Plenty in Storrs

A sudden clearing, the woods part. This is it? The capital of college basketball?

Here?

Not too many stores in Storrs. No movie theater, no McDonald’s. Lord knows, no Gap or Banana Republic.

“A Subway, a Blimpie, a Dairy Mart, that’s about it. That’s all we have,” said Shea Ralph, a guard on the No. 2-ranked women’s team. “There are tons of other schools you could go to. To come here, you have to know how to make your own fun. This is our fun.”

This is not Westwood or Palo Alto or Chapel Hill, N.C. The fact is, there’s more to do in Pullman, Wash., than Storrs.

“This is the coun-try, the country,” said Richard “Rip” Hamilton, a slashing swingman for the unbeaten and No. 1-ranked men’s team and a contender for national player of the year. “Storrs is basically just the campus. Usually you’d think there’d be like a little town, then the campus. But Storrs is just campus. . . . If Coach [Jim] Calhoun weren’t here, and the players who are already here, it would be something to recruit players to come here.”

No, there is nothing obvious to draw an 18-year-old from Minneapolis or Pennsylvania or St. Petersburg, Russia, to a hamlet that feels extraordinarily isolated even though it lies 40 minutes from Hartford and roughly midway between New York and Boston.

There is only one reason.

Make that two.

They are Jim Calhoun and Geno Auriemma--two coaches who have little use for each other and share almost nothing beyond the “UConn” on their players’ jerseys, the extraordinary rise of their programs and the style of basketball their teams play--a swarming, high-pressure defense that feeds a hell-bent-to-score running game.

Together, by sheer coincidence, they have twice achieved what no other school has--not UCLA, not Stanford, not North Carolina or Duke. For one week in 1995 and six weeks this season until the women lost to Tennessee in a No. 1 vs. No. 2 matchup, both teams were No. 1 in the nation.

And no, they don’t particularly get along.

The players do. Hamilton and center Jake Voskuhl were among the 10,027 at the Tennessee game, pulling for a Husky team led by silky 6-foot-2 gunner Svetlana Abrosimova.

“Svet, the girl from Russia, we call her Toni Kukoc,” Hamilton said. “Just the way she attacks the game. She’s a very great player.”

As for the coaches, when you ask Auriemma about Calhoun and he pauses, looks you hard in the eye and says, “Personally or professionally?” well, you have your answer.

There’s a black-and-white photo of the pair side by side at a golf outing a few years back still lying around the athletic department, and people pretty much laugh at it as a relic of history, never to be duplicated.

“People want Geno and I to be best friends, and that’s not true,” Calhoun said. “I like him. I have the utmost respect for him. But he goes to Little League games still, and I’m awaiting the arrival of my first grandchild.”

Auriemma is Philadelphia, a good haircut, a whiff of cologne, and has a way of calling his players “guys” that dismisses the whole girls or women problem and avoids the dreadful “ladies” altogether.

Calhoun is more Boston intellectual, with a haircut that looks like he might have done it himself. A cardiac case on the sideline, he has a razor wit that will charm your socks off if it’s not slicing your heart out.

So they don’t have chalk talks. But together they have created something Calhoun says former university president Harry J. Hartley dubbed menswomensbasketball.

“He said it as one word, because he wanted to be sure that he didn’t do a disservice, at that time, to the women,” Calhoun said. “And today, people just kind of say, ‘Huskies,’ ‘UConn,’ and for a lot of people, just state people, it means the same thing.

“Yes, the women have their own crowd, and have their own love affair. We have our own crowd, but clearly, within the state, probably 4 million people, Huskies, UConn, basketball has a connotation, where, 8 o’clock on Saturday night, they [the men] play West Virginia, got to watch them, plus they [the women] have that great big game against Tennessee on Sunday. For many people, that’s what they do.”

Outside of town, a sign on a barn pretty much says it all: “Go Women. Go Men. Go Huskies.”

If on Tuesday night they give out a life-size 6-foot-6 poster of Hamilton, on Wednesday night it is a 6-2 poster of Abrosimova, the marvelously creative sophomore from St. Petersburg who displayed her ability against UCLA at Pauley Pavilion in November with 39 points in 27 minutes.

“My legs look short,” Abrosimova said, crinkling her eyes at the poster but smiling. “They don’t make posters of you in Russia.”

They don’t make posters of many women’s basketball players in America, either, Svet. At least, not till recently.

UConn is a phenomenon, and though the Tennessee program may be more imposing and have its own strong following, Pat Summitt’s team couldn’t compete with Peyton Manning.

