Suddenly, a different side of Mark Few
Sep
10
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Most of the chatter around Mark Few these days has to do with what he might have done to somebody else when he was picked up on suspicion of drunken driving the other night.
Once that was reconciled, I was drawn to the question of what the arrest does to Mark Few.
What broadsided me most was how un-Few-like this was. Not that he’s a saint, but that he rarely leaves himself vulnerable. Almost exclusively, those moments have been in the athletic arena, when one of his teams couldn’t score down the stretch or he waited too long to switch defenses. But he’s got a ridiculous 630-125 record as a basketball coach at Gonzaga, he’s been to 22 straight NCAA tournaments and two national-title games, so there’s precious little to nitpick.
A lot of that is because Few is intensely private. His down time is nobody else’s. Before transfers became such so predominant in college basketball, he would disappear for much of the spring. Gonzaga helped there, too. Those glad-handing May caravans that occupy coaches at big-time schools wouldn’t be part of his job description – and indeed, that understanding was part of the allure in staying put in Spokane when he could have gone damn near anywhere.
So it’s no surprise that he doesn’t do social media. He’s not on Twitter. He’s long disdained sports-media yardbarking, the pat conclusions and the lazy narratives. In 2017, when the Zags marched to the school’s first Final Four, he scoffed at the popular notion that he managed to get a monkey off his back.
All of this is by way of saying that with his DUI arrest, he just invited all that conversation, all the yakkers, into his living room. The cloak of invincibility came crashing down, and suddenly, Mark Few looks a little different to a lot of people.
He issued a statement, mentioning a “lapse in judgment.” A lapse in judgment? That’s what you say when you forget to bring sunscreen. This is more like an egregious, confounding lapse in judgment.
Somebody said blowing a .12 blood-alcohol reading (as documents report) might have reflected a third beer, instead of two, at dinner. Not even close. Somebody else lamented that Few didn’t wait an hour before driving, as if that would have dropped him below the legal .08 limit. That’s another figurative air ball, minimizing the reality that .12 is a pretty stiff number, one and a half times the legal limit.
So, the cold facts: It’s September and college basketball preparations are ramping up. And the coach at the school people are picking to win that coveted national championship just got busted on a DUI charge.
It’s impossible to know whether Few’s arrest could impact recruiting, which has been boffo lately at Gonzaga. At the very least, it puts him in the position of having some explaining to do.
We can say this definitively: Chris Standiford, the new GU athletic director, scarcely had time to straighten the photos on his office wall before this crisis hit – he had been on the job all of two working days. As introductories go, Few’s was not ideal.
I wondered whether this could affect what has evolved into a likelihood that Few makes the Naismith Hall of Fame. Bob Huggins, with a DUI in his background and more wins than Few, hasn’t been selected. It took the Hall so long to enshrine Eddie Sutton, also with a DUI and 806 victories, that it came posthumously.
But an old crony in my biz with a sense for the Hall selection process draws a distinction between Huggins, Sutton and Few. The first two acquired reputations as rogues, whereas this is Few’s first blemish on an exemplary career. He’s been a pillar in the Spokane community; he and his wife Marcy helped raise millions in the Coaches Versus Cancer campaign.
Few is a good man who did something colossally dumb. My guess is, this is a searing, traumatizing moment for him.
It may be that’s a good thing.
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