'The hurt's always greater than the happy'
The glory and agony of March Madness: What it's like to win -- and lose -- on a last-second shot
If you enjoy this newsletter, please consider recommending it to others and becoming a paid subscriber. You’ll get dispatches about travel, adventure and #dadlife that will sometimes be heartfelt and profound, sometimes peel back modern parenting life for a look inside, and sometimes be, well, whatever this is. If you support my work, I would appreciate it.
This is from my archive. But it’s appropriate to run it now, in the midst of March Madness. None of the truths contained in here have changed. Two quick asides about this story.
I asked a very famous coach a question about “protocol” after a last-second shot, and he gave an answer that was dismissive enough that one of my writer friends sought me out after to say it’s not you it’s him.
I was supposed to turn this story in the month I moved from Charlotte back to St. Louis. Only when the editor asked where it was, long after the original deadline, did I realize I had completely forgotten to write it (though I had all the reporting done). That had never happened before, and it has never happened since, and it will never happen again.
What it’s like to watch a last-second shot float through the air and pray like hell that it goes in … or doesn’t
Villanova coach Jay Wright talks to himself when every shot is in the air. He says, “bang,” as the ball reaches the goal, as if perhaps that little word will entice a shot that would otherwise clang away to instead drop through the hoop.
And so it was, as his Villanova Wildcats beat the North Carolina Tar Heels for the 2016 national championship on Kris Jenkins’s incredible, mind-blowing, remember-where-you-were buzzer-beater, the only visible reaction Wright gave was that simple word: Bang.
He didn’t yell it or scream it, and truth be told, it’s not entirely clear whether he said it out loud or just mouthed it. Nobody would have even known about “bang” if his reaction weren’t so closely scrutinized in search of something that could be called, “reaction.” Other than saying “bang,” Wright had zero reaction to one of the biggest shots not just in Villanova basketball history but in all of college basketball history.
Video of Wright’s (non-)reaction blew up on social media, as these things do, and it stands as a polar opposite to the “other” infamous coach reaction to a national championship game-winning shot. North Carolina State coach Jim Valvano ran around looking for someone to hug after his Wolfpack stunned the Houston Cougars in 1983 on a last second dunk by Lorenzo Charles. Wright didn’t so much as shrug.
Wright will never see anybody hit a more important shot in his career and his reaction was so non-reactive that even Wright himself was curious to see what he didn’t do, namely go crazy. “I can’t wait to see that look because I was just shocked,” Wright said during the trophy presentation after the game.
No word on what his reaction to his non-reaction was.
---
If you think your heart hits your throat when a last-second shot is in the air, imagine what it’s like to be a coach in those situations. Now, to be sure, only a handful of coaches have ever watched as their own national championship hangs on a single shot. But just about every coach, at just about every level, can recall, with not all that much fondness, waiting an eternity as the clock strikes zero and the ball is still in its way, spinning, spinning, spinning, endlessly spinning, on a journey to the rim that never seems to end.
Jeff Van Gundy, the former coach and commentator, offered perhaps the best description of a coach awaiting his fate. As the ball sails toward the rim, Van Gundy says, all the guy in the suit can think is, “I’m a good coach, I’m a bad coach, I’m a good coach, I’m a bad coach, I’m a good coach, I’m a bad coach, I’m …”
Maryland head coach Mark Turgeon laments the exquisite agony of waiting, helplessly, to see the result. “That’s a scary deal, when that ball is in the air, and you’re up 1. It seems like it’s in absolute slow motion, and you can read the letters on the ball.”
As North Carolina coach Roy Williams put it after the title game: “The difference between winning and losing in college basketball is so small. The difference in your feelings is so large.”
Which is more powerful—the joy of the win or the pain of the loss? Notre Dame’s Mike Brey said each causes “equal emotional stress. I would need to see my therapist on both.”
For most coaches, though, the session would last longer after a loss. “The hurt’s always greater than the happy,” Turgeon said, echoing a commonly held (but not universal) opinion. A look at Williams’s face after the loss to Villanova supports that notion.
