Calhoun's Time

For all Jim Calhoun is, Hasheem Thabeet, Connecticut's seemingly two-story tall center, needs just one marvelously apt word to size up what the coach means to this Final Four team.

"We call him teacher," Thabeet said. "He's taught us a lot. When you watch us in practice, it's always hard and we used to hate it, but now we know why the practice was hard. He's prepared us so well for his postseason play and all we can right now is thank him."

Generally speaking, one word covers Calhoun's impact about as well as a tube top would cover your average offensive lineman. Calhoun is a New England institution, somewhere between Bickford's and Bird. He built a basketball dynasty out of snowy ruins and joined the exclusive fraternity of coaches with two national titles. On the sideline, his expressions run as foul and unpredictable as the region's weather. And when he speaks in that Boston-drenched accent, you half expect the man to belch out those old tokens for the T.

But Thabeet is right.

Teacher should be on the man's business card, or Calhoun should be on the front of the team's jerseys, one way or the other. Because these Huskies are a team built tough and taught tough in the image of a coach whose father died when he was 15, who worked as a grave digger to support his family before climbing his way up the coaching ladder.

This is his team. Maybe in a way none before it ever has.

And this should be his last.

For Calhoun, all the lessons are taught to this club. It will never get better than this.

Even the coach must know it, beneath the dour expressions and the business-first, last and only, demeanor. After his win over Purdue in the Sweet 16, the eighth of his career in that round, Calhoun admitted he got goose bumps. Needless to say, cast-iron guys like Calhoun typically get loose bolts or missing rivets, not goosebumps.

"When I said it to them, we are playing Saturday in the regional finals, I get goose bumps and I did," Calhoun said after the win. "There is only one or two better feelings."

Calhoun, of course, has earned the right to stay so long as he can find his way to the bench. Entering his third Final Four, he remains as gifted on the sideline as he is on the recruiting trail. But his 67th birthday will come little more than a month from championship Monday and building title teams isn't something that can be completed like a fantasy sports roster. This team he now leads into the Final Four took three years to build and is an all out ground-up job. Connecticut missed the postseason altogether in 2007 and hadn't won a single postseason game, conference or otherwise, until its opening round win over Chattanooga.

All along, the coaching veteran of 37 years understood just how precarious a path the road to the Final Four can be and how likely it was that he may have cut his final net.

"Did it cross my mind?" Calhoun asked after his Elite Eight win. "Did I leave the season with my head down a little bit? Yeah. A tad bit. Just like had we made the right judgments on some of the young kids we had."

Add another three years onto Calhoun to season another Final Four quality team and the coach will be brushing 70 before he has a chance to return to this level, no young age for any coach this side of Joe Paterno, particularly one who has suffered through as much medical misfortune as Calhoun. Even then, there are no guarantees. In 2006, Calhoun led a team that produced five draft picks that June, only to watch a group plagued by distraction fall to Cinderella George Mason.

"They probably had a lot of other agenda going on with so many pros on that team," said senior A.J. Price.

There are no great records for Calhoun to break that he doesn't already own. He may join the group of coaches with three national titles, a club that includes Mike Krzyzewski and Bob Knight, but he likely won't catch Adolph Rupp (four) and certainly not John Wooden (10). And should he win three national titles in three Final Four appearances, Calhoun would encase his reputation as the premiere big game coach of his era in lucite. Krzyzewski, by comparison, has 10 Final Fours for three national titles; North Carolina's Roy Williams has completed six Final Fours with a single title.



The all-time wins record, 902 by Knight, could be attainable, but by the time Calhoun reaches the mark, it will likely have been eclipsed by Krzyzewski, who is 28 wins ahead and nearly five years his junior, assuming Knight himself doesn't come out of retirement and move the bar higher. Nor will he catch Krzyzewski, Wooden or North Carolina's Dean Smith in Final Four appearances.

And Calhoun has the opportunity, for the moment at least, to go out to applause, something few coaches of his success and longevity have the fortune to do. Among coaches with 780 or more wins, only Smith retired still at the pinnacle of the program he built, saying farewell months after eclipsing Rupp's win record on the way to his 11th Final Four. Arizona's Lute Olson left the Wildcats in an unfortunate mess, far removed from his 1997 national championship while Kentucky's Baron of the Bluegrass was sidelined by the state's mandatory retirement age six years removed from his last Final Four. Meanwhile, coaches like Knight, Lou Henson, Lefty Driesell and Eddie Sutton all ended coaching in relative basketball backwaters. Imagining Calhoun on San Francisco's bench, as Sutton was to win his 800th game, is like thinking about Superman wearing green.

Meanwhile, the distant thunder can already be heard from the recruiting scandal unearthed by Yahoo! last week. Should trouble spread beyond former assistant Tom Moore, the school could be forced to part ways with the coach anyway. And if NCAA sanctions don't strike the Huskies, then Calhoun can leave the cupboard stocked with another talented recruiting class, much like Smith did for longtime assistant Bill Guthridge.

And will a Connecticut institution like Calhoun ever really leave the school anymore than Smith left North Carolina?

But above all, there is this team, a 17-player testament to Calhoun's coaching and the bred-in-Boston toughness of its coach. Does anyone even remember Pitt's DeJuan Blair flipping Thabeet over his back? Could that soft label Connecticut began with seem further away when Stanley Robinson, who spent the first semester suspended and working in a scrap metal yard, bounces another post player off with his double-wide frame like they were a tennis ball in basketball jersey?

This team is unquestionably tough, fitting of the best remaining team from a mixed martial basketball league that plays hoops like they've got shoulderpads under their jerseys. And like his previous championship teams, when the coach is at his toughest, so are the Huskies. Calhoun has missed NCAA tournament games three times in his career, in 1999, 2004 and this year. That's two national titles and this intimidator of team now.

"We are just mentally tough," Jeff Adrien said. "It starts with our coach. ... We have been through a lot of ups and downs in our lives and everything. We just know how to block it off."

And that could well be the first paragraph of Calhoun's biography or the first paragraph of his farewell address.

It's hard to imagine that sideline without Calhoun, like it is to imagine Duke without Krzyzewski or the Yankees deciding pinstripes are passe. It's hard to think what the Huskies will be like without the coach and those famous perplexed looks, hands up in the air and face suggesting that he just asked his players to add two and two only to get back a chant of five. Calhoun is his program. Yet should he leave now, he'll leave a program crafted perfectly in his image.

But everyone ages, Hall of Famers and teams alike. As this Husky team goes, so should its coach.

Tough and triumphant. Just the way Calhoun taught.