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.