“I think it's the nature of coaches,” Turgeon says. “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to enjoy the wins almost as much as I hate the losses. You get a win, you enjoy it for about three hours, then you go right into the next game, and you start worrying about that one. If you get a loss, you never stop worrying about that loss. You don’t forget about that loss until you win the next game.”
Turgeon said the worst loss of his career came on a season-ending last-second shot. He was the head coach at Wichita State, and it was senior night. If the Shockers won, they would go on to the NCAA tournament. If they lost, they would go home. They were up by two, and Northern Iowa’s Ben Jacobson hit a three-pointer as time expired.
Immediately after the game, Turgeon told reporters, “This is no fun right now. This hurts more than I can express.”
On his ride home, Turgeon was still in the anger stage of grief. “You’re talking to God. OK. Really? What did I do? We didn’t deserve this. Wichita State didn't deserve this. We have good kids.”
It’s been 11 years, and Turgeon still hasn’t reached the acceptance stage. He sounds just as heartbroken now as he did then: “I’ll never get over that loss.”
---
Wright’s explanation for his lack of reaction goes like this: As the ball was in the air, he started thinking not about winning the national championship but about what defense the team would have to run if the ball went in. He thought, as the ball left Jenkins’s hands, that there would be enough time for North Carolina to inbound the ball and heave a desperation shot.
“I’m the adult,” he said. “I got all these 18- and 22-year-olds around me. They’re going to go crazy, and I'm going to have to get them gathered up here, and we're going to have to defend a play with .7 seconds. That's what I was thinking.”
So the reason Wright did not get excited about winning the national championship is that he did not, in fact, know that he had won it. But even if he had known, it’s unlikely that he would have run around the NRG Stadium court in Houston like Valvano ran around The Pit in Albuquerque, New Mexico. That would violate an unwritten code among coaches.
Every coach has a last-second loss that haunts him … though none so bad as Williams has now. Watching the shot, Williams said, “I pretty much knew it was going in. It was helpless. It was not a good feeling.”
After the shot, Williams put his hands on his knees and stared at the floor. But he didn’t linger. He immediately stood up and started walking toward Wright to congratulate him. Shock doesn’t begin to adequately describe the look on his face, but it’s as good a place as any to start.
“Before they determined that shot was good,” Wright said, “Roy came right up to me and said, ‘I'm really disappointed for our guys, that was a great game, but I’m really happy for you.’”
That’s PhD level class on Williams’s part. But no matter the game, no matter the level, nobody ever wants to have to make that walk, express that comment, have that look on their face. And as much as coaches want to win, within the tight-knit coaching fraternity, there exists a desire to not make somebody else’s last-second loss any worse than it already is.
“I think you need to be yourself,” said Clemson head coach Brad Brownell. “If you win, you need to be gracious. You don’t need to show up anybody else. I’ve been the guy of agony, too.”
About that agony: When Brownell was at UNC Wilmington 13 years ago, his team got knocked out of the NCAA tournament on a buzzer beater that “brought me to my knees,” as he put it. It’s much worse to lose that way than to lose by, say, eight, “especially if you had the lead,” Brownell says. “You feel like it’s yours, and it was taken away from you.”
Even in a loss, Brownell says he has to compose himself and walk off the court with dignity because he knows he’s being watched—by his players, by fans in the stands and by the TV camera.
Which is not to say every coach plays the stoic with the game on the line. “If the ball’s in the air, I’m certainly not sitting in my seat. If the camera was on me, they’d see a lot of different gyrations,” Brey says. But after the shot—make or miss—Brey tries to play it classy and cool. He walks directly over to the opponent, looks him in the eye, and congratulates him (or accepts congratulations).
“We’ve all been trained as coaches, quick celebration, go shake the other guy’s hand. We’ve been on that side of it, too. If you miss it, get to the guy who missed the shot, to make sure his psyche is OK. I’m probably grabbing him going off the floor going, ‘Hey, we're running the same thing in two nights, so your ass better take it.’”
Just don’t expect the coach to go crazy, make or miss.