Melancholy Aside, Bulldogs Become Monson’s Team
He had been the head coach for maybe an hour. For Dan Monson, that was the bad news.
Not that he didn’t want the job or that he dreaded the challenge. Nothing like that. He had, either consciously or subconsciously, been preparing for this moment since he was a teenager - the moment when someone would hand him the keys to the car and allow him to decide the destination, the route and the speed.
But before it could be his moment, Dan Fitzgerald’s moment would have to pass.
Along with the regrets.
“At times like these, Jud used to say, ‘Coaching sucks,’ ” said Monson, who as a kid absorbed more than just bon mots when his dad assisted Jud Heathcote at Michigan State.
“It doesn’t. But losing does.”
Losing is the way Gonzaga University will always end its basketball season, however. And just because the end this year was quick - a 64-59 loss to San Diego in the first round of the West Coast Conference tournament - that didn’t make it painless.
Not with the shots and opportunities the Bulldogs had to win. And not with the cold-shower realization that Fitzgerald had coached his final game for GU. Monson, in fact, was ruefully second-guessing his last few seconds as an assistant.
“I didn’t help Fitz there at all,” he said. “He wanted to call a timeout and go for a 3 and the win. I said, ‘We’re down two - let’s just get a basket.’ You look back now and realize we probably couldn’t have played with them in overtime, with all the guys we had fouled out.”
Hypothetical, all of it.
It has been a season of that. When all-WCC center Paul Rogers broke his foot, the theory was that the Bulldogs wouldn’t go anywhere. When they succeeded without him, the theory evolved into fanciful expectation. And there was always the notion that fate or Irish luck would be Fitzgerald’s magic carpet.
So when the Zags lost his final home game two weeks ago and made the early exit Saturday, nobody took it harder than the man anointed 16 months ago to be Fitz’s successor.
“I just think Fitz has given so much to us personally and so much to Gonzaga that you just wanted to give him something back, and unfortunately we didn’t deliver,” Monson said.
“It just seemed like so much his type of season. All of a sudden when Paul goes out, we’re the underdogs and that’s him. He is such an underdog, us-against-the-world coach, and it was like, OK, this is right, this is how he’s supposed to go out, with the odds stacked against him a little bit.
“I think we played well for a stretch that way, but it finally caught up to us the last month or so.”
And caught up with a vengeance in the tournament.
Lorenzo Rollins was back in harness as GU’s dray horse, scoring 26 points and making virtually every big basket. Fellow seniors John Nemeth and Kevin
Williams were steadying influences off the bench. Sophomore Mike Leasure after Rogers went down the only other Zag with WCC minutes on his resume - did a veteran’s dirty work.
And the kids struggled, and staggered.
“You have to give them credit for getting to a position where they were expected to win,” Monson reasoned. “Young kids had to grow up faster than they normally would have. But now they have something to prove next year.
“In reality, this is a 15-12 team that was fifth in the league. They’ve shown signs of being physically able to play at this level; now they have to play at this level mentally. That’s the one thing we probably lacked and everybody wrote it off as youth.
Next year, that can’t be an excuse.” Next year. Next year - starting today - will contain more mystery than any Bulldogs season in a decade.
To test his market value, Rogers will in all probability declare for the NBA draft and play in the summer evaluation camps. Since he’s just now getting out of a cast, he’ll probably find it’s to his advantage to return for his senior year. But you can never gauge the NBA’s fascination with a 7-footer who can run and catch and shoot. And there are always professional offers from his native Australia to weigh.
“We’re planning on having him back,” Monson said, “but in these situations, you do what’s best for the kid.”
If he does return, there’s an issue of chemistry that must be sorted out - the redistribution of playing time and roles. Only two new recruits will join the mix - one, 6-foot-8 Casey Calvary, has already signed. And Monson will continue the Zag tradition of the walk-on farm system by awarding scholarships to three: Mark Spink, Mike Nilson and Ryan Floyd.
And, of course, there is Monson’s own transitional relationship with the players now that he’s the boss - though he insisted that “Fitz always gave so much ownership to his assistants, you always felt like the head coach.
“I still think it’s going to be a program with Fitz’s signature on it for a while,” he said. “His influence on it is not going to just go away. The longer we can keep his kind of players in the program and his competitiveness, the better off the program is going to be.”
But it will be Dan Monson’s team - and had been, by that point, for almost two hours. Good news, in a melancholy context.
, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review