Hard-driven coach Billy Donovan has turned Florida into a national power in the same quick-draw style that he has lived his life.
By JOEY JOHNSTON
Tribune Staff Writer
(c) Tampa Bay Times. Originally published April 1, 2000.
INDIANAPOLIS – What’s up with the hair?
It seems a frivolous question, especially on the eve of tonight’s Final Four. Doesn’t Billy Donovan have more important concerns? After all, his Florida Gators are preparing to meet North Carolina in the national semifinals.
But fans want to know. His players want to know. Even family members want to know.
Once, he was Billy the Kid, a gunslinging point guard from Providence College, a gym rat who somehow escaped a maze of mediocrity and captured America’s hoop dreams. Now he’s all grown up, all of 34. He looks the part of a big-time coach. He wears designer suits. He stalks the sideline, bantam-like, with a puffed-out chest and an unmistakable swagger. His coal-black hair is gelled into an immovable state, personifying his slick image, making him a cross between Pat Riley and Eddie Munster.
“It’s pretty smooth looking hair, but I have no idea what he’s got up there,” UF forward Brent Wright said. “It just stays very still.”
Donovan’s nephew, 8-year-old Michael Daly, idolizes Uncle Billy. He wants the look, too. What’s the secret? “I just tell him, “shellack, honey,’ ” said Susan Daly, Donovan’s sister. “Even if Billy’s in a wind tunnel, there’s not a hair out of place.”
There’s no secret, Donovan says, just a little dab each day. He says he’s being practical.
“If you saw my hair normally, you’d see the reason [for the gel],” he said. “It’s messy. It doesn’t hold well. This way, I just put it back and go. No worries. I don’t have to deal with my hair.”
Even in a wind tunnel, Billy D can focus. Even when confronted with the inevitable gale-force howlings from college basketball’s establishment – How could this guy build Florida into such a good program, so fast? – he’s unperturbed. Not a hair out of place.
Slick is slick. But don’t get fooled by the look. Eventually, the jacket will come off. The work never stops. His shirt always has a symbolic blue collar. Billy the Kid has grown up. But he hasn’t changed.
Return to a musty gymnasium on Long Island. Visualize a teenager so driven that he uses a bolt cutter to pry through the gym’s metal-screened window. Witness his hundreds upon hundreds of jump shots, his quiet determination, the thwack of a net and the ball bouncing perfectly back to him on the hardwood. Feel his legs burn as he tries to make 12 consecutive game-situation jump shots, unwilling to leave short of that goal, even if he hits 11 straight. Not good enough. Start over.
Then move to college ball, to a less-than-average beginning, then his total dedication to the directions of the new coach, Rick Pitino. Donovan whips himself into shape, going from All-Doughboy to All-Big East, then spearheads Providence’s divine run to the 1987 Final Four.
Soon he’s a coach himself, working for Pitino, outworking him even. You know he’s going places and he’s getting there quickly. He’s a Division I head coach by 29. Two years later, he’s at Florida, a program without many players or fans, but one oozing with potential. Someone just needs to awaken the Gator giant. He’s the guy.
Now he’s at the pinnacle. He has an entire team of gym rats. Everyone has bought into the run-and-press system. He’s their coach and their friend. He’s adored in Gainesville, formerly the exclusive domain of that guy in the white visor. The athletic director gave Donovan a fat new contract last season. He’s in the Final Four, even with only one senior on the roster. Things are good.
That’s the legend of Billy the Kid. But don’t confuse it with an overnight success story.
At birth, Donovan weighed 8 pounds, 13 ounces. His mother was in labor for nearly 10 hours. “It was long and hard,” she said. But definitely worth the wait. Donovan hit the ground running and life has been a fast break ever since.
Well, what would you expect? His father, Bill, was a star player at Boston College. He, too, would sneak into the gym for late-night shooting sessions. There’s a photo of 2-year-old Billy in knickers, bouncing a basketball near the sidelines while his father coached in the CYO league on Long Island. Basketball, it seemed, was the family birthright.
So was work. Donovan’s father began as a sales trainee for J.P. Stevens, a textile business in Manhattan. He was a shoe-leather type, going door-to-door through the city’s garment district, establishing accounts, creating relationships, fending off the competition. Recruiting, really. Twenty-two years into his career, Donovan’s father had become president of the company’s $500-million division.
Little Billy was watching. “You get nothing without honest effort,” his father told him. “Don’t expect to be given things in life. You have to go earn it.”
