The Forever Coach

Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim Is The Longest-tenured Coach In College Basketball History, And One Of Its Winningest—a Living Legend. Earlier This Year, While Driving, He Was Involved In An Accident That Took A Man’s Life. This Fall, At 74, He Returns To The Only Job He’s Ever Known. What Else Would He Do?

- Tom Chiarella

It’s twilight at the Turning Stone Resort and Casino, and the curtains glow a dim blue. Jim Boeheim stands on his heels at the lectern, the night before his annual charity golf tournament. Weight back, hips supinated, eyes down. The thunderheads are in. The bad weather is jammed in to the west and headed this way.

Golf tomorrow is probably off.

But this is upstate New York, the Mohawk Valley, east of Syracuse. People know the weather doesn’t make any guarantees as to your happiness. Boeheim smiles and addresses the room from the cockpit of his trademark what-are-you-gonna-do shrug. Then he sets about his business for the night.

He’s wearing a sport coat over a logoed golf shirt atop expensive khaki pants and some kind of boat shoes. The hoops coach in summer. Boeheim’s not playing in the tournament anyway. His game has slipped—he doesn’t like that one bit. And there’s the business of tomorrow: a hearing regarding an accident in which he struck a man on the interstate on his way home from a game last winter, and the man died.

It’s no secret. Boeheim was never charged with any wrongdoing. But a tragic accident, a gut punch for the born-here, played-here, coached-to-the-tippy-top-here legend. Grim business for an often misread guy. He will be cleared, but first he’s going to have to live through the reconstructions of the incident, the vetting of his reactions and intentions. Like anybody in a fatal accident. For the record. He knows this.

But that’s tomorrow.

He tells a few jokes from the lectern. Outlines projects funded by the Jim and Juli Boeheim Foundation and its $4.4 million in grants, all within the region. He auctions offa trip home from a road game with the team. Floor seats at another game. He’s done this for more than ten years now, since before the foundation he and his wife started to help kids in need and fight cancer cut its first check.