Mar. 29—Cluck-U Chicken.
That was the name of the only food joint open deep into a night in the early 1990s, somewhere near Santa Clara.
Details now fuzzy from the intervening decades, I found myself driving Dan Monson, Mark Few and Bill Grier on a midnight food run.
The best I can recall, Gonzaga had completed a late game in the West Coast Conference Tournament at Santa Clara, and I, the GU beat writer, was the only person in the hotel lobby at that moment who had a car capable of transporting four hungry men.
The three passengers in the economy rental were Gonzaga basketball assistants to head coach Dan Fitzgerald. The combined resumes of the three were meager at the time, but their influence on GU's rising trajectory already was being felt.
Gonzaga was still scraping by on the cheap, rosters mostly filled with the overlooked and marginalized. The try-hard guys of Zags lore, fueled by rejection or neglect.
Against odds, those three assistants would become Division I head coaches. Monson would start a streak of absurd success at GU and sustain a long career. Grier would coach San Diego to an NCAA Tournament win over No. 4 seed Connecticut.
And Few would become a Hall of Fame finalist with the highest winning percentage of any active coach in the nation. Not to mention, be the only college coach chosen to assist the 2024 USA Olympic gold medal team.
Surely, what Gonzaga has become was rooted in the dreams — delusional at the time? — of the three guys in that car.
Had somebody told me, on that night so long ago, that Gonzaga basketball would become one of the most unlikely success stories in the history of college sports, man, I'd have choked on my chicken.
----With his team over the past month or so, Mark Few used the term "desperation" to capture the urgency of their situation.
The Zags were nearing the end of a second consecutive season in which they had dropped from the Top 25 rankings, and they had lost more conference games than ever under Few (four).
Their consecutive streak of NCAA Tournament appearances seemed endangered.
Perhaps because of this pressure, Few had several times reminded his team and fans and media of not only how long this had gone on, but also how far they had to go to even get the thing started.
And that's the hook of this story, and the reason for the ancient scene-setting chicken prologue.
Each of the past two seasons reflected a reality of contemporary college basketball: Even though Gonzaga enjoyed impressive roster retention, new players occupied important roles, and their assimilation, and the refinement of their contributions, required time.
Patience is not a strong suit for fans, social media, or ranking agencies.
In both seasons, Few and his staff instituted changes to the starting lineup and rotation, and laid out for them the necessity of playing with greater intensity.
They responded both years; last year advancing to the NCAA Sweet 16 for a record-tying ninth consecutive time. This season, although finishing three games back in the regular season, a win in the West Coast Conference Tournament earned the NCAA automatic-qualifying bid.
Their tournament-appearance record stretched to 26 (27 if including the 2020 tournament for which the Zags qualified, but was not held due to COVID) — second longest behind Kansas.
Nobody outside the inner sphere knows if Few brought up the word "streak" along the way, but the unprecedented skein of success for the Gonzaga men's basketball team had to loom like a hungry beast that demanded to be fed.
Few is a coach, at his core, but Gonzaga basketball has become such a megalithic athletic corporation that the job must increasingly force him to extend his executive function. It has to feel, more ...
