Passion for Victory That Knew No Bounds

This was back in the spring of 1990, almost a decade before jim won the first of three national championships at Connecticut, the state university in the middle of nowhere that he helped turn into quite the destination on the college basketball map of the United States. Behind the blue curtain that separated the postgame interview area from the locker room pathway, Calhoun was holding court with well-wishers, making a mole hill out of a miracle.

“It can be done, damn right it can be done, don’t tell me about the clock because you catch, turn, boom, .5 seconds,” he said, reliving the buzzer-beating jumper tate george had just made to send Connecticut into the regional final against Duke in East Rutherford, N.J., a few miles from George’s Newark roots.

And when George appeared with a couple of teammates — including Scott Burrell, who had made the perfect length-of-the-floor pass from out of bounds with one second left and the Huskies down a point — Calhoun thrust a finger in his senior guard’s chest.

“Listen, they’re going to ask you if you think you stole one,” Calhoun said. “You say: ‘This is a good basketball team. We still had a second.’ ”

Time enough, in fact, to execute in the blink of an eye against all odds and, in effect, for what Calhoun had prepared them to do. First and foremost, college basketball is a coach-dominated sport and, already 48 but with a long, credentialed coaching life ahead of him, here was Calhoun in all his combative and controlling glory, right down to orchestrating the hero’s postgame explanation.

It takes a huge commitment to achieve what Calhoun did, basically from scratch, at Connecticut, along with a tenacity bordering on obsession. For 26 years of a 40-year career, through three bouts with cancer, and other afflictions and distractions, Calhoun badgered and bullied his Connecticut program to dizzying heights, taking on all competitors, including critics who so much as looked at him cross-eyed.

Calhoun’s age, 70, and uncertain health will probably spare him much derision for the self-serving timing of his sudden retirement, along with the appointment of the assistant coach and former Husky Kevin Ollie to replace him on a one-year, $625,000 contract.

But the change does come weeks before the start of a season that will find the Huskies depleted by N.B.A. defectors and ineligible for tournament play after years of embarrassingly low graduation rates that finally caught up with them. By the latter standard, Calhoun wasn’t even the most-accomplished basketball coach on campus, given the far superior academic history of the women’s program (on top of Coach Geno Auriemma’s seven national titles).

That said, men’s basketball operates on a different financial plane, and Calhoun was the highest-paid state employee in Connecticut — as we learned a few years ago when a reporter dared question him on the subject of his salary during harsh recessionary times.

So, yes, perhaps he should have hung around to usher his program through what promises to be a most difficult season. It is in a state of disarray that Calhoun, more than anyone else, is responsible for. Instead, he waited until the bell lap sounded for summer to decide he was done, too late for Connecticut to search for a more credentialed replacement at a most tenuous time — not only for the program he built but for the struggling Big East Conference that has been so instrumental to Calhoun’s success.

This week Notre Dame announced it would divorce the Big East to marry the Atlantic Coast Conference for all sports but hockey and football, following the lead of Pittsburgh and Syracuse. Add West Virginia, now of the Big 12, and that’s four name-brand programs gone or on the way out.

How much greater a challenge will it be to maintain Connecticut’s national profile with old conference rivalries in tatters and the lion of Storrs permanently sidelined?

Calhoun said he would sleep well at night, knowing his handpicked successor — as opposed to an accomplished outsider with no loyalty to him — would be in charge.

“Who’s in place is very important,” he said at Thursday’s news conference before adding, not surprisingly, that he would still attend practice and offer his opinions. Relinquishing control will apparently happen in stages.

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