At UConn, where Division I-A football has not yet arrived, there are the Husky men and the Husky women and the gulf is not incredibly wide.

The Hartford Whalers are gone and the New England Patriots are on their way, but for now the stage belongs to Connecticut basketball.

When UConn played Tennessee on Jan. 10, going the same day as two NFL divisional playoff games, the women’s game drew a 33.8 rating and a 56% share in the Hartford area--meaning that more than half the TV sets in use were tuned to the women.

About 112,840 viewers watched Minnesota beat Arizona to advance to the NFC title game. Some 307,580 watched UConn lose its No. 1 ranking to Tennessee.

You could point to the opening of the campus arena, Gampel Pavilion, in 1990, as the catalyst in these programs’ development, but you would be wrong.

It’s the coaches.

Auriemma arrived from an assistant’s job at Virginia in 1985, and turned a 9-18 team into a winner in two years and has reached the Final Four three times, winning the national championship with an undefeated season in 1995. He made Connecticut heroes out of Rebecca Lobo, Jennifer Rizzotti and Kara Wolters along the way, and stirred a national controversy over the Nykesha Sales scoring record.

Sure, the Huskies get a sellout crowd of 10,027 adoring fans at Gampel for Tennessee, their great rival. But they also got 10,027 for a 97-point victory--that’s right, 117-20--over Quinnipiac, and are the most televised women’s team in the nation, with five national broadcasts and at least 17 Connecticut public-TV games this season.

Calhoun arrived in ’86 from Northeastern, where he coached the late Reggie Lewis, and went from 9-19 in his first season to National Invitation Tournament champions in his second, riding the wave of the Big East to reach three NCAA Sweet 16s, three Final Eights--and everyone is quick to point out, zero Final Fours.

Both coaches face some of the same recruiting battles and have developed their own strategies. Calhoun started selling the Big East to players who idolized Patrick Ewing at Georgetown or Pearl Washington at Syracuse.

Then there’s the challenge of Storrs, which is pretty enough when the leaves turn or after a snowfall, but feels isolated.

“Ray Allen always said the best thing about UConn was at times you can be boring,” Calhoun said. “You can go shoot for two hours. Somewhere else, you might go get a haircut, go to Taco Bell.”

One recruiting success begat another, Scott Burrell to Donyell Marshall to Ray Allen to Hamilton to Khalid El-Amin.

Auriemma seeks his own sort of player, a different breed from Calhoun’s, but the same in that they can find happiness without Tower Records or bars on every corner.

“That’s where I think the success of our program lies,” Auriemma said. “The kid that we get, they understand why they’re coming here.”

Amy Duran, a senior guard, is one example.

“I’m from the D.C. area, and all that’s around here is like a Store 24, a Dairy Mart, a Subway,” she said. “Coach made me forget about that. You come here to get an education and play basketball. You forget about the fact that there are cows right down the street.”

The women’s crowds will make you forget the cows.

“Who doesn’t want to run out there and have 10,000 fans screaming?” Auriemma said. “You can list 10 or 20 places like that in men’s basketball, but not for the women.”

Separate but equal at Connecticut?

Calhoun lifts the Diet Coke he’s drinking. “If I get one of these, one will be delivered over there. They are going to bend over backward to make sure no one’s getting something the other doesn’t have.”

Not exactly.

Calhoun and Auriemma have identical base salaries of $153,306.

However, Calhoun’s total compensation from the school, which includes radio and TV money, and six-figure sums for an annuity and public-relations duties, is worth $478,806, and he adds another chunk well into the six figures for his personal appearances and contract with Nike.

Auriemma’s total package from the school is $257,306, including radio and TV, an annuity, a car allowance and compensation for public-relations duties, and he also has his own shoe deal and works as a television commentator for WNBA games for ESPN in the summer.

“[The discrepancy] doesn’t bother me one bit,” Auriemma said. “My package should be reflective of what we do here, and what my value is to the University of Connecticut, and it should be relative to where I am in the sport, as opposed to where it is compared to the men.

“My base salary should be the same as his, I agree with that. That’s only because we do the same job, and in my mind we’re maxing this thing out.

“But you know, the NCAA tournament is going to give you a certain amount of money if you go to a certain round, and because of that, a coach should share in that. You know what, [the women] don’t have that right now. So, I don’t deserve it. I don’t have a problem with that.

“One of the things that hurts some programs around the country is that sometimes they’re lumped together and it’s like well, because somebody gets this, they get it because they’re the men, or because they get it you have to have it, for no other reason.

