That's not why I asked the Washington Post to write about him — although that would have been a legitimate request.
Donoher (Mick or Mickey to his friends) was the first college basketball coach I ever met. I was 11 years old. He and his wife, Sonia, passed away in 2020 after 66 years of marriage, but he remained a friend whom he came to cherish even after his college coaching career ended in 1989. was.
If you're one of those people who rolls their eyes when I tell you how and why I met my coach, stop reading now.
My father was never a sports fan, but having attended the City University of New York when it was still a prestigious basketball school (before the gambling scandals of the 1950s), he still had a warm spot for college hoops. is. I was growing up. He also had a friend named Fred Podesta, who was high up in the hierarchy at Madison Square Garden and got us really good seats.
Most of the time, I was buying Knicks and Rangers tickets myself, as well as tickets to regular season college basketball games. But during the NIT, when all the games were at Madison Square Garden, my dad got tickets from Podesta and we started in the quarterfinals.
In 1968, only 23 teams qualified for the NCAA Tournament, but the NIT was still important. The final team of the year was Dayton, which struggled for most of the season after starting on its way to the national title game, losing to Lou Alcindor's first team, UCLA.
“We were lucky to lose that game by 15 points,” Donoher said years later. “coach [John] Wooden stepped back in the last six minutes to keep the score close for us. ”
Dayton was coming into the game having defeated North Carolina in the national semifinals, coach Dean Smith's first Final Four.
A year later, still slightly hungover from the ecstasy of that run, Dayton started 6-9. The Flyers, then an independent, had to win their final nine games to qualify for the NIT. In the quarterfinals, we played Fordham, one of the New York teams I root for and support. As I was rooting for the Rams (loudly), my dad noticed his three women sitting a few seats away from us, rooting for Dayton just as passionately.
“I bet they're Dayton coaches' wives,” my dad said.
When future Fordham athletic director Frank McLaughlin missed a jumper at the buzzer and Dayton won 61-60, I sat gloomily waiting for Game 2 to begin.
I looked up and saw an attractive woman standing over me. My father was right. “I'm Sonia Donoher,” she said. “My husband is the coach at Dayton, so I can't honestly say I'm disappointed your team lost. But you know your basketball, right?
Dayton's Don May wonderful player. Sonia introduced herself to his father and we talked for a few minutes. She asked if we were going to the semifinals. When I said yes, she asked if I could pull a Dayton player.
And the Flyers defeated Notre Dame in overtime. On Saturday afternoon, they defeated Kansas and Joe Joe White to win the title.
“Would you like to come see Don and the players?'' Sonia asked.
When Sonia introduced me to her husband, he said: She said, “Sonia has told me a lot about you. She says you know her own hoops.”
Then he took me to the locker room and introduced me to the whole team. Two weeks later, a package arrived from Dayton. Inside was a sheet signed by everyone on the team. and Autographed photo of Dong May. “Dear John. Thank you for helping us win the NIT.”
Thirteen years later, I was a young Post reporter covering the Final Four in Philadelphia. Before the first game on Saturday, I was killing time looking at all the men in the coach's section. I recognized Coach Donoher (he was always “Coach Donoher” to me) and walked over to introduce myself. When I started telling him the story of how we met at his NIT in 1968, he interjected, saying: Sonia and I had always wondered if the story we read in the Post was by the same boy we met in 1968.was So I'm proud of you!
It turned out that one of the Donohers' sons lived in Annapolis and had sent the newspaper to his parents.
Four years later, when I was living in Indiana and writing a book about Donoher's friend Bob Knight (Don was one of Knight's assistants on the 1984 U.S. Olympic team), I had dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Donoher. I drove 2 hours from Bloomington to Dayton to take the exam. . Mick (derived from a nickname given to him as a child in Toledo, after a local fighter named Mickey Donoher) and Sonia were the ones I felt after a particularly difficult day fighting the Knights. More than once, it has helped me get rid of my gloomy mood. his capricious personality;
“I promise,” Mick said one night. “He won't like the book. It's just who he is.”
Of course he was right.
We stayed in touch over the years, and the Basketball Writers Association of America selected him to be the third recipient of the Dean Smith Award, created to honor coaches who embody the principles Smith embodied. I was proud of that.
Years ago, my friend Gary Noone, who passed away last month, wrote an article about his first encounter with Donoher when he was a young reporter for the Dayton Daily News. Dayton lost a close game to DePaul. Gary stood outside the locker room, thinking it would be at least 15 minutes before he got a chance to talk to the losing coach. At the time, there were no formal rules regarding post-game interviews.
“I was there less than a minute,” Noon wrote. “Donoher stuck his head out the door and said, 'Are you going to meet the deadline?' 'Yes,' I said. “Come in,” he said. He was that way until the day he was fired (and beyond). In good times and bad, the whole class always takes action. ”
that was Will Don Donoher understand a reporter meeting a deadline or a wide-eyed 11-year-old? He was always the whole class.