UConn's Kevin Ollie prefers to lead defending champs from behind
STORRS, Conn. – Going into last season’s NCAA tournament, nobody believed in the UConn Huskies.
Believed? Hell, nobody was even talking about Kevin Ollie’s Huskies. They had lost to Louisville by 33 points — 33! — in their last regular-season game. They were a 7-seed facing a 10-seed in St. Joseph’s in a game that many had as a fashionable upset pick. Show me someone at the beginning of the tournament who believed UConn would make the Final Four, and I’ll show you a blood relative of one of their players.
But what we didn’t know at the time — and what we surely know now, as UConn begins the new college basketball season as the defending champs — is that perhaps the greatest thing Ollie, one of the rising stars in his profession, excels at is belief.
Two decades ago, he believed his basketball talents could take him from the rough streets of Compton, Calif., to the heights of college basketball. He believed he could turn that good-though-not-great college basketball career — he never averaged double-figures scoring in four years at UConn and went undrafted in 1995 — into a 13-year NBA career. He believed things would work out for him in an NBA career that had more than its share of 10-day contracts and bleak moments. He believed that he would be the perfect successor to Hall of Famer Jim Calhoun, even when an uncertain UConn administration initially committed to only a seven-month contract.
And all through last season, he kept believing. He believed in this UConn team when it was on a road trip in Dallas in January; he took his players to AT&T Stadium, site of the Final Four three months later, and he told them they would be back here in April. In the NCAA tournament, he believed when they were down against St. Joseph’s with less than a minute left and a freshman who shot 57 percent from the free-throw line needed to make a tip-in and the free throw to send the game into overtime, where UConn won and began an improbable — you even could say unbelievable — run to the title.
The most defining characteristic of the defending national champion is that this team believed in itself when no one else did. And that also happens to be the most defining characteristic of its coach, a trait that goes far past basketball and into the very essence of this man — the son of a minister whose life has been one big lesson in overcoming long odds and other people’s doubts through an overflowing cup of faith.
I was in Storrs recently to talk with Ollie for an interview that will air on FOX Sports 1 next week. I wanted to find what it was from his unlikely life journey that led last season’s team to believe in themselves when no one else did.
“Success ain’t never on discount,” he told me. “You gotta really believe in the dark because there’s been some dark days. Like where I got cut on December 23rd. It’s like two days before Christmas. We got the Christmas tree at the apartment and everything, and my kids are ready, and then I get traded. Then I have to leave and report to another team in 48 hours, and then my kids are back there in the apartment with the Christmas tree.
“But if that purpose is greater than that pain, you’re going to always get through things,” he continued. “It’s always from my faith in God that He’s going to put me in certain situations. I just got to adjust, but He knows the outcome. He’s already seen the DVD. He knows the ending. The only thing I got to do is stay faithful.”
If there is a polar opposite of the loud, sometimes cantankerous, always-in-the-center-of-attention Calhoun, it is Ollie: steady, solid, humble, deferential. As Ollie told me, “I like to lead from the back.” Whereas Calhoun loves to hold court, Ollie would prefer to blend in.
But there is one big common denominator between the two, and it’s toughness. When Ollie visited Storrs as a recruit, the wide-eyed South Central Los Angeles kid saw the cows near campus and knew he was in a different world than the concrete jungle where he was raised. He knew he’d fit in just fine in this idyllic New England college town when he was watching a scrimmage at Gampel Pavilion and a couple of teammates got in a fight right there at midcourt. All the sudden it felt like Crenshaw High School again.
“It was like, ‘Wow, Coach, you’re not gonna break that up?’ ” Ollie laughed. “And Coach was just like, ‘No.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, this is cool.’ I did love the style. I was like, ‘Man, this place is totally different from where I was at.’ But the thing that was the common denominator was they all love basketball.”
There’s one more part of Ollie’s faith — a strong Christian faith passed on from his mother — that explains what made last season possible. It’s the Christian concept of servant leadership. When Ollie talks about leading from behind, he means that his leadership style is one that prods everyone else to be better but doesn’t exalt himself. Exalting themselves was the problem for UConn at the end of the regular season, when the Huskies got blown out by Louisville. Ollie calls it “do-me basketball” — players do "me" just fine but don’t care about the other four guys.
In the locker room after the Louisville blowout, the turning point of UConn’s season, Ollie told his players this: “You play like that, you probably got two games left. You probably have the AAC Tournament. If you play like that you’ll probably lose that game. Then you have the NCAA tournament. And you’ll probably be in the first round, and you’ll lose that game, too, if you play do-me basketball.”
I asked him to explain “do-me basketball,” mostly because I plan to appropriate the phrase as my own. “It’s just me — it isn’t no we,” Ollie explained. “This is my basketball. I’mma just play. I’mma forget about defense. I’mma just go into offense. and that’s what we kind of did in that Louisville game. I think everybody took it upon themselves, like, ‘I could beat Louisville.’ I, I, I instead of we.”
Ollie made a 13-year NBA career out of focusing on “we” instead of “me.” He was never a star, never even close. But he was brought into Cleveland to mentor LeBron James as a rookie. And later in his career, Kevin Durant credited him with instilling the winning culture at the Oklahoma City Thunder. That mentality is why his name was the subject of so many NBA coaching rumors this offseason.
As the Huskies begin their title defense — they opened with a come-from-behind 66-53 win over Bryant on Friday — he’s already talking about having faith and creating servant-leaders. Ryan Boatright is a senior this season, taking over for Shabazz Napier in the point guard role. He’s been susceptible to do-me basketball in the past. But Ollie is trusting him. He had Boatright call all the underclassmen in the offseason to mentor them. He’s trying to make Boatright into more of a giver, less of a taker. Here’s what he told me about Boatright leading into the season: “He’s beating the same heartbeat that I’m beating, and that’s a beautiful thing.”
In essence, he’s sprinkling a little bit of himself on Boatright and on this blueblood program.
“I’m a point guard,” Ollie told me, “so I always saw myself as a coach. I’m a giver at heart. It wasn’t like give me the accolades because I never cared about that. At the end of the day, I wanted to be on that basketball court so the coach would trust me at the end of the game, that I can execute, that I can get my team in the right position. And I’ve just carried that attitude in life.”
It works in life, especially a self-professed Christian life. And as last season made apparent, it works in basketball too.
Follow Reid Forgrave on Twitter @reidforgrave or email him at ReidForgrave@gmail.com.
