SYRACUSE — If a team is a reflection of its coach, then how should we characterize Florida?
“I think we come out, we reach back, and we
just try and go for the knockout punch, you know?” Gator point guard Teddy Dupay was saying yesterday. “You know, reach back, give you everything we’ve got. If you could take it, give us more, so be it. But, we’re definitely gonna give you everything every time out.”
It is the way Billy Donovan played, first at St. Agnes High in Rockville Centre, then at Providence College, for Rick Pitino. It is the way Donovan coaches now. They call him the Billy The Kid, because he still has that baby face and is a kid at heart at 34.
His Gators are a bunch of Bowery Boy gym rats, just like he was in those Chris Mullinesque days when he would climb through the window to get back in that gym when he didn’t have the key, only many of them are former McDonald’s All Americas.
They are young and restless and irrepressible and relentless and they play as fast as Donovan talks and they call the style BillyBall. They press you off the bus and break and never met a trey they didn’t like and wear you down physically and psychologically and today Donovan tries to get them past Oklahoma State in the NCAA East Regional championship game and into the Final Four.
And best of all, they are fearless. The kid from West Virginia, Brett Nelson, doesn’t care that he is just a freshman. He plays with an unmistakeable swagger and passion. They all do, really. It is how Donovan coaches.
It is what he recruits. Florida isn’t just a football school anymore. It is a basketball school now. New York should be proud of him. Dupay is asked for one anecdote that sums up his coach.
“I think he said something to a ref once, we were getting a couple of bad calls out there, whatever, and a guy gave a couple of cheapshots to our guy,” Dupay said. “He says to the ref, ‘One more time I’m gonna come out there and kick his [butt] myself. And we’re like, ‘Wow!’ Just kinda got us fired up, that type of thing. He’d do anything for us, he’d go to war for us. If there was some kind of fight out in the lockerroom between two teams, I’d have a hard time believing he wouldn’t be in there with us.”
When Donovan succeeded Lon Kruger, they wondered if he could recruit. You bet he can. He went to South Dakota to get Mike Miller and ruffled feathers at Kansas and Kentucky when he did. He was on the phone with Miller seconds after the NCAA-imposed midnight green light.
“When I recruit, I want to find out how much a kid loves the game, how much he wants to get better,” Donovan said. “And I think, for a lot of kids coming out of high school, with all the accolades, the publicity , the exposure, a lot of kids think they’ve arrived.
“Our guys on our team are basketball junkies. There’s so much of a premuim in recruiting put on guys handling, passing and shooting … I put the same emphasis on a guy’s love for the game. Because I don’t want to go to practice as a head coach and be around guys who’ve got long faces and don’t practice. These guys love practice.”
Pitino, Pitino, Pitino, that’s all Donovan hears. Pitino showed him how to maximize his talent at Providence. Pitino hired him as an assistant at Kentucky. Pitino gave him a cup of coffee with the Knicks. Donovan is wise enough not to resent the comparisons to one of the greats.
“When I left coach Pitino from Kentucky and went to Marshall, the first thing that I realized that I needed to do was to be myself,” Donovan said. “I had never ever tried to be coach Pitino. In my opinion, he’s one of the greatest coaches in the game.
“And I learned from one of the best, and one of the things I learned from him is you gotta be yourself. I am not him. And it doesn’t bother me one bit when people bring his name up. Because I am intelligent to understand that what he provided for me as a player and as a coach, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now. So I take it as a tremendous compliment when his name is brought up in the same breath as mine.”
What did he learn from Pitino?
“I think he’s a great listener,” Donovan said.
He raised eyebrows when he went to a 2-3 zone Friday night late against Duke. A calculated risk that worked. Pitino would have been proud.
“The other thing I learned from him is the fact he’s extremely innovative and not afraid to take risks, take chances, and do different things.”
Donovan was Pitino’s coach on the court when Providence made its magical 1987 Final Four run.
“I think if there was one thing I would take from it as a player, is I didn’t appreciate and understand what was happening,” Donovan said. “Looking back on it, I probably didn’t enjoy it and embrace the moment enough because when you look back on it you realize what a tremendous accomplishment it was. I want these guys to experience what I had a chance to experience.”
Donovan leaves no stone unturned watching film these days.
“It was much, much easier being a player,” Donovan said.
But he wouldn’t trade places with anyone. He remembers those days before coaching.
“After I got done playing I did what most New Yawkers try to do, is graduate from college and go down to Wall Street and try to make millions of dollars,” Donovan said, “and realized that I wasn’t having very much fun doing that. I was actually a stockbroker and cold-calling and picking up the phone and try to get some guy from Texas to invest money with me who had no idea what I was doing with it anyway. My dad always told me while you’re young, ‘Do what you love doing.’ Because that’s what’s gonna make you happy. All the money in the world can’t buy happiness. Do what you love.”
This. This team. These kids.
“We’ve gotta play fearless,” Donovan said. “I want our basketball team to be aggressive, to exude confidence, to play to win the game. And, we may get beat by a better team in Oklahoma State. But I’d rather have that happen than lose by saying, ‘Jeez, we played not to lose.’ “
If you know Billy The Kid, you know there is no danger of that ever happening.