Amid spotlight of being No. 1, Geno Auriemma relishes quiet time alone

Originally published January 21, 2000.

STORRS, Conn. - For Donato Auriemma, a Norristown factory worker who made cinder blocks and candy and never learned English, life's highs and lows took place behind closed doors.

Whenever the Italian immigrant's eyes got moist - at weddings, funerals or on the night his son's basketball team won a national championship - he excused himself. Men worked. Earned. Disciplined. They did not cry.

"My father," said Geno Auriemma, the University of Connecticut's women's basketball coach, "was in the bathroom for a lot of life's great moments. "

And though Donato Auriemma's son has an NCAA championship trophy on his desk and a photo of him with President Clinton on an office wall, he too finds the need to retreat to the quiet side of a closed door.

"The more attention this team gets, the more uncomfortable I am. I retreat into here a little more," Auriemma said as he wolfed down pasta and vegetables in his office last week, just hours before his No. 1 Huskies walloped West Virginia to go 13-0.

"Phil [Martelli, the St. Joseph's men's coach who is a close friend] knows the janitor, the cleaning woman, everybody in his building. I wish I could be like that. When I was younger and first got the job here, I tried really hard to be like that. And I was for a while. But as things grew and grew, I found myself hiding in my office more. "

Trim and wavy-haired at 45, with a swagger and accent that betray his Philadelphia-area roots, Auriemma ought to be riding the Husky-mania wave that has washed over this compact state like a blue-and-white tsunami in the last decade. Four days earlier, Connecticut had thumped Tennessee in Knoxville.

Instead, he seems to be watching it all from a distance. Happy with his team's excellence (the unbeaten Huskies are once again atop the polls) and happy with his own success (a 210-16 record over the last 6 1/2 seasons and a $248,000 salary that is supplemented by camp and Nike money), Auriemma wishes that he, like the Wizard of Oz, could do it all from behind a curtain.

"I remember coming back from Minneapolis [after Connecticut's 35-0 season in 1994-95 concluded with a national championship]," he said. "The first thing I asked our [athletic director] on the plane was, 'Is there any way we can do what we just did and not have to deal with what's coming next? ' And he said, 'No, I'm sorry. '

"There's a price to pay," Auriemma said. "You go to your kids' games and wear a baseball hat and hope no one recognizes you. You go shopping to buy a book and everybody wants to talk about last night's game. People want to give you all this money to do commercials. I've got a TV show, a radio show. All of a sudden you say, 'Wait a minute, this can't be right. There's too much going on. ' "

The pressure to win and sell tickets has grown like the game itself in women's basketball. When Auriemma arrived in Storrs in 1985, Connecticut's women had never been to an NCAA tourney and drew a few hundred fans to their games. Now they sell out Gampel Pavilion with fans who don't understand - or accept - losses.

"In Oklahoma last month, a guy said, 'Don't you guys ever have a bad year? ' I said we did. And he said, 'What's a bad year in Connecticut? ' I said, 'If we don't win the national championship, that's a bad year. ' You laugh, but that's the way it is. It's like coaching the Yankees. "

So, whatever happens now, with the possible exception of winning another national title this spring when the Women's Final Four takes place in his beloved Philadelphia, it's not going to measure up to those Friday nights when Auriemma was a boys' basketball assistant to Martelli at his alma mater, Norristown's old Bishop Kenrick High School.

Then, after Kenrick's games, the two of them, with $10 or $20 in their wallets, would go out for beer and steamers at the Glass Rack bar. They'd talk about basketball and life. Go home broke and happy. And no one ever interrupted for an autograph.

"It was the most fun I ever remember," he said. "You don't want to go back to those days . . . but now, with all this craziness up here, you hope that you can kind of hold on to those memories. It's kind of what keeps me going when you lose to Tennessee and everyone is going to have a heart attack and you have to answer questions about what's wrong with your team for two weeks. Guys like [Villanova women's coach] Harry Perretta look at me and think one of two things. It's either, 'Boy, he's got it made. ' Or, 'Man I wouldn't want that life. ' "

Auriemma wrestles constantly with that dilemma. There are days when he is convinced he is the luckiest man in America, coaching a dominant team that has remained scandal-free.