His sister, Susan, remembers Billy with a basketball cradled under his arm. Always. She was a year younger and they ran in the same crowd. Billy wasn’t big on teenage parties. He preferred the gym or the 20-by-20 lighted court his father built in the backyard of their home in Rockville Centre, N.Y. Sometimes, he’d head for the projects in Queens or the South Bronx, where the competition was fierce and you had to work hard just to get off a jump shot.
Frank Morris coached Donovan at St. Agnes High School in Long Island’s Catholic League. Morris said he never had a harder worker. But when Donovan signed with Providence to play for Coach Joe Mullaney, the magic stopped, at least for a while. He sat and sat. After two seasons, he thought he might transfer to Northeastern and play for Jim Calhoun. Then Mullaney resigned and Providence hired Pitino.
Pitino immediately told Donovan to lose some weight and put in a full summer. Donovan took the words to heart. He substituted fruit for junk food. He strengthened his thigh muscles, relieving the tendinitis in his knees that probably led to his bad-habit push shot. He ran and ran, either in the park or through a maniacal set of suicides in the gym.
“I though Billy was going to have a quiet four-year college career, then he’d get out,” Donovan’s father said. “I was almost resigned to that, really. But before Billy’s junior year [at Providence], I saw how much quicker his jump shot was. He was in terrific shape. That jump shot [release] was miles faster.
“From that point on, it’s almost a blur, like a miracle that unfolded before our eyes.”
Providence made the NIT, its first postseason appearance in seven years. Then in 1987, Donovan’s senior season, the No. 6-seeded Friars became national darlings. They made the Final Four. Billy the Kid went national.
“It was absolutely surreal,” said Donovan’s sister, Karen. “There was our brother on TV all the time, getting this attention. We were all on Cloud Nine. He went from not playing to being the talk of the tournament. Sometimes, it’s almost like a dream, like it never really happened.”
The Friars beat No. 1-seeded Georgetown 88-73 in the Southeast Region final, where Donovan was named MVP. Even though they lost to Syracuse in the national semifinals at New Orleans, the tournament run was an experience that taught Donovan about possibilities. In truth, it shaped his life.
“I have a lot more appreciation for it today than when I was a player,” Donovan said. “You tend to get caught up in the moment. I remember getting off the plane at New Orleans and a jazz band was there. There were 30,000 people watching practice. You come into the Superdome and there’s 65,000 in the stands. It was overwhelming.”
The moment was fleeting. Donovan barely attracted the NBA’s attention, getting drafted by the Utah Jazz and playing 44 games with his home-area New York Knicks (then coached by Pitino). A long-range pro career was out, so Donovan headed to Wall Street. He went to school at night, trying to get his stock-broker license, and learned the trade at Shelter Rock Securities. He caught the train to Manhattan each morning, then returned to his new wife, Christine, and their home with the white-picket fence.
He hated the life.
When the market opened, Donovan was given a stack of index cards. He was cold-calling. “I was talking to some guy from Texas, wanting him to invest his money and I had no idea what I was even talking about,” he said. Donovan looked around the room and saw a bunch of guys in suits – with slicked-back hair – who didn’t need coffee to jolt their day started. They were crazed. One guy got a tip 10 minutes before the market closed Friday. Ten minutes later, he had lost $30,000.
Donovan was a trainee. His task was to get someone interested, then let a broker close the deal. After five months, Donovan had attracted no one. Yes, there was a time when Billy Donovan couldn’t sell.
“Those guys were so into making money and I guess that’s fine,” he said. “But all the money in the world isn’t going to buy you happiness.”
About that time, there were rumors that Pitino wanted to leave the Knicks. He was being linked to the scandal-ridden program at Kentucky. During a weekend trip to his father’s beach house, Donovan picked up the bedroom phone. He returned to the living room with a smile. “Dad, Coach Pitino is going to Kentucky,” he said. “And I’m going with him.”
“Billy’s eyes lit up like a pinball machine,” said his father. “He recaptured his love.”
Donovan was a graduate assistant, barely older than the Kentucky players. He participated in many of the five-on-five drills and usually was the best player on the floor. “Billy was the yardstick that Coach Pitino used for hard work,” said John Pelphery, then a UK player and now Donovan’s chief assistant at UF. “He said nobody ever worked harder than Billy. He wanted us to be like Billy. Of course, nobody could.”
