NCAA East Regional : Syracuse Coach Faces Another Big Test

Jim Boeheim is a man who looks like a mouse and acts like a rat. He is known in college basketball circles as something of a whiner and a complainer, admits to being terribly sensitive to criticism, and he perfected the art of chair-throwing long before Bobby Knight ever got the hang of it.

Some of this stuff, the Syracuse basketball coach insists, is an act. The carping at referees, the technical fouls he has drawn deliberately, the griping about comments made about him.

“It’s the same thing I compare to Clint Eastwood,” he said here Friday on the day off before today’s NCAA East Regional championship game against North Carolina (1:03 p.m. PST, Ch. 2). “In the movies, he shoots people. But he doesn’t walk down the streets of Carmel with a gun and pull it out and shoot people.

“Well, I’m a coach, and when I’m coaching on that floor, that’s my act. That’s my stage. A lot of that is emotional acting or whatever, and once the game’s over I’m fairly low key, I’m not like that at all. A lot of people don’t like me and then they meet me and they say, ‘Hey, you’re not as bad as we thought.’ Well, that’s not really me out there. That’s part of the job, part of what we do.

“Lou Carnesecca (the coach at St. John’s) is one of the nicest, quietest guys you’ll ever meet--away from the game. Gary Williams (of Ohio State) is the nicest, quietest, calmest guy in the world, one of my best friends, but (while coaching) he’s an absolute maniac, 10 times worse than I could ever be. He’ll have a complete heart attack some day, right on the court, and die.”

Boeheim may be the best coach in the business unknown west of the Big East. Since being promoted from assistant to head coach one year after Roy Danforth’s Syracuse team played in the 1975 Final Four at San Diego, Boeheim has racked up a record of 259-83, including Thursday night’s regional victory over Florida.

But Boeheim’s name and face are not particularly well known, at least to the casual basketball fans who are mostly familiar with Knight, Dean Smith, John Thompson and such.

The name, for those who need informing or reminding, rhymes with daytime. The face is bespectacled and sort of bookwormy. He looks like one of those kids from high school who kept the rims of his eyeglasses attached to the lenses with white adhesive tape.

Boeheim, 42, definitely would enhance his reputation with a win over favored North Carolina. His Orangemen are expected to be fairly easy pickings for a Tar Heel team that has averaged a school-record 92 points a game, scoring 100 or more in seven different games and 98 three times.

What bothers Boeheim is his reputation as a coach who cannot win the big game. He cannot fathom how Syracuse can qualify for an NCAA tournament or for a Big East Conference postseason final and then be accused of choking just because they succumbed to a very good team. He doesn’t know why East Regional losses to Ohio State, Virginia, Georgia Tech and Navy the last four years struck certain critics as unpardonable sins.

“I’m sensitive because people who criticize you are just fans, really,” Boeheim said. “If another coach criticized me, I would have a lot more regard for it because I would feel he really understood the game and the situation. But a fan hears a criticism and pretty soon it becomes fact.

“He hears Billy Packer on TV say we should have played a man-to-man, and the next day they’re talking about what he said like it’s a fact, like it’s something the Syracuse coach did wrong.

“I laugh when (ABC-TV White House correspondent) Sam Donaldson says people don’t really believe all the things he says about the President or whatever. I think an awful lot of people hear a criticism or read a comment and they say, ‘It must be true, because I heard it on TV, or I read it in the paper.’ Or some oddsmaker says we should have beaten a certain team, and we didn’t do it, so we must have screwed up.”

Any team good enough to get this far is good enough to beat you, Boeheim contends.

“I view the NCAA tournament very much as Russian roulette, and other people don’t,” he said. “You can get a hot team or one hot player like a David Robinson (of Navy) and you can beat anybody. I didn’t think it was a disaster for us to lose to Navy last year, but some people obviously did.”

Besides supposedly failing in big games, the rap on Boeheim and Syracuse has been loading up on a soft schedule outside the conference--this year’s opponents included George Washington, Oklahoma State, Cornell, St. Bonaventure, Canisius, Boston University and Hawaii-Loa--and failing to develop good college players into good pros.

Dan Schayes, Leo Rautins, Marty Byrnes and Pearl Washington, some of the biggest stars of the Boeheim regime, did not exactly set the NBA on fire after becoming first-round draft picks.

Boeheim, a sideline-swiper who considers himself “argumentative,” said he has made a concerted effort to get off officials’ backs, to the point that he cannot recall a technical foul called against him all season.

He believes he has mellowed. He can’t imagine flinging a chair again, as he did at a press conference after the 1984 Big East final at Madison Square Garden, where Georgetown’s Michael Graham was allowed back in the game by an officiating crew that changed its mind after having ejected him.

“When I do get a technical, it’s usually intentional, to wake up the team or wake up an official, even if it doesn’t look that way,” he said. “Most of what I get in life, I earn. When I get a speeding ticket, I never tell the cop I wasn’t speeding. I say, ‘You’re right. I did it.’ I probably haven’t got a lot of T’s that I deserved to get.”

Although this is a coach who looks anything but tough, his players would argue that appearances are deceiving. Rony Seikaly, the 6-foot 10-inch center who scored a career-high 33 points Thursday, has spent the last three years listening to Boeheim’s screams, and Boeheim got so frustrated trying to teach the foreign-born Seikaly the game that eventually he turned him over to assistant coach Bernie Fine and let him have the headaches.

“Rony came in having trouble walking and chewing gum at the same time. He finally got that down this season,” Boeheim said Friday, not quite as harshly as it sounds.

Should Seikaly be unable to handle North Carolina center J.R. Reid, who scored 31 points Thursday against Notre Dame, and should Syracuse lose this latest big game, Boeheim wonders if once again it will be he, the coach, who is spoken of harshly.

“Gene Keady (of Purdue)--is he a bad coach? What’s his NCAA record now, 2-6? Does that make him a lousy coach?” Boeheim asked rhetorically. “John Wooden was 4-9 in his first 13 NCAA games, I think. Was he a bad coach?

“You do get to be sensitive about the things people say about you. At least I do. I just wish they didn’t say I was a bad coach. Maybe they could just say, ‘Well, he’s not a good coach, but he’s not a bad coach.’ Would that be OK?”