of the Year of the Big, a fourth double-double in six NCAA Tournament games making a final argument none of the others survived long enough in this tournament to match — while also vaulting Sanogo

into the company he’d aimed to keep ever since Okafor visited Storrs over the summer, providing a living and breathing roadmap to who UConn’s center of the present wanted to be. “He’s obviously cemented himself into the pantheon of greatest,” Huskies coach Dan Hurley said. “To have the national championship

a souvenir.

As his teammates hugged each other, the 6-foot-9 junior wrapped his arms around that basketball. One more part of this month and this event that Sanogo completely owned. “I needed that ball,” he said, though as the net-cutting continued, it had mysteriously disappeared

not simply in what Sanogo does but rather when he does it and how it moors an entire operation. “It takes a lot of weight off our shoulders,” Huskies guard Jordan Hawkins said. “If we just really need a bucket, really bad, we just give him the ball. We’re really lucky to have a guy like that.”

Monday was no different. The Huskies were determined to punish San Diego State early near the basket, and Sanogo delivered by making his first three shots — one as a shoe fell off, it should be noted. He was a plus-11 overall in the first half. His putback of a Tristen Newton miss, meanwhile, ended a 9-0 run by the Aztecs in the second half. He clambered in for an offensive rebound with a little more than two minutes left, getting fouled by a fallen Matt Bradley and sinking two free throws to extend the lead to a more or less impervious 14 points.

DAVID

just puts him in that position in one of the most storied programs in college basketball. He’s an all-time great.”

No wonder Sanogo bounced on his toes as time wound down on a 76-59 win over San Diego State, anxious to fulfill dreams big and small at the horn. This was a small one: A day earlier, Sanogo visualized a fifth national championship for his school and, in turn, securing the game ball for posterity. So the clock ran down and walk-on guard Andrew Hurley spiked the orb on the floor, and Sanogo leaped from the bench area to chase after

from his possession. “That’s a ball I want to save for my kids, my grandkids. I needed that ball. I’m definitely keeping it. Definitely.”

The numbers are the numbers: 19.7 points and 11.7 rebounds per night in the NCAA Tournament, making 50 of the 75 shots he attempted from the floor in this event, capping the run with three straight double-doubles in the Elite Eight and Final Four. A sledgehammer to the wall until it crumbled.

Still, UConn might argue there’s a bit of nuance to it. The significance, to them, is

A 240-pound sigh with the ball in his hands. “Just his presence alone set the standard for the team,” Okafor said. “You could see: Everybody looked to go to him. They establish him, and when he’s established, the team flourishes.”

Okafor would know, having been that same force 19 springs prior and now watching as another iteration repeated the steps in his hometown.

He’d come through Storrs in the offseason to catch a glimpse of a promising roster and, naturally, connect with the group and talk about what’s required to

OPPOSITE: Connecticut forward Adama Sanogo celebrates after their win against San Diego State in the men’s national championship game in the NCAA Tournament on April 3, 2023, in Houston.

J. PHILLIP / ASSOCIATED PRESS

“When your team has a dominant big, that team does well. And he’s a testament to that.”

UCONN ALUM EMEKA OKAFOR (’04 NCAA CHAMP, NBA PLAYER)

ABOVE: Connecticut celebrates with the NCAA national championship trophy after their win against San Diego State on April 3, 2023, in Houston. DAVID J. PHILLIP / ASSOCIATED PRESS

OPPOSITE: Connecticut players celebrate after the national championship game against San Diego State in the NCAA Tournament on April 3, 2023, in Houston.

BRYNN ANDERSON / ASSOCIATED PRESS

UConn’s national title turns the Hurley legacy from legendary to mythical

BRENDAN QUINN • APRIL 4, 2023

HOUSTON — It was roughly 24 hours before the 2023 men’s national championship game when Bob Hurley Sr., wearing a faded maroon St. Anthony High School hat, started at the beginning. Ellis Island. Late 1890s. That’s when both sides of his family, the O’Briens and Hurleys, came ashore from Cork, Ireland. Penniless, all of ’em. They settled in what amounted to an Irish tent city, before packing up and moving to St. Patrick’s parish in The Junction section of Jersey City, over by what is now Liberty State Park Station. The family grew, time moved forward, and Robert Hurley, the youngest of six boys, entered the world. In 1947, he had a son of his own — Bob. Robert was more of a baseball fan, but his son gravitated toward basketball.