But there are other days, like this one, when the opponent is a pushover and he clearly is in conflict with himself. The postgame beer and steamers have been replaced by more demands and more questions.

During 14-plus seasons in this rocky and remote New England town, Auriemma has turned a team that perennially finished last in the Big East into a national powerhouse. His teams have won nine Big East titles, made three Final Four trips and captured the NCAA title in '95. His overall record is 373-94. And 78 of those losses came before the '93-94 season.

He has done it by being tough, foul-mouthed, brusque and unconcerned with his critics, many of them female coaches who dislike his harsh tactics and are convinced that he looks down his nose at them. He thumbed that same nose at tradition in 1998 when, during a game at Villanova, he and Perretta contrived a way for injured Huskies star Nykesha Sales to reach a scoring milestone.

"I've never really been politically correct," he said. "I've gotten in trouble for some things, but I really don't give a [hoot]. A lot of women that coach women's basketball approach it like it's women's basketball. I don't. I approach it like it's basketball. I make the same demands of my players as if I were coaching men. I don't compromise one bit.

"I get all kind of horses- letters. You yell too much. You do this and that. ' That's because the girls are nice and smile a lot and they're pretty. They don't know what a pain in the butt they are to coach. They're 18 19, 20, and you treat them as such. I've been lucky. I get the kind of kids that want to be treated that way. "

And he and Jim Calhoun, the coach of Connecticut's defending national champion men's basketball team - whom Auriemma, nodding his head toward Calhoun's adjacent office, called the "problem next door" - have, at best, a strained relationship.

This weekend, before his 16-0 Huskies play at Villanova tomorrow, Auriemma will take his team to South Philly for cheesesteaks and a visit to his cousin's Ninth Street cheese shop. He still refers reverently to past Big Five coaches, and gets goose bumps recalling the first time he brought a team into the Palestra.

"He talks about Philly all the time. It's Philly this and Philly that," said AnnMarie Person, UConn's assistant director of athletic communications.

Auriemma remains at heart a Philadelphian. He is cocky, loquacious, street-smart and, most of all, convinced that good fortune is only a temporary condition. As secure as any coach in the nation, he can't always shake the fear that a single loss might leave him unemployed.

"I used to think I had to win every game to prove I can coach," he said. "If I lost a game, it meant I can't coach. That's from Philly. Philly coaches think they can take four donkeys and win the Kentucky Derby.

"Philly teams were always big underdogs. You had people coming into the Palestra strutting their [stuff], and these guys would find a way to knock them off. But then you go and watch the ACC, watch Duke and North Carolina, and you realize that it's about the players. So while I've moved away from that winning-all-the-time stuff, a part of me still believes it. "

Donato Auriemma, who brought his wife and 7-year-old son here from Montella, Italy, in 1961, worked tirelessly in America - first at a Conshohocken candy plant and then at a cinder-block manufacturer in Norristown. But he never took a paycheck for granted.

"My father came up when I bought my second house here [in Manchester, Conn.]," recalled Auriemma. "He looked around the big place and he said, 'How you going to pay for all this? ' I said, 'What do you mean? I get paid. ' And he said, 'What happens if there are no more games? ' "

He has helped make UConn the poster child for women's athletics. Huskies attendance for the last six years is the nation's best, though Tennessee has moved into a bigger arena and has been drawing bigger numbers recently. TV and radio ratings for the women's games are phenomenal in Connecticut. When the Huskies played the Vols, the Nielsen rating for the game in the Hartford area was nearly twice as high as that for the NFL playoff game between Washington and Detroit.

The team's graduation rate is 100 percent, and a whole new generation of girls has grown up with pictures of Huskies stars, such as Sales and Rebecca Lobo, on their bedroom walls.

Yet for all that success, Auriemma still believes he'll never be as good as his high school coach at Kenrick, Buddy Gardler.

