A Challenge Only Few Could Handle
There is a radio station in Honolulu which has Mark Few on its “A” list of interview subjects. Half a dozen times since he became Gonzaga’s head coach last summer - and again this week - Few has been a favorite on-air guest.
Why Honolulu? Why a largely unknown rookie head coach?
Why not?
Possibly there is a Hawaii native on some dusty old Bulldogs roster, though one does not come readily to mind. Possibly there is a knot of loyal GU alumni on the islands glued to their transistors for midday updates from the coach. The Bulldogs did play there in December, though it did not go down as one of the season’s highlights.
But we forget that it wasn’t just Spokane and Washington which fell in love with the Bulldogs last March, and generally at least once each day a radio guy in Honolulu or Hannibal or Lake Havasu City reminds Mark Few of that.
“What did I learn this year?” Few mused. “That I probably shouldn’t have given my home number to so many people.”
The Bulldogs are back at Prince Charming’s shindig this week, having arrived mostly on the Casey Calvary’s broad back, Matt Santangelo’s heady steering and Richie Frahm’s bursts of brilliance. It is exactly what everybody expected as an encore to the Elite Eight phenomenon of 1999 - heck, as they presumed and demanded, no questions asked.
Mark Few didn’t make a 3 or play any D to get the Zags back in the NCAA Tournament, but all along he has been this team’s most curious dynamic, if only for the things that could have happened but didn’t.
For we know from being sports fans that Mark Few - the new guy who had been part of the journey all along - was going to be judged on how badly he screwed it up.
And though he never did, there were a few times when he felt the razor’s edge of that judgment.
“I remember sitting in the room at the University Inn in Moscow, waiting to play Idaho right after New Year’s,” he said. “Here we were, not even in the conference yet, and it seemed like a do-or-die game.”
That’s right, the Idaho game. Not Cincinnati or Temple or UCLA. The Zags had just come back from Hawaii, having lost back-to-back games against Oregon and Colorado - postseason teams both of them - by blowing second-half leads. Axel Dench was out of the lineup with a calf pull; Ryan Floyd’s hamstring limited his minutes.
The Vandals were none too good this season, but at that point, the Zags were in something of a survival mode.
“You could almost see it slipping away,” Few admitted, “but our guys pulled together as they always seem to do.”
Then there would be the loss at home to San Diego - not just a loss, a spanking - in which whatever was left of the veneer of invulnerability was stripped away.
“That was the low moment,” Few said. “Losing at home up here is like losing a loved one. This fog sets in over Gotham City. And it always seems to happen in the next-to-last game here, when all the relatives are in town. You lose and nobody talks to anybody at home, everybody steers clear of me and has to tiptoe around.”
This is the fallacy Few tries to defuse - that he takes the setbacks any harder now than he did as an assistant to Dan Fitzgerald and Dan Monson.
“People ask me if it’s that much sweeter getting (to the NCAAs) as the head coach,” he said. “Heck, it felt great last year. The only way it’s sweeter is that it was just so much harder to do this year, based on the way we set the bar - and how hard we set up this season.”
Indeed, the eight teams GU lost to this year have an aggregate record of 173-71. Four are in the NCAAs, two in the NIT - and the two staying home only won 39 games between them. By comparison, the six teams which victimized GU last year before the tournament won 114 games.
But, in part, that’s why so many eyes were on Few.
The Bulldogs themselves were a proven commodity, for the most part, with only two - albeit two significant - pieces missing from Elite Eight team. The only rookie of note was the coach, though he already had a decade invested in the program. If he seemed close to the edge - and three losses in a stretch of four games can put you there - it was understandable.
“You just don’t have a margin for error at a Gonzaga,” he said. “I’m looking at teams in the bigger conferences that lose 11 games and still get a No. 7 seed. Wisconsin loses 14. Here, you can’t slip up many times.
“You don’t have to be perfect, but you have to be darn close.”
Compounding the possibilities for stress, of course, was the arrival of Austin James Few on Jan. 18, Mark and Marcy Few’s first child who proved himself the most clutch of players by accelerating his delivery so as not to interrupt Dad’s business trip to Saint Mary’s and San Diego a few days later.
First-time fatherhood can be a frantic proposition. For Few, it has been “a perspective-giver.
“Marriage did that, too,” he said. “When I was the third assistant here and single, all you do is live and die basketball. Life is pretty shallow. I’d walk out of this place at 6 a.m. after watching film all night. I’d feel horrible because we lost and I had nothing else to identify with.
“Now, an hour or two with A.J. puts it all straight.”
Coaching gets to be a beauty contest in some respects, and possibly even more so when a program goes through three head coaches in the space of four years the way Gonzaga has. How Few stacks up against Fitzgerald, who built the program, and Monson, who in two years took it to unprecedented heights, is at this point both premature and irrelevant.
In fact, draining as this year has been, it will not be his biggest challenge.
That will come next year when the five seniors who have been the nucleus of the most successful stretch of basketball in GU history are gone, and an entirely retooled backcourt takes over. Names like Dan Dickau, Germayne Forbes, Blake Stepp - all should be fine players. But …
“But I’ve been penciling in Cal Ripken Jr. and Ken Griffey Jr. in the lineup card all year,” Few acknowledged. “Night in and night out, I’ve got the two best guards on the floor - and, at worst in the biggest games, a push. I’ve prepared myself for the change - but I don’t know if I’ll really be prepared.”
Something suggests he will. He was obviously prepared for this one.