It was a meteoric rise from graduate assistant to associate head coach, then to head coach of Marshall University in 1994. Donovan turned the Thundering Herd into a running, pressing, exciting, winning program. Two seasons in at Marshall, Lon Kruger resigned at Florida and shifted to Illinois. The Gators were 12-16 and floundering. UF Athletic Director Jeremy Foley contacted Donovan, who naturally consulted with his mentor, Pitino.
Pitino’s advice: Bad move. Don’t do it.
“Florida was decimated,” said Pitino, now with the NBA’s Boston Celtics. “I won’t say it was Division II talent, but they had the weakest Division I talent for a major conference I’ve ever seen. It’s going to take you three years to get them competitive against programs like Kentucky and Arkansas and the rest of the SEC.
“I told him ‘You can’t take it. You’re taking it for the wrong reasons.’ He told me, ‘Coach, this is the kind of place I think I can turn around.’ “
Pitino changed his tack when Foley called. Foley’s question: If I go after the top names in this game, how long would it take them to turn it around? Pitino’s answer: At least three years. Another question: In three years, will Billy Donovan be one of the top names in coaching? Pitino: Absolutely.
“Then why shouldn’t I take the guy right now?” Foley said in a closing statement that swayed Pitino. “We’ll be patient. We’ll give him the years. Why can’t he make the ride with us?” Pitino gave his blessings. And Foley had fit his head-coaching profile – an up-and-coming name instead of an established coach – that had Donovan and Duke assistant Tommy Amaker as the front-runners.
Foley and two UF athletic department associates had flown to Huntington, W.Va., for a four-hour interview at Donovan’s home. They talked philosophy, academics, style of play, commitment.
“After that meeting, it felt like I had known Billy my whole life,” Foley said. “I knew he was the guy. I don’t know if it’s the head or the heart. It’s more like the gut.”
Donovan’s age has been irrelevant. He worked relentlessly on the recruiting trail, first getting in-state kids like Teddy Dupay, Brent Wright and Udonis Haslem, then broadening the search nationwide for McDonald’s All-Americans like Mike Miller of Mitchell, S.D., Brett Nelson of St. Albans, W.Va., and Donnell Harvey of Shellman, Ga.
If you think Donovan is merely a slick recruiter who rolls out the basketballs, think again.
Witness this Final Four run. He was furiously meticulous in the first-round win against Butler, working offensive and defensive substitutions on nearly every late possession. The Gators attacked from the beginning, grinding Illinois into the hardwood. Against Duke, he shifted to a zone defense in the final minutes, which forced the Blue Devils into some bad long-range shots. In the region final against Oklahoma State, he sensed fatigue. He told his team to dedicate the game to someone special. Each player wrote the name of a family member on their taped ankles. That gave them strength.
“When I first got the job, everybody talked about me as a coach, working for Rick Pitino, winning a championship at Marshall and helping to turn around that program,” Donovan said. “Coaching was not an issue. The question was: Can you recruit? Can you beat Kentucky, North Carolina or Duke on players? Can you keep the in-state kids home? Recruiting, recruiting, recruiting. That’s all I heard.
“Then when we started signing some guys, it was back to, ‘Can he coach these guys? Can they win?’ In coaching, you have to do both things well. If you look at Duke and North Carolina, they have great coaching and great recruiting. When people were asking, ‘Can he recruit?’ I wasn’t pounding my fist on the table saying, ‘Yes, I can!’ You just have to do it and prove it. With all I’ve been through in my career, I’m very secure in my abilities.”
He should be secure. Billy Donovan is one of the nation’s hottest coaching properties. That prompts another question: Will he leave Gainesville? Donovan says he has everything in place. He’s understandably intrigued by Kentucky, but Tubby Smith isn’t leaving Lexington.
Maybe Gainesville is the dream job, not the transition spot everyone else predicted. Maybe the Gators can be annual Final Four contenders. If Donovan and his staff maintain their high-level recruiting, that’s achievable.
“Billy is a special human being,” Pitino said. “I would surmise that he’s happy there and he’s going to stay there a long time. Where are you going to move? He has put a stamp on that program just like Steve Spurrier has put it on the football.”
If UF beats North Carolina tonight, Pitino said he will grab a plane to Indianapolis for the championship game. In a way, Donovan has recruited his old coach, too, getting him caught up in the excitement.
“I’ll be there rooting with my Gator sweatshirt on,” Pitino said.