"I wanted to be like him," Auriemma said of Gardler, now coaching at Cardinal O'Hara. "I wanted to teach like him. I wanted to be looked at the way we looked at him. He played for [Jack] Ramsay. He played at St. Joe's. It was like, 'You're God. And you're teaching us to play basketball?' "

* Auriemma had been born Luigi Auriemma in Montella, near Naples, in 1954.

When he was 7, his parents emigrated to join relatives working at Alan Wood Steel in the Conshohocken area.

"My mother tells me there was one basketball hoop in our little town in Italy and that when I was little I would go there and watch them play," he said.

The Auriemmas moved in with relatives across the street from Lincoln Elementary School. Geno played basketball on the playground, but it was baseball that captivated him immediately.

It wasn't until his sophomore year at Kenrick that he made the basketball team. And at his very first practice with Gardler, something clicked.

"I got hooked on basketball right then," he said. "It really hit me that this was something I really enjoyed. I understood what Buddy was teaching us. I could see what he was trying to do. "

As a player, a guard, he was borderline Big Five material.

"Paul Westhead was at La Salle and Jack McKinney was at St. Joe's. They said I could play freshman there, but there was no guarantee I'd make the varsity," Auriemma said. "I thought to myself, 'I'm not good enough to play at those places. ' Now if my parents had spoken English and gone to high school and college here, they probably would have said, 'Look, we don't care if you play or not, if you have a chance to go to those schools, you're going. ' "

Auriemma knew he could play at nearby Montgomery County Community College. He met his wife, Kathy, there, worked at a number of jobs, and eventually transferred to West Chester.

It was then, in the mid-1970s, when an old Kenrick teammate, Jim Foster, telephoned him.

"He was at Temple, and out of the blue he calls and says, 'Hey, I'm coaching the girls at Bishop McDevitt. You want to help me?' " said Auriemma. "I said, 'No way. I wouldn't coach girls for all the money in the world. ' When I was at Kenrick, we wouldn't even let the girls on the court. "

Foster finally convinced him. Auriemma had grown up with his own preconceptions of what girls could and couldn't do athletically. But he determined from the start that he would teach them just as Gardler had coached the boys. Twenty-five years later, he still does.

"Obviously, their skill levels are very different from men," he said. "Sometimes we'll run a play perfectly and the kid will hit the bottom of the rim with a layup. And I'll say, 'If I was coaching guys, that would have been a dunk. '

"But deep down inside, and that's what people don't get, these women want what the guys want. They want to be challenged. They want to be pushed. They want to be told, 'This is right; this is wrong. ' They would be offended if you said to a guy, 'That's unacceptable,' but said to them, 'That's OK, I understand. We're going to do it a little different for you because I don't want you to break a nail. ' "

After two years at McDevitt, Foster, now Vanderbilt's coach, got the St. Joseph's women's job and brought Auriemma along. The only problem was his salary. He was making $1,000 a year.

"I said, 'This isn't going anywhere. I've got to get a real job,' " he recalled.

By 1979, Gardler had left Kenrick for O'Hara and Martelli had replaced him.

He hired Auriemma as his assistant.

"I thought, 'Wow, what a break. I'm coaching boys at my old high school. This is it. Down the road, I'm going to be Jimmy Lynam.' . . . They were two of the best years of my life. Playing in those little gyms. Riding the buses back from Bishop Egan or some God-forsaken place. . . . But eventually, I saw that the teachers there made only $15,000 a year. "

Martelli worked at the summer camps of Immaculata's Cathy Rush, one of the pioneers of women's basketball. The best college coaches attended. In 1981, Martelli told Auriemma that Virginia coach Debbie Ryan was looking for a full-time assistant.

"I thought, 'Man, I don't want to go that women's route again. ' But I went down and looked. It was my first time out of Philly. I thought all colleges looked like Temple or St. Joe's. Then I saw that beautiful campus. They had Ralph Sampson and their men were No. 1 in the country. I said, 'Holy s-! ' And I signed on the spot. "

He spent four years there and had a couple of offers that didn't work out. In 1985, having heard of the opening through the Philadelphia coaching network, Auriemma interviewed to replace Connecticut's Jean Balthaser, who had had four straight nine-win seasons.

