Pop quiz: At what age did John Wooden call it a career?
Don’t feel bad — I had to look this up myself.
Answer: 64 years of age.
Bo Ryan will coach his last game at age 68 after announcing that the 2015-2016 college basketball season will be his last. It’s not that much of a headline when viewed through the prism of age. “68-YEAR-OLD COACH CALLS IT A CAREER!” is not cause for astonishment.
What’s surprising about Ryan’s decision is that the boss Badger from the bench was as feisty and spirited as he ever was in these past few seasons. On and off the court, Ryan worked — in the sense of putting forth effort, but also in the sense of finding an angle — to promote and protect the best interests of his program. Everyone else in the Big Ten hated him for it, but everyone in Madison loved him fiercely. Ryan fits the classic description of any great sports irritant — prodigiously skilled and thoroughly clever in his profession, he was the kind of guy you’d always want in your corner, but you’d loathe him to pieces if he was on the opposite side of the floor.
Was Ryan advancing in years? Sure. Was he going to immediately cultivate a team as talented as the one he just enjoyed coaching over the past two seasons? Very probably not. Did the process of coaching into the last weekend of each of the past two seasons, in a spotlight Wisconsin basketball had never previously experienced (the 2000 Final Four was a Cinderella run; 2014 and 2015 were journeys made by heavyweight teams), weigh on him? It’s hard to think it didn’t to some degree.
Yet, for all of those likelihoods, it’s still a bit surprising that Bo Ryan decided he wanted only one more season of college basketball.
More tributes and appreciations will be offered next March and April, but for now, let’s make sure that two specific aspects of Ryan’s career are appropriately remembered.
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It might have been harder to appreciate in the present moment, when the dramatic crescendo of the 2014-2015 college basketball season was so intimately connected to the question of whether the Kentucky Wildcats would go undefeated or not. Yet, it should be a lot easier to appreciate now: Bo Ryan’s attempt to win a national title, two nights after taking down Kentucky, was as compelling a story as Big Blue’s pursuit of immortality.
What was difficult to grasp — and savor — about Ryan’s chase of a championship is that the story wasn’t front and center throughout the past season. Kentucky’s story was an obvious one, with the tension building each time Big Blue moved closer to its glittering, gleaming, 40-0 goal. Kentucky’s journey carried with it a delicious suspense that escalated day by day, week by week, tournament site after tournament site.
Wisconsin was busy trying to handle Roy Williams and North Carolina in a contentious Sweet 16 game, and then Arizona in an Elite Eight rematch held in Southern California. When Wisconsin met Kentucky, the focus rightly belonged with — and on — the Wildcats. They were the centerpiece of that national semifinal reunion. Wisconsin wasn’t trying to make history on that Saturday night in Indianapolis; it was trying to thwart it. Yet — and this is the part that was harder to grasp — as soon as Wisconsin did beat Kentucky, it jumped to the forefront of the sporting scene. The Badgers’ story became infused with the urgency, poignancy and history Kentucky relinquished when it lost.
Kentucky, of course, carried the burden of a story that was — and is — 39 years in the making. The 1976 Indiana Hoosiers were the last team to go unbeaten in college hoops, so Big Blue was competing against that length of time.
When Wisconsin beat Kentucky, Bo Ryan and his players were competing against 24 years of history, because it was in 1991 that college basketball last witnessed the defeat of a previously unbeaten team in a national semifinal. The conqueror of that unbeaten team had not yet won a national title. Its coach had done everything in the sport other than lifting a trophy on what coaches simply refer to in the business as “Monday night,” the night of the national championship game every season (since 1973).
Wisconsin was in position to do what that other team had done in 1991, also in Indianapolis, the site of the 2015 Final Four. That fact that “that other team” was Duke, Wisconsin’s opponent 24 years later, made the national title game a truly remarkable convergence of stories, something much more than merely noteworthy or interesting. Seeing Wisconsin-Duke in this past April’s title fight represented two people looking in a mirror and seeing each other clearly across 24 years of time. Bo Ryan tried to become what Mike Krzyzewski became in 1991 in the Hoosier Dome.
When Wisconsin grabbed that three-possession lead midway through the second half, it seemed that one of the great stories of our time in college basketball was about to be written. However, Grayson Allen and Tyus Jones had other ideas, and so the story Duke authored in 1991 was not repeated by Wisconsin in 2015… because of Duke.
This absence of a final crowning moment — of the full completion of Wisconsin’s rags-to-riches story as a basketball program, begun by Dick Bennett many years earlier — won’t haunt Bo Ryan. Moreover, it shouldn’t. It merely stands out as a reminder that as great a coach as Ryan has been — he’s a sure Hall of Famer, one of the best coaches in Big Ten history — not every giant in the profession gets the fairy-tale ending.
It’s true that unlike John Chaney and Gene Keady and a few other coaches one could place in a similar category of greatness, Ryan did break down the Final Four barrier late in his career. In that sense, his basketball life will always remain fulfilled. Yet, the absence of a finishing kick against Duke — particularly from Sam Dekker — is the kind of “what if” lamentation that will never disappear from the public record.
It’s sad, it’s unfortunate, and it would have made for a great story — the story of a long lifetime in college basketball — but Bo Ryan’s “almost” moment against Duke a few months ago now becomes more painfully acute in light of his decision. It’s impossible to not call forth that still-fresh memory this week.
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Naturally, though, the story of Bo Ryan is an immensely successful one. If there’s pain in Madison over this decision and the accompanying reality that Ryan’s tenure will be a magnificent but ultimately unfinished symphony, the Badgers can also recall just how amazingly consistent their coach has been. Given the fact that Ryan has just one season left, the main drama of the coming campaign will revolve around one specific pursuit, something Wisconsin has made second nature during the entirety of Ryan’s stay in the Kohl Center.
It’s true that the Big Ten didn’t begin its postseason conference tournament until the latter half of the 1990s. In this respect, no Big Ten program has decades of history to measure itself against. Nevertheless, it remains that in a cutthroat conference — consistently one of the best in the United States — Bo Ryan has never failed to get a first-round bye in the Big Ten Tournament. His Wisconsin teams have finished in the top four of the league every single season. In a league where Tom Izzo, John Beilein, and Thad Matta prowl the sidelines; in a league where basketball-centric programs such as Indiana and Purdue reside; in a league where Illinois and Iowa can call upon rich basketball traditions, only Wisconsin has been able to make the top four of the league a permanent home under one coach.
This is Bo Ryan’s most special long-term achievement in Madison. If he can carry it through and maintain the perfect track record next winter, he might not attain the level of immortality he denied to the Kentucky Wildcats this past spring. However, Ryan would be able to ride into the sunset knowing that the program he inherited from Dick Bennett never really wavered in any larger or profound sense.
Bo Ryan took something solid in Madison and improved it by many orders of magnitude before he left. Ryan fell short of the mountaintop, albeit by the smallest of margins, but that’s going to be a mere footnote when matched against all of his enormous accomplishments as a Badger.
