And Mitch and I are good now. And Buonaguro did get another chance. There was talk that Siena could become a mid-major power like Butler or Gonzaga. McCaffrey left after the season to become head coach at Iowa.
Siena named Buonaguro as his replacement, and the Saints struggled badly, going in three seasons and never finishing higher than sixth in the MAAC.
Buonaguro, now 62, was fired. He lives in a suburb between Albany and Saratoga Springs and has done some television work. In Marbach was hired at Canisius, dragging his pregnant wife, Denise, with him, even though her CPA career was blossoming.
At that point Marbach, now 51, got off the coaching treadmill. Marbach sold real estate and did radio commentary on Siena games for five years. Since , Marbach, 61, has been working as a sales rep for Ampro Sports in Philadelphia. Lappas was the last to leave Villanova. One year after hosting his annual Final Four party in Queens, he was on the floor in Rupp Arena, hugging Massimino after the buzzer.
Then Manhattan hired him, and Lappas righted a struggling program, winning 25 games in his fourth—and final—year. When Massimino left Villanova after the season, Lappas replaced him after Pete Gillen, then coach at Xavier, turned the job down. Once like father and son, Massimino and Lappas have not spoken since. And then I took it. I had to take it. However, he won just two NCAA tournament games and left under fire after the season. He just finished a season in his third year at Massachusetts.
Others have tried unsuccessfully to bring him together with Massimino. Marty and Denise Marbach invited both Massimino and Lappas and seated them, with their wives, at the same table. That day was about our daughter. Better than 20 years ago.
In he had the joyful, expressive face of a child, and that face is still there, now covered by layers of hard living. Some of them did drugs with me. Some tell a different story now. But I never thought he had a drug addiction. Would I have bet my golf clubs that Gary McLain was using cocaine?
Well, probably. But not in a way that I could take action. McLain had not just been a rock of consistency in the championship game but also was the emotional center of the team for four years, the guy who kept bus rides alive with his sharp wit and lacerating humor. Now he was the traitor who besmirched the Cinderella story.
You have to forgive. Time heals all wounds. Many of them are on the north side of 50, when anger takes too much effort to hold. Pinckney has loaned McLain money on several occasions. He came back again four years ago, when the team was inducted, en masse, into the Villanova sports hall of fame.
The 85s remain an extraordinarily close group. This is still true. Pressley talks to Pinckney on the phone at least three times a week. Plansky and Jensen chat all the time. Everson stays in touch with everybody. Jay Wright runs a summer golf-alumni basketball tournament that brings many former Wildcats together.
McLain has yet to attend. He occasionally goes on phoning binges with old teammates and then seems to disappear. It was real. I was 22 years old, and I came hard at people.
I said things, and I paid the price for saying them. He has been divorced for six years, but his year-old daughter, Jade Alexis McLain, lives nearby in Florida and stays with McLain every other weekend.
He has worked since October for a company that places doctors in temporary positions. He says he wants to write a book about his life and perhaps to deliver his cautionary tale to kids. On Sunday mornings he plays pickup basketball on a West Palm Beach playground. The discipline. The sense of family. That was no joke. I do look back sometimes. And damn, I was a champion. McLain remains mecurial. I texted him in early March and after getting no response, called his cell phone three days later.
We can talk then. Gary was unbelievable. They all want to talk about the bad stuff. He came to the November reunion and asked to sing the National Anthem teammates say McLain has a beautiful voice, but they talked him out of performing that night , and arrived at the Villanova-Northwood game wearing a black velour tuxedo and sneakers. He will always be Giz. T he beige suits and yellow power ties have been swapped for Bermuda shorts and golf shirts.
Here he often plays 27 holes or more a day and lunches with roundball cronies like Chuck Daly and Billy Cunningham. Golden Girls meets Dr. Massimino, 69, looks healthier than the night he coached Villanova to the title, frightened into good behavior by a ministroke last spring. Massimino left coaching only last March, when he resigned after seven years at Cleveland State.
Chuck Daly died five years later at age All those years I worked from early morning until late at night while my wife raised our family. In , arranging an interview with Massimino was problematic. Finally I wrote a letter and sent it via FedEx overnight to his home in Florida. Two days later, he called me and invited me to come to Florida. During a two-hour interview he gets three calls on his cellphone, all from former players. Whether it is actual familial ties, like we saw with Ron and RJ Hunter in this year's tournament, or family in the broader sense of the word, creating that atmosphere allows to year olds to do extraordinary things, like take down the intimidating Georgetown Hoyas.
The human element of loving Cinderella stories comes from the relatability. There's nothing relatable about a demigod, and in , Patrick Ewing was about as close to one as there was in college basketball. It was much easier to root for Ed Pinckney. An All-Big East player in his own right and eventually the Most Outstanding Player in the tournament, Pinckney always got up for playing against Ewing when the two teams met on the floor. Jon Thompson and I had a wonderful relationship, still do as a matter of fact.
So it was something that was very special. People ask would you rather play St. John's than Georgetown -- it didn't really make any difference at that time.
If this was , Villanova, with a record after a loss to St. John's in the Big East tournament, would have been a bubble team with a terrific strength of schedule rating thanks to the dominance at the top of its conference. John's on a Monday or vice versa. We would play two No. There is one noticeable, but humorous difference between the way the championship is remembered by fans and the way Massimino recounts the tale.
Villanova was an incredible of from the field The fact remains, it was a perfect game to a certain point, but we still had 17 turnovers in that game. So what made the championship resonate in a way that has been different from the other great stories?
Probably because the spirit of that title team has never left the Villanova program, so we get reminders of Coach Massimino's influence every year when the Wildcats take the floor.
The players on the championship don't tire of talking about that team, that season or that game. It's special to us as fans, but it has been life-changing for the players and coaches who were a part of it, and program-changing for Villanova University. For more than 40 years, Rollie Massimino, Steve Lappas and Jay Wright have leaned on that family-first way of doing business to run the Villanova basketball program. But as you might expect, Massimino claims no ownership over the program that has clearly been built with some of the same values he he put in place decades ago.
Georgetown, the No. The Hoyas had five future NBA players. Ewing, a 7-foot center and one of the most decorated college basketball players, was a senior and looking to cap his storied career with back-to-back national championships. Villanova, which entered the tournament with a record, won its first three tournament games by a combined nine points. The title game was expected to be no different. Before the game, Villanova coach Rollie Massimino said his team would need a perfect game to win.
The Wildcats shot for from the field, including nine of 10 in the second half, and for from the free throw line. In addition to the incredibly efficient shooting, Villanova played excellent defense and deployed a wonderful game plan that got Ewing into foul trouble. The Wildcats also slowed the game. At the time, the NCAA did not have a shot clock—it added a second clock for the season.
DI Men's Basketball News WATCH: UC Riverside stuns Arizona State on the road with last-second half-court shot Men's basketball is back, and this is why we're excited 7 programs with strong cases to be college basketball's next 1st-time champion Ohio State's Zed Key scores game-winner in season opener These are the best father-son, junior-senior duos in college basketball 15 player of the year candidates to watch in men's basketball The Atlanta Tipoff Club announces the men's basketball Naismith Trophy watch list Men's NCAA tournament predictions for the Sweet 16 to the national championship Men's March Madness bracket predictions ahead of opening night Facing unusually modest expectations for Michigan State, here's Tom Izzo's strategy for Presented By.
Listen: March Madness podcast.
0コメント