“All I know is there isn’t anything I want or I need or I feel is necessary for me to win the national championship I don’t have.”

What, then, is the problem? Part of it seems to be the little things Calhoun says that get under Auriemma’s skin.

“I got in trouble a few years ago for saying our crowds were different,” Calhoun said.

The quote was basically that the women’s crowd was like “a day-care center” and “a senior citizens’ home” rolled into one.

“There are a lot of similarities and a lot of differences,” Auriemma said. “I would venture to say some of the bigger corporate involvements with the men are also involved with the women’s side. It’s good business.

“I also would venture to say that if someone on a fixed income maybe can’t afford the tickets for the men’s games. Our tickets are $13. Theirs are $23.

“I also would venture to say that probably a lot of guys out there, if they get four tickets to the UConn-Syracuse game at the Hartford Civic Center, probably the last thing they do is call their wife and two kids and say, ‘Let’s go to the UConn-Syracuse game.’

“They’ll get a couple of friends, go have some beers and dinner. But the same guy, if he gets four tickets to a women’s game, calls his wife, grabs their two kids, puts them into the car, comes to the game, and has a great time.

“Now, their people, the men’s fans will tell you, they’re not real fans, nobody goes to the women’s games, just old people and young kids. That’s like saying, well, who goes to figure skating. It gets better ratings than any sport. That’s the only reason they have the Winter Olympics, to show figure skating on TV.

“Is that a bad thing, because there aren’t a lot of people 21-to-35 and guys coming in their trucks or in their three-piece suits from their job?”

Another situation stems from a 1995 doubleheader against Kansas in Kansas City, Mo., when the teams shared a chartered plane.

The women, on their way to the national championship, won by 10.

The men lost by 29.

Calhoun bemoaned his team’s play, then said that “at last report, [Athletic Director] Lew Perkins is going to continue the sport of men’s basketball at the school. Women’s, obviously they will [continue].”

Then the teams filed onto the plane for a long ride home, one team celebrating, one team humiliated.

“My honest opinion of most men’s basketball coaches in the country, 90% of them are into only what they do and how they do it and how it affects them and could give two bits about anyone else, anywhere, anyhow, whether it’s their school or another school or anywhere,” Auriemma said, never mentioning Calhoun as part of either the 90% or the 10%.

And as for Calhoun?

“Well, from a professional standpoint, I will tell you that no one probably wants their basketball team to win more than me. The further they go in the tournament, the more they’re on television, the more this school is recognized as a basketball powerhouse,” Auriemma said.

“His ability to build the program to where it is today is remarkable, and from where they were to where they are today, I truly admire what they’ve done. I have tremendous respect for him.”

And personally?

“That’s personal,” Auriemma said. “He is who he is, and he is what he is, and that’s that.”

That’s what passes for peaceful coexistence, and the truth is, people in Storrs seem rather content.

“[Perkins, the A.D.] has a saying, ‘You’re the best, you’re the best,’ ” Calhoun said. “We’re both the best. I always say, ‘Why don’t you say one of the best?’ because I know he says it to both of us. But we’re ‘the best.’ ”

That’s the one nagging issue. The UConn men have never been the best. Not at the end of the season. Not national champions.

“I’m going to be asked that,” Calhoun said, acknowledging that he is a member of the brotherhood to which Dean Smith and John Elway once belonged, and Marv Levy never escaped. Can’t win the big one.

The women did.

“Oh yeah, the biggest part of it I think is comparisons,” Auriemma said. “If no matter what you did, somebody compared you to someone else and said, well, you haven’t done this. . . . You have to understand, it’s not coming from us.”

Chances are, neither team will win the national championship this season. Tennessee might be too dominant on the women’s side. Conquering the men’s tournament is considered tougher, with more contending teams, not to mention Duke, and no home games, which the women have, in the early rounds.

“They represent the university just as well as we represent the university,” Hamilton said. “They win a national championship, good for them. We win a national championship, good for us. I think we’ll all respect each other the same, regardless of what happens.

“In high school, we didn’t have a great boys’ team. It was just like here, the girls won a state championship and the guys never did. Here, the girls won a national championship, and the guys have never won one.

“It’s kind of fun. You want to be in a program where the girls are trying to do the same thing you’re trying to do.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Conn-tenders

A look at where the Connecticut men’s and women’s basketball teams have ranked in the final regular-season AP poll since the 1993-94 season:

*--*

Season Men Women 1993-1994 4 3 1994-1995 8 1 1995-1996 3 2 1996-1997 NR 1 1997-1998 6 3

*--*