Author: Andy Staples / Source: SI.com
MINNEAPOLIS — For years, the Virginia Cavaliers were accused of boring their opponents into defeat. They guarded relentlessly. They milked offensive possessions. They celebrated shot clock violations the way other programs celebrate alley-oop dunks.
Their critics, who were legion and included pretty much every major talking head who wasn’t a former basketball coach, claimed the Cavaliers played a style that couldn’t possibly win six consecutive NCAA tournament games.
And given what happened last year, those critics seemed to have a point.Yet as Monday bleeds into Tuesday, Virginia guard Ty Jerome sits at his locker wearing a new white hat. Under the gold bill is the word CHAMPIONS.
Boring? The Cavaliers trailed with at most 13 seconds remaining in regulation in the Elite Eight, in a national semifinal and in the national title game. They won all three. This brand of boring causes heart attacks. “I just feel so bad for [ESPN’s] Stephen A. Smith,” Jerome deadpans. “He said he hated watching us. And he had to watch us every single round of the tournament. I feel so bad for him. It must have been so hard for him.”
The Cavaliers produced anxiety as effectively as they produced heroes. In the Elite Eight against Purdue, freshman Kihei Clark flung a pass that Mamadi Diakite turned into a buzzer beater to force overtime. In the Final Four against Auburn, guard Kyle Guy sank a three-pointer to keep the Cavaliers in it and then won the game with three free throws. Monday, guard De’Andre Hunter scored 27, hitting three-pointers to keep Virginia alive in regulation and to take control in overtime of an 85–77 win against Texas Tech that put the lie to thousands of “first to 50 wins” predictions.
Asked how the Cavaliers could stay so calm when facing almost certain defeat, Jerome thinks for a moment. “We’re probably not as calm as we look,” he says. “We just always believe in each other. If we have a fighting chance, we’re going to keep trying to make the right play. Guys are not afraid of the moment.”
They weren’t afraid of the moment, because no on-court result could be worse than the one they endured at the end of last season. After those two hellish hours, it seemed these Cavaliers would be remembered only for one game. But as Guy pointed out frequently this season, we all walked in on one chapter of their story. They controlled the next one.
Nearly everyone dreams of making history in some way, but aspiring history-makers rarely consider the possibility of being the first to do something truly embarrassing. Virginia made history in 2018. The Cavaliers were the first No. 1 seed in NCAA tournament history to lose to a No. 16 seed. But that wasn’t all. Virginia was the tournament’s No. 1 overall seed, and the Cavaliers lost to UMBC by 20. In an April 2018 Facebook post that must have left blood on the keyboard, Guy explained how it feels to be that kind of trailblazer. “There aren’t many people who know what it’s like to be the ONLY person (program in this instance) in the world to be on the wrong side of history,” the future 2019 Final Four Most Outstanding Player wrote. “No one has done this before and it might be a while before it happens again, so no one understands the sheer pain and fear to be ridiculed.”
For the entire offseason, Virginia coach Tony Bennett wrestled with how to address the UMBC loss when the Cavaliers reconvened for preseason practice. “How am I going to frame this?” he asked his wife Laurel. Laurel Bennett had an idea. Nearly four years earlier, she had attended a series of TED Talks in Charlottesville. One talk stuck with her. Donald Davis, a former Methodist minister from North Carolina who makes his living as a professional storyteller, had spun a yarn about his father. Laurel loved the story so much when she heard it that she showed it to her son and daughter as soon as it was posted on YouTube. But she hadn’t thought about it for a while. As she pondered her husband’s dilemma, Davis’s honeyed twang rang in her ears. She fired Tony a link to the YouTube clip titled How The Story Transforms The Teller. “That’s how your team has to look at this,” Laurel Bennett remembers thinking. “You’re not going to get better or grow stronger from that loss just because it happened. The only way you get better is if you respond to it the right way.”
Tony clicked on the video, and there was Davis on stage in his bow tie. Davis explained that everyone in his tiny Appalachian hometown called his father Banker Joe, but one day an older acquaintance of Joe’s referred to him as Cripple Joe. Davis, angered at what he perceived as a slight, asked his father how the man could be so mean. Davis’s father responded with a story.
When Joe was five years old, he sliced his leg with an ax. The injury would render Joe unable to work the family farm with his brothers as he grew older. So everyone in town referred to him as Cripple Joe. But Joe’s mother—Donald’s grandmother—offered some sage advice. She told Joe to tell the story of his injury to anyone who asked about it. “If you don’t tell this story enough, when you’re 50 years old and you look at your leg, you’ll be five again and you’ll be pitiful,” Davis said on the stage that day in 2014, channeling his grandmother. “Because when something happens to you, she said, it sits on top of you like a rock. And if you never tell the story, it sits on you forever. But as you begin to tell the story, you climb out from under that rock and eventually you sit up on top of it.”
Cripple Joe stopped feeling angry that he couldn’t work the farm. Instead, he went to business school. He returned home and launched a successful career that allowed him to help raise his younger siblings after his father’s death. He became Banker Joe in part because he had continued to tell his story. “It is never, never tragic when something people think is bad happens to you,” said Davis, who holds degrees from Davidson and Duke. “Because if you can learn to use it right, it can buy you a ticket to a place you would never have gone any other way.”
Tony Bennett watched the talk, and he had an idea. When the Cavaliers arrived for their first day of practice in October, they expected a grueling workout to help them prepare to play their exhausting Pack-Line defense during the season. Instead, all they did was watch a 17-minute TED Talk. “You’re not telling the story to change what happened,” Davis said on the screen. “You’re telling the story to change you.”
And so the Cavaliers told their story whenever someone asked…
Guy told the story. He told it at Charlotte’s Spectrum Center—the site of the UMBC loss—for the ACC’s basketball media day in late October. He, Bennett and forward Jack Salt stayed in the same hotel they’d stayed in for the UMBC game. Guy already had practice telling the story. He’d poured it out in the Facebook post in April. He’d already recounted how the Cavaliers needed a police escort and had to enter that hotel through the back door following the loss because someone had sent death threats.
So he…
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