"I know I wasn't their first choice, but I got the job in May," he said. "We won our first seven games, and I thought, 'Here we go. ' Then we lost like nine straight. "

He recruited Kerry Bascom, and things improved. The Huskies made their first NCAA appearance in 1989. By 1991, Bascom's senior season, they reached the Final Four and were playing in a new arena.

"We averaged maybe 800 to 1,000 people," he said. "Then that November, we signed Rebecca Lobo, the number-one prospect in the country. Now, all of a sudden, everybody loves us. We're the darlings. Our attendance goes up to 3,000 a game. In her junior year, we beat Auburn at Auburn and beat Virginia here. All hell broke loose. From that day on, the games have been on TV and you can't get a ticket. "

Connecticut's women's games attract a far different crowd than the Huskies men - families and thousands of young girls.

"There's only one group of people our game hasn't captured," said Auriemma. "The 21-to-30-year-old single guy who wants to go to dinner with three buddies, drink a couple of beers, go to the game and [curse] the ref. We haven't captured the guy who spits on Charles Barkley. And that's the guy the other sports are aimed at. But we've got everyone else. "

If Auriemma sounds defensive, he is. He knows that for all its growth and success, women's basketball continues to be viewed as a second-rate freak show by many. That animosity surfaced after the Sales incident.

Sales had suffered a career-ending injury two points shy of Bascom's Connecticut scoring record. She was one of her coach's favorites, and Auriemma sought a solution. Comfortable with Perretta, he called the Villanova coach a few days before their Feb. 24 game there.

"The funny thing was, before I could ask Harry, he said to me, 'How can we do this?' " said Auriemma.

They agreed that the injured Sales and a Villanova player would exchange uncontested baskets at the start of the game. The reaction was immediate and furious. Critics blasted him for tampering with the integrity of the game and further trivializing women's sports.

"You had guys who had never watched a women's game in their lives saying I was screwing with the game," said Auriemma, whose father had died earlier that season. "After the kid made the basket, the 4,000 people in the place went crazy, standing on their feet and cheering. Then we picked up the papers and read how we were real [jerks] for acting that way.

"It was like, 'Here's our chance to take a shot at women's basketball. They think they're so hot, so clean, so cute. They're good students, they don't have the problems the men do, the money, the agents. We can't have this. ' So a lot of guys living in caves came out. "

Now, with the advent of the WNBA, and the realization among college administrators that women's sports can make money, the women's game seems to be losing its innocence. (Connecticut's women's basketball team generated a $2 million profit in 1998-99, Auriemma said. )

"It's sad," he said. "Women's coaches are demanding the same pay as men, and they're being put under the same pressures. They get fired if they don't win. So to save your job, you pull a few strings here and there, admit a kid you wouldn't have before.

"We're dealing with some things the men's game has suffered through," he said. "And a lot of these women, they want to be like the men. That's the worst thing that could ever happen. The men are the men. If you try to be like them, there's no reason to watch because you can't be that good. Stay unique. Carve out a little niche for yourselves. "

Last year, when the Connecticut men won the NCAA title, the testy relationship between Auriemma and Calhoun bobbed to the surface. Calhoun preferred not to discuss it, but people in Storrs insist he and Auriemma wage a constant fight for the spotlight. And Auriemma felt the men's coach ignored him.

"I've got a problem next door, but everybody has one of those," said Auriemma. "You could trade him for something worse. I was spoiled because I had Jimmy Lynam [at St. Joe's] and Terry Holland [at Virginia]. Guys that took you on their charter, took you out to dinner. "

Auriemma insists he has no desire to make the move to the men's game or the WNBA, where he has been an analyst on telecasts. The only thing that could drive him away, he said, was if the mounting pressure spiraled out of control.

Until then, he'll close the door to his office whenever possible and daydream.

"You know what my dream job would be?" he asked, rising from his chair and preparing to do his TV and radio shows. "If, when my kids [two teenage daughters and a son in fifth grade] are older, Martelli wins the Atlantic Ten and the NCAA title and gets the Sixers job. I'd like to be his assistant.

"I wouldn't scout or travel. I'd just go to practice every day and work with the guys. I'd have come full circle. That would be ideal."