STORRS — The clips have been seen over and over, the hollering, the gesturing and the conversation went on until it ran its course and the next thing came to dominate the news cycle.
Geno Auriemma has been famous for more than 30 years, but this was an intense “15 minutes of fame” no one would want.
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“I think most of the conversations have already been out there,” Auriemma said Monday, in his first talk with state reporters since the UConn women’s team lost to South Carolina in the NCAA semifinals, followed by his heated exchange with Gamecocks coach Dawn Staley. “And everybody certainly has had the chance to have their conversation about it.”
Auriemma planned to leave it at that, but in his 49 minute interview in the lobby of the Werth training facility, it was bound to come up again, and again. But in clearing the air here, Auriemma took what should be the last step in processing and putting the night of April 3 behind him. It will come up again when UConn and South Carolina play at Mohegan Sun next November, but for now there is a needed distance.
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“It kind of reminded me a little bit, thank God we didn’t have social media back then, but it reminded me a little bit of the Nykesha Sales thing back in the day,” Auriemma said, referencing the biggest controversy he’d been involved in before this. In 1998, after Sales suffered a season-ending knee injury, things were set up with Villanova for her to score an uncontested layup in order to break UConn’s scoring record. Auriemma was criticized worldwide for that.
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“Immediately it was the worst thing to happen to the game of basketball, to sports in general,” Auriemma recalled. “When at the time, it was really just an attack on women’s basketball, because a few years later there was a guy (Michael Strahan) who was allowed to break the sack record (in the NFL) and no one said a word. So these things that happen, you take them all with a grain of salt, understand them. For me, I’m at an age now (72), not to say you couldn’t care less what people think about you, because we’re all human beings and we all have feelings about what we did or what we could have done, what people think of you. That never goes away. But in terms of how I’m going to be viewed? I don’t give two (bleeps) about it. I did what I did, I apologized for it and moved on.”
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Auriemma has won more games and more championships, 12, than any coach in college basketball, men’s or women’s. He has lost more national semifinals (12) than any other coach, because his Huskies have reached the Final Four 25 times. Some of those have been excruciating, ended long winning streaks, came at the buzzer or in overtime.
Although UConn, defending champion, was undefeated until facing South Carolina in the Final Four, Auriemma had envisioned scenarios in which the Huskies could come up short, particularly if both Azzi Fudd and Sarah Strong had bad shooting nights. There was nowhere else to go for scoring, and South Carolina’s physical, dogged defense made for a 62-48 Gamecocks victory.
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Auriemma was angry after the third quarter, when he saw Strong’s jersey ripped, apparently not realizing she had done it herself in frustration, and there were six fouls called against UConn, none against South Carolina. He let loose to ESPN’s Holly Rowe on camera.
After the game, he and Staley argued about the pregame handshake, when there was a delay in her coming out. In the press conference afterward, Auriemma doubled down on everything, and his apology statement the next day made things worse, because he expressed his respect for South Carolina’s “staff,” not mentioning Staley by name. Eventually, they spoke, and both issued statements that put things to rest.
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“After every game, whether you’re a coach, official, player, the first thing you do is analyze what happened,” he said. “And you do things on the spur of the moment sometimes, but they usually come from things that happened and built up for quite some time. So when I walked in the locker room afterward, the coaches were shaking their heads, ‘you couldn’t hold it in for five more seconds.’ And you feel like a dumbass for the way it played out. We’re all human and we all do dumb (stuff).”
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If Auriemma’s reputation is tarnished at all, it is not likely to be more than temporary, given all he has accomplished and the caliber of team he will have, likely to be ranked in the top five going into next season.
“I’ve gone by, for as long as I can remember now, my family, my friends, the people I trust the most,” Auriemma said. “Their opinion means the most to me. Somebody’s opinion that they want to express who I have no connection to, or my connection to them is strictly transactional, they’re the same people who at the end of last year said I was the greatest coach that ever lived. I’m not sure I’m that, and I’m not sure I’m anything near what probably was said. If you don’t live in that world, which I try not to, then you try take things in stride as much as you can. … Maybe some of (the criticism) was warranted, and maybe some of it was, people have been lying in the weeds waiting for that moment. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done for the game, it’s what you just did. That’s the world we live in today, and it’s often one-sided. The people who knew what it was all about and understood it in a different light, they weren’t going to go on the air and say it, because now they’re going against the major internet or media frenzy.”
That’s where this chapter closes, a chapter Auriemma would like to close permanently. Now, it’s on to getting Sarah Strong necessary offseason rest and recovery time, for assimilating the incoming freshmen, for getting the long list of returning players to return for next season, the type of tasks on which his reputation was built.
