Scoop Jardine explains what he now understands about playing for Jim Boeheim

Just as when he played point guard for Syracuse, Scoop Jardine can see his old coach Jim Boeheim’s retirement from all sorts of angles. Actually more now, since Jardine is a first-year junior college head coach himself.

“I didn’t think this was going to be the year,” Jardine said this week over the phone after just landing in Los Angeles, where he is now the coach at Los Angeles Trade Technical College. “How they went out as a team. I know Coach being as competitive as he is — I really wanted him to come back another year, me personally. I was bummed out. Really sad that he’s gone.”

Jardine then added, “But it’s time, right?”

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After 47 seasons, at age 78, going 17-15 this season with a first-round loss to Wake Forest in the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament added to the fact that Syracuse had been treading water these last few years in the ACC. A press release from the school announcing the retirement was apparently ready to be sent as soon as the season ended. Not the way Jardine wanted to see it for his coach, the second-winningest coach in NCAA Division I men’s basketball history.

But with Adrian “Red” Autry as successor, just over a decade ahead of Jardine as a Syracuse guard, taking over as head coach — the Neumann Goretti High graduate said he likes that part. The way Jardine sees it, Autry has paved the way for him as a player and coach.

None of it easy, playing for Boeheim, Jardine made clear.

“I’m actually grateful I got the opportunity to play for him,” said Jardine, who played professionally overseas after playing for the Orange. “I learned so much from him on and off the court. … I kind of never agreed with him when I was playing. But he got the best out of me as a player. He made us all compete.”

Stories?

“I’ve got so many,” Jardine said. “I’ll give you one.”

His freshman year, February 2008, coming off a suspension “for something I barely did,” Jardine said. “I had just gotten reinstated.” Syracuse was heading to Philly to play Villanova, at what was then called the Wachovia Center. Before the suspension, he’d been starting. Before the trip, Jardine went to Boeheim’s office.

“If you’re planning on not playing me, I’d rather not go to Philly — because I’m expected to play,” Jardine remembers telling Boeheim, adding that he loved how he and other players were allowed to express themselves with their coach.

“He was adamant that he was going to play me,” Jardine said.

And the coach did — for three minutes.

“I was hot,” Jardine said. “So many people were there. My whole family was there. I was more hurt. We won. I never wanted to let the team see it. We won the game.”

Jardine got to the shower quickly. He kept his mouth shut.

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“He sensed my energy,” Jardine said. “I was trying not to show it. He kept egging me, egging me, egging me. I just snapped. I lost it.”

In real-time, Jardine said, “I literally thought I was done. In my head, I was thinking of other schools to call.”

Boeheim took him into another little room in the arena. This part, Jardine didn’t see coming.

“He just hugged me,” Jardine said. “He didn’t say anything.”

Was Jardine saying anything then? Still mad?

“No, I needed it,” Jardine said. “He wasn’t mad at me. That was the most important thing.”

After starting 10 games as a freshman, Jardine sat out the next with a stress fracture, then came off the bench for a season, before starting every game as a junior and as a senior.

“When you’re playing, it’s great,” Jardine said of those later years. “For the most part, I was an extension of him. He expected a lot of his point guards. He [had] three point guards on his bench [as assistants] now.”

Jardine said he sees now in his first year coaching at any level that it isn’t about any one player, that a coach must get the most out of everybody.

“I understand what he was doing,” Jardine said. “I didn’t when I was playing.”

How the era ended, even if it was time, that’s just not sitting right.

“I thought it was going to be a farewell tour next year, the whole nine,” Jardine said.

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