Content Giacoletti facing former Utah team tonight
It’s not that Ray Giacoletti recommends being fired. Who would? It’s humiliating, insulting, devastating.
A boo echoes for a few seconds. Cleaning out your desk seems like forever, even if it isn’t.
So he will not cop to the disingenuous old spin that being hastily pushed out last March as the basketball coach the University of Utah was the best thing that could have happened to him. It wasn’t. The best thing would have had him winning more games, seeing his recruits through the program, enjoying the payoff that should come with establishing a foundation and enduring the growing pains.
Instead, he landed at Gonzaga University as an assistant, working with one of his best friends in a perennial Top 40 program, living in a community where he was already well regarded. Which appears to be the second-best thing that could have happened – except tonight.
That’s when Giacoletti’s old team comes to McCarthey Athletic Center to play his new one.
Now, Dennis Erickson has made a cottage industry out of moments like this, but for someone as self-effacing as Giacoletti it’s just awkward. That is to say, the public, gossipy aspect is awkward. The basketball part is just basketball.
Giacoletti’s part.
It seems reasonable to say that he is about the game and not so much about the role, which is why his retreat from a decade as a head coach – at Utah, Eastern Washington and North Dakota State – to his duties as an assistant has been, in the words of his friend and new boss Mark Few, “seamless.”
“For 10 years I had to answer all the questions,” said Giacoletti, who took EWU to its first and only NCAA tournament in 2004. “It’s nice to step back and work behind the scenes, especially with someone who’s not only a good friend but who I respect as much as anybody in college basketball and in a program this special.”
It’s easy enough to suggest that a man without a job takes what he can get, but this is not such a case.
In fact, a few weeks after his dismissal at Utah, Giacoletti and his wife, Kim, took a seven-day cruise to Mexico “to try to get away and figure it all out.” On the last day of the cruise, longtime Gonzaga assistant Bill Grier accepted the head coaching job at San Diego and Few called Giacoletti to offer him Grier’s old spot.
“I just wished I’d known the first day of the cruise,” he laughed.
By then he’d already said no to two opportunities to return to the game as a head coach.
“I wasn’t ready for that,” he admitted. “I knew that. Deep down, you can be honest with yourself. I had just been through the most traumatic time in my personal life. I know myself – I wasn’t ready to go have to tackle that again. That doesn’t mean this was any less of an opportunity. To me, this was the best possible situation I could hope for.”
Those who witnessed how uncomfortable it was for Few and Giacoletti to coach against one another when Gonzaga played Eastern might have wondered if their friendship would fray a bit with one of them in a subordinate role, but neither of them did.
“I’ve always had close friends on my staff,” said Few, “because the greatest thing you can have is loyalty for one another. You always know that your message – or the assistant’s message – is being backed up, and everybody’s in it together.”
Giacoletti works with GU’s big men, has assumed Grier’s emphasis on defense and, of course, will be counted on as a recruiter. He must have some chops in that area – the Utes who are 8-3 this season were all brought to Salt Lake City by Giacoletti and his staff.
“Really, I’m thrilled for those kids,” he said. “They believed in us and we believed in them, and this validates that we were headed in the right direction. Jim Boylen has done a great job with them and I’m a huge fan – except for this one night.”
Yes, they were 11-19 last year when the bulk of them were freshmen and sophomores. Two years earlier, Giacoletti had steered Utah to 29 victories and the Sweet 16, but apparently that bought him no margin for program building.
There is little point in revisiting the circumstances of his firing, except perhaps the comical insistence of athletic director Chris Hill announcing it as a resignation, as if it had been Giacoletti’s idea all along. But that’s symptomatic of the current silliness. Just the other day, San Francisco trussed up Jessie Evans’ axing as a “leave of absence.” Next a coach will be “in abeyance” or on “indefinite vacation.” You wouldn’t think educators – and they still like to gussie themselves up as such – would be so afraid of one little word.
Giacoletti certainly doesn’t dodge his part in what came to pass.
“Not to blow my own horn, but in 10 years as a head coach it was really our first losing season,” he said. “It got overwhelming. You do things to try to rectify the situation that you wouldn’t normally do when you’re under the gun. I’m not pointing fingers at anybody – it was just me. But certainly I never envisioned being fired.”
And, yes, he can envision himself as a head coach again “when the time is right.
“But it’s not my No. 1 priority. I could never have said that in the past because it was always about getting where you were going. Right now it’s about being with good people and being happy. I want to see where this all leads.”