Amid all the gloom and cynicism attending sports these days come a couple of unrelated heart-warming stories, oddly enough emerging from the same place, Charlottesville, Va.
By now, you’ve probably heard one of them. Tony Bennett, not that one, but the one who coached the Virginia men’s basketball team to the school’s first national championship, did a rather remarkable thing.
Customarily, when a coach wins a title in a major college sport, he or she is offered a raise, usually because another school or pro team is making an offer.
Bennett was presented with a potential pay hike by UVA’s president and its athletic director.
Declaring that he has more than he needs, Bennett declined the raise,asking that the money be diverted to his staff and to improvements for the program, as well as through the rest of the athletic department.
It was a stunning, virtually unprecedented move especially by a man, Bennett, whose team suffered perhaps the most ignominious loss in men’s college basketball history just a year before.
Or had you forgotten how the Cavaliers, the top seed in their region, lost in the first round of the NCAA tournament to UMBC, the first and only time, a men’s top seed lost to a 16th seed?
Bennett surely didn’t forget and his behavior, in view of the typical cowardice and self-aggrandizement attendant to coaches, would be noble anywhere apparently than at Virginia.
To wit, Joanne Boyle, Bennett’s former women’s colleague at Virginia, Boyle had had successful runs at Richmond and at Cal-Berkeley before coming to Charlottesville in 2011.
Boyle led the Cavaliers to the NCAA tournament in 2018, but abruptly retired from coaching at the age of 54, with many years apparently left on her career odometer.
Initially, Boyle, who is single, said her departure was for family reasons, but didn’t elaborate. Eventually, she revealed that she was leaving basketball to fight fulltime to keep her adopted daughter, Ngoty, in the United States.
Boyle saw the girl when she was an infant in her native Senegal in 2012, but it took two years before she could bring Ngoty to Virginia.
Over the next four years, as the little girl became increasingly accustomed to life here, Joanne Boyle battled through increasing levelsof red tape.
In one instance, after mother and adoptive daughter had arrived in Dakar to shore up paperwork that would have cleared the way for Ngoty to become a U.S. citizen, Boyle was told that she had to first prove that Ngoty was a Senegalese citizen.
A Senegalese official suggested that Boyle leave the girl there while the matter was settled, a suggestion she rejected.
They were able to return to Charlottesville, and, three weeks ago, Ngoty Rain Boyle became a U.S. citizen, the first child to be adopted into this country from Senegal in five years.
At a time when our faith in the coaches and players we watch and the very institutions that govern our sports has been shaken, it’s good to know that there are men and women like Tony Bennett and Joanne Boyle who recognize that there’s more to life than wins and losses.
And that’s how I see it for this week.
