Even if you view March Madness as a three-week hall of hugs – giddy hugs and sad hugs – the hug that happened with 53.1 seconds on the game clock last Saturday in San Jose was one doozy of a hug. It boasted tears, gratitude, breakthrough and, even beyond that, a dollop of college basketball history and a tinge of whimsy.
Mark Few had urged Gonzaga (36-1) to a first Final Four on his 18th commendable try, and had you just happened by and looked at the 54-year-old coach hugging a 22-year-old player, you might have thought they just culminated five years of human collaboration – yelling, arguing, loving, hating.
“I just thanked him, said, ‘God bless you,’ for believing in us,” Few described it.
In truth, he had coached the guy for one transfer sit-out season, one real season, and that’s it, one blip in the two-decade Gonzaga saga. Yet the guy, Nigel Williams-Goss, had been about as close to perfect as a realistic coach could hope, even if he just spent four NCAA Tournament games entering Saturday’s national semifinal against South Carolina shooting 19-for-61, or 31.1 percent. That actually marked an improvement of his three-game mark, which was 28.6 percent (12-for-42), all while his free throw percentage had dipped from 89.5 to 70.4 (19-for-27).
That’s because the Gonzaga floor general, one of five finalists for the Wooden Award, is a see-the-whole-game type even among see-the-whole-game types, so that box scores both tell and hide his effects. He’s an academic powerhouse, a graduate already, with one of those brains that could watch basketball film all the day without growing weary of the same damned thing.
Further, he utters things such as this, two weeks ago at his locker in Salt Lake City: “I just don’t really believe that anyone should have a big ego. I think we’re all humans, and I think we should respect one another, and no matter what you’re good at, whether you’re a good athlete or a good musician or whatever, that’s just a talent and that’s just a hobby but at the end of the day, the most important thing is just being a good person and trying to live your life the best you can. That’s just been stressed to me from a young age, and that’s how I approach every day.”
Few had welcomed, by transfer from Washington after his two .500-ish seasons there, a connoisseur’s player who makes the eyes burrow deep into the geeky portions of the box score. His energy and command can lure attention even when he’s 19 for 61. He’s a 6-foot-3 guard often called a one-man fast break, while happy to get 30 rebounds in four NCAA Tournament games (second on the team), happy to demand to guard West Virginia’s best shooter on the final play of a taut scrap in the Sweet 16, happy to joke about playing 30 minutes a game on the block if only the coach would let him, happy to think enough of himself to bark instructions.
“He’s really one of those guys that, he knows how to talk to players, I think,” said Zach Collins, Gonzaga’s improving 7-foot freshman reserve who, like Williams-Goss, played high school ball in Las Vegas. “He kind of knows what makes people tick. And he knows that he can get on some guys and then other guys, he has to take over in the corner, explain what to do here, and not necessarily yell at them and stuff. He’s just a great leader, and off the court, he’s just like one of our friends. He’s not really thinking about basketball or anything.
“He’s definitely the source. He brings it every day in practice. He’s yelling, screaming, when we’re just doing like breakdown drills. He brings the energy, for sure. That’s just contagious. When he hear Nigel talk, we’re like, ‘If he’s our leader, why not talk? We can be that much better if he’s doing it.’ He brings the energy and it makes all the difference in the world.”
(For the record, Collins prefers yelling.)
In a West Coast Conference tournament semifinal, Williams-Goss drove thoughtfully (25 points on 9-for-13 shooting, five assists, eight rebounds). In the final, against Saint Mary’s, he went for a devil of a stat line: six rebounds, six assists, six steals, with 22 points on 6-for-11 shooting. Then the NCAA Tournament came loudly and weightily, and the puzzle changed again. In the first round against South Dakota State, Williams-Goss shot 4-for-13 as a player prominent enough to make people wonder why. As a player who famously covets all the game films any assistant wants to drop-box to him, he went to study.
Rating his favorite sport as “90 percent mental,” he said, “I mean, something small … you know, on my shot … I noticed that on all my shots, my momentum was kind of going backward, and I wasn’t ending up on the same spot coming forward. I was kind of fading back a little bit. That’s like a little tweak that you can make, that you can be better next time. But you have to watch it and see those things to understand, maybe, why you weren’t successful.”
He burned out of the gate in the second round against Northwestern, with a glistening 14 points, six rebounds and four assists by halftime, a picture of command, then straggled through a 1-for-9 second half in which Northwestern’s comeback overwhelmed him and almost all else. Still: 20 points, eight rebounds, four assists, two steals, with three turnovers. Alongside fellow transfers Johnathan Williams (Missouri) and Jordan Mathews (California), he had become the leading guy, a stat guy and a glue guy on a team of which Williams-Goss said, “I just feel like our whole team has been pulling the rope in the same direction all season long.”
Toward the Final Four, Few could note the oddity that this was the team, of all the good teams. In his 28 years at Gonzaga, the concept of transfers, he said, had changed from “almost like a scarlet letter” to “a really, really valuable aspect” of his program. “So I mean, I walked out there on the practice floor, was, like, we’ve never, ever started with this many new people as far as meshing them together,” Few said. “And I think they deserve all the credit in the world for – they’re as connected as any team we’ve had that’s played together for four years.”
One of many clues to that might have come in an essay the leader, Williams-Goss, wrote lately for Players Tribune, in which he told of his first day at Gonzaga, overhearing some classmates talk about their intramural league, then asking about it, then declining their invitation while refraining from telling them why. (They finally saw him introduced on Gonzaga’s preseason Kraziness in the Kennel night.) By Saturday with 53.1 seconds left, he had gone from his determined childhood in Oregon to prep school in Las Vegas to college in Seattle to another college in Spokane, and had become unforgettable in Spokane.
By all accounts, he’s not even remotely annoying.
“I don’t think so,” he said, as if refraining from certainty just in case.