“Working-class people,” Bob says. “My recollection of all these people coming up is everyone coming home on the bus with a newspaper wrapped up under their arm. They’d get home, then go to work the next day. World War II veterans. Everyone smoked.”

That, if you were wondering, is how the Hurleys got here.

But how did they get here, you ask? To this moment? To Dan, Bob’s youngest son, and Andrew, Dan’s youngest son, walking together across midcourt in front of 72,000 people? To Dan, with his arm slung over his son’s shoulder, saying, “Oh, look, look, look!” and pointing to a massive scoreboard as the opening keys are played to “One Shinning Moment” are played? To the Hurley family having its place in basketball lore expanded from legendary to … something else. Maybe, mythical?

To Connecticut 76, San Diego State 59, and the Huskies’ fifth national title since 1999?

Then Pete Gillen called. The old Notre Dame assistant coach was on his way to Cincinnati, taking the head coaching job at Xavier, a small, modestly successful program in the Midwestern Collegiate Conference. Gillen wanted Hurley to join him.

“It was my first college head coaching job, and I wanted to shoot for the moon,” Gillen says 38 years later. “Bob was going to be my top assistant and in charge of the defense.”

promoted to JV coach the next year, and then, in 1972, at age 25, to varsity coach. That same year he accepted a job with the Jersey City Probation Department.

OPPOSITE: Bob Hurley, center, head coach of the St. Anthony High School boys’ basketball team, talks to his players in the locker room during halftime of a game against St. Mary’s, Feb. 2, 2011, in Jersey City, N.J. St. Anthony won the game 76-46, giving Hurley his 1,000 career coaching victory. JULIO CORTEZ / ASSOCIATED PRESS

Well, that’s another story. And it starts with Bob. And a small Catholic high school operated by the Felician Sisters. And the decisions to stay. And it ends with a legacy. Our world, this basketball world, would be a different place if it had spun a few degrees differently in August 1985. There was Bob Hurley, a 38-year-old father of three splitting time as both a Jersey City, N.J., probation officer and a wildly successful boy’s high school basketball coach at St. Anthony High School, a small college preparatory school operated by the Catholic Archdiocese of Newark. Every day was impossibly long. Practices scheduled around probation visits. Home, kids, sleep, alarm, do it all over. The team practiced at White Eagle Hall, a repurposed bingo parlor with no water fountain.

Gillen thought Hurley might actually do it. He’d recruited David Rivers, a St. Anthony star, to play at Notre Dame the previous year. It was a huge deal back in Jersey City. A St. Anthony kid? Going to Notre Dame? Few could believe it. Rivers backed it up by averaging 16 points per game as a freshman in 1984–85 and led the Irish to the NCAA Tournament. That prompted Xavier to hire Gillen.

Hurley trusted Gillen. Gillen trusted Hurley. That’s what it’d take to pry Hurley away from Jersey City. The man was raised from its pews and comfortable on its concrete.

Hurley went to St. Paul’s Grammar School in the Greenville section of Jersey City. He went to Saint Peter’s Prep, an allboy Jesuit high school in Jersey City, then to Saint Peter’s College, roughly 2 miles away. He got his coaching start at the CYO level in his home parish of St. Paul’s, then took over as freshman team coach at St. Anthony, about 5 miles away. He was

Hurley’s coaching quickly grew into lore. He won 10 state championships in his first 14 years. College coaches began journeying like pilgrims to recruit Hurley’s players. More than that, they came to sneak a peek at his genius and steal whatever wasn’t bolted down. They’d whisper behind their hands, wonder why he was at a tiny school in a hardknock town.

“Everyone would show up at White Eagle Hall, watch Bob take the chairs down and put the chairs back up, watch him work and say, hey, this guy is a great coach,” Gillen says.

While visiting Xavier, Bob and his wife, Christine, were presented with the possibility of a different life. No more splitting time as a probation officer. No more jumping over all the hurdles that St. Anthony presented.

“He would’ve had a pretty good life,” Gillen says. “We couldn’t offer a fortune, but it would have been better. All he’d have to do was coach. Do something he loved. Be a coach.”

Bob and Chris spent a weekend in the city. They met with Gillen, sat with some school officials. Xavier was poised to be pretty good (it ended up going 25-5). Rather quickly, the Hurleys were looking into schools and picking up real estate