Donovan contemplates next step on the ladder

Billy Donovan was ready to climb the ladder to cut down the second NCAA championship net of his career, and his father stood watching.

“Every ounce of his blood has gone into this program,” Bill Donovan said.

Donovan arrived at Florida as Billy the Kid, a 30-year-old who had been a three-point shooter for Providence in the 1987 Final Four and then cut his coaching teeth under Rick Pitino at Kentucky.

Monday night, he won his second NCAA title at only 41 years old, and he’s no kid anymore.

He can go to Kentucky when the megabucks offer comes if he’d like, or he can become a legend at Florida.

He wasn’t saying where his mind was Monday night, and if you believe his father and wife about his single-mindedness, he was being honest.

“I just got off the court. I’m right here at the University of Florida. I’m going to enjoy this moment right now,” Donovan said. “All that stuff’s going to be addressed, but now isn’t the time to address it, just as it wasn’t when it got asked over the last week. It’s all about these kids, our program, this time.”

The company Donovan joined by repeating is astounding.

The last two coaches to win two in a row were Mike Krzyzewski and John Wooden.

Only Bob Knight and Phil Woolpert won their second titles at a younger age, and they were only a year younger, at 40. (Henry Iba also won his second at 41.)

Donovan has won as many NCAA titles as Dean Smith, Jim Calhoun and Iba, for goodness’ sake, and only two other men have ever played in a Final Four and coached a team to the title. That would be Knight and Smith.

Donovan is in Hall of Fame territory with a whole career still ahead of him, and now he must decide where that will be.

“I don’t know,” said his wife, Christine, as she stood on the court, making eye contact with her husband on the podium between wondering where their son, the one they call Little Billy, had gone off to.

“We haven’t discussed it at all,” she said. “We know the tradition at Kentucky. It’s the pinnacle of college basketball. It’s something of interest. But we’re very happy where we are, with the administration and where we are today.”

There was a faint hint that the administration might change when Donovan said after the game that Athletic Director Jeremy Foley had told him he’d retire if they added a second title on top of this year’s football championship, but Foley just shrugged as if that weren’t very serious.

As high a mountain as Donovan sits atop now, he said he knows it isn’t necessarily permanent.

“I sit here very humbled to be part of two national championships,” he said.

“I have said this, the program is bigger than anybody. I’ve never looked at my legacy and how it impacts me. It’s more about the program. There are a lot of great, great coaches that never get to this point and probably deserve a lot more attention.

“My legacy to me is I hope I work as hard as I can to do the very best I can. I hope I do things in such a way that when I walk away I can say I did my very best. What gives me peace is when I walk away from something and have no regret.”

It is hard to imagine how he could walk away from Florida without looking back now.

“I always tell him, do what’s in your heart,” his father said. “Never listen to people. Do what you want.

“I think Kentucky is a great program, great tradition, a great job. He enjoyed his five years there. Now he gets a chance to sit down and see where he wants to be with his family.”

For everyone who imagined Donovan was already listening to Kentucky or weighing his options during the Final Four, Christine and Bill say it’s not so.

“I know him. He’s not a multi-tasker. You give him a job, he’s not going to deviate from it,” his father said. “I’m telling the truth. He is so focused, he has not thought about anything else.”

That is the doggedness the hard-nosed kid from Long Island applied to the Florida job from the day he arrived.

“It’s been a long and arduous journey, a lot of hard work and a lot of sacrifice,” Christine said.

There were those years Florida lost in the first round, to Creighton and Manhattan.

“Painful,” Christine said. “When things like that happened, Billy would blame himself. He didn’t prepare them, or he didn’t prepare the right way.”

His father remembers the criticism -- the same kind of criticism, if perhaps less personal, that coaches endure at Kentucky.

“It was ‘Can he coach?’ ” he said. “Or, ‘Good recruiter, can’t coach.’ ”

“That changed in a hurry.”

It changed because instead of players who were in a hurry to try to get to the NBA, like Mike Miller, Anthony Roberson and Matt Walsh, Donovan found players who wanted to stay.

Players like Al Horford. Joakim Noah, the most outstanding player of last year’s Final Four, and Corey Brewer, the most outstanding player of this one.

Some of them were born with a silver spoon in their mouths, the sons of professional athletes, but none of them acted like it.

“These kids -- you’ve got to appreciate them,” Donovan’s father said. “They’re so tough. Amazing. They’re willing to work to get it done.”

That was what Donovan marveled at.

“The UNLV teams, the UCLA teams, the Kentucky teams, the Duke teams, I’m not sitting here saying these guys or our team could beat them.

“Just look at the word team by itself. I’m not talking about competing against other teams, but what a team is, I think they’ve got to be talked about.”

Donovan and his wife have something to talk about, but this isn’t Roy Williams going back to his alma mater at North Carolina or fleeing a rocky relationship with his athletic director.

“This is different because of the path we had to take,” Donovan said, talking about the repeat. “Last year’s path was so unexpected.”

Now Donovan must decide where his path leads next.

robyn.norwood@latimes.com

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Classic coaches

NCAA championship winningest coaches:

*--* Coach School No. John Wooden UCLA 10 Adolph Rupp Kentucky 4 Bob Knight Indiana 3 Mike Krzyzewski Duke 3 Jim Calhoun Connecticut 2 Denny Crum Louisville 2 Billy Donovan Florida 2 Henry Iba Oklahoma A&M; 2 Ed Jucker Cincinnati 2 Branch McCracken Indiana 2 Dean Smith North Carolina 2 Phil Woolpert San Francisco 2

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