Rollie Massimino, the crafty little coach whose successful and sometimes controversial career at Villanova will be colored forever by the Wildcats’ startling 1985 NCAA championship and by his role in the downfall of a beloved Philadelphia basketball institution, died on Wednesday.
Massimino, 82, had been battling lung cancer for several years.
The son of an immigrant shoemaker, Massimino was a brilliant game strategist whose matchup zone defense and patient offense drove opponents to distraction. He won 481 games at Division I schools and another 332 at the smaller colleges that bookended his 41-year career, 34 at SUNY Stony Brook and 298 over the last 11 seasons at Florida’s tiny Keiser College.
He built his reputation at Villanova, where from 1973 through 1992, his teams won 355 games, four conference titles and, in what remains one of sport’s greatest upsets, that 1985 title, when his eighth-seeded Wildcats toppled mighty Georgetown on a surreal April Fool’s night in Lexington, Ky.
Massimino’s roly-poly shape and often frenetic sideline behavior became familiar March Madness features in the 1980s, when his Wildcats made eight NCAA Tournament appearances, advancing to the Sweet Sixteen and beyond on four occasions.
Devoted to his close friends in the profession and to the players that became his extended family and frequent guests at home-cooked pasta dinners, Massimino’s relationship with others, particularly Philadelphia sportswriters, could be contentious.
“With the inner circle, there’s a fierceness of loyalty,” Bill Bradshaw, an athletic director at DePaul, Temple and LaSalle, once said of him. “But anyone outside the circle better beware.”
After leaving Villanova in 1992, Massimino’s long major-college career concluded at two tarnished programs, UNLV and Cleveland State. In 10 frustrating seasons at those schools, he never got back to the NCAA tournament.
All of that couldn’t diminish the glory he’d earned at Villanova, where Massimino’s cerebral teams consistently frustrated foes with an array of shifting defenses and, especially in the years before a shot clock, a highly disciplined attack.
In 19 seasons there, his Wildcats earned 12 NCAA and 3 NIT bids, gained a leg up on their Philadelphia rivals by joining the Big East and moved into a new campus arena. But the highlight came on April 1, 1985, in the last college game without a shot clock and 3-point shot. Playing and shooting so flawlessly that their improbable victory would become known as “The Perfect Game,” Massimino’s Wildcats defeated the tournament’s top seed, No 1-ranked Georgetown.
Dressed in a tan suit on that early spring night, his hair typically disheveled, Massimino careened ecstatically around the Rupp Arena court after the buzzer sounded, hugging players, assistants and friends, and telling CBS commentator Billy Packer how sweet the victory was.
“Nobody thought we could do it,” he yelled. “But I did!”
Ironically, despite another 27 seasons as a coach, that victory would remain his mountaintop.
Immediately following the title, he was a campus demigod. But in March 1987 things started to unravel. Gary McLain, the point guard on his ’85 team, wrote in a Sports Illustrated cover story that he’d been high on cocaine during much of that NCAA tournament run. He said he’d long used cocaine and marijuana and implied that his coach and university knew, a charge Massimino vehemently denied.
At about that same time, Villanova’s increasingly lucrative and successful affiliation with the Big East almost severed its once-deep bonds with Philadelphia’s Big Five. When the Wildcats said they would no longer schedule Temple, St. Joseph’s, LaSalle and Penn each year and decided to play all their home games on campus or at the Spectrum, the unofficial city league dissipated and the Palestra doubleheaders that had defined it disappeared.
While the end of that longstanding and peculiar Philadelphia institution was probably inevitable and the reasons for it complex, Massimino became the villain of the piece, a criticism that infuriated him as much as a turnover.
“It wasn’t Villanova’s fault, it was Rollie. Rollie is Villanova,” he said in trying to explain the thinking behind the ill-will. “Well, Rollie’s not Villanova. The decision was made by the institution.”
Becoming increasingly sensitive and irascible, he often feuded with local sportswriters, who eagerly returned the fire.
“(He could be) such a magnanimous winner,” then Inquirer sportswriter Jere Longman wrote in 1987, “and such a churlish loser.”
By the 1990s, it was clear his Main Line honeymoon was over. When in 1992, after a 14-15 season, news that he was leaving for UNLV was announced at a Villanova assembly, some students gleefully chanted, “NA-NA-NA-NA … GOODBYE!”
His UNLV tenure was cut short after just two seasons when reports surfaced that he and the school’s president had conspired to under-report the coach’s salary to the state, a subterfuge officials termed a violation of Nevada’s ethics laws.
In eight Cleveland State seasons, his teams had a sub.500 record (90-113). In 2003, amid various reports of player misconduct, he resigned and retired to Florida, where he played golf almost daily.
But in 2006, at 71, he returned to head coaching,at tiny Keiser, then Northwood College, in West Palm Beach. There Massimino’s acumen resurfaced and he led that school to two NAIA championship games, the most recent in 2014.
He spent his finals years doing what he knew he was meant to do.
“He loves coaching and he loves the kids,” Massimino’s ex-assistant Mitch Buonaguro once said. “He’ll scream and yell at the kids on the court but then take them into his office afterward and talk about anything but basketball. There’s not a kid (he’s coached) who doesn’t love him.”