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SAN ANTONIO — Their first meeting transpired in a deli during some Final Four around 20 years back, and the accounts of it tend to contain the word "lox." It drew a dozen or so men. It sounds categorically informal but upheld an old truth about what happens when people belonging to an outnumbered group convene. "There was this immediate connection," Jason Belzer said, "of basketball and Judaism."
The Jewish Coaches Association, which Belzer helms as CEO and president, sprouted organically from there across years and Final Fours and delis, then Hillels and synagogues, all the way to this weekend and to quite some vista. It's not just the number expected for the Final Four breakfast of Saturday - maybe 250, with other faiths amid - but also a number assured for the Final Four semifinals of Saturday night.
That number, three, feels even larger than the 250 because it refers to the Jewish head coaches among the four who have reached this bracketed pinnacle: the 65-year-old Auburn coach raised near Boston, Bruce Pearl; the 37-year-old Duke coach raised near Chicago, Jon Scheyer; and the 39-year-old Florida coach raised in Phoenix, Todd Golden. "Yeah, of course you're proud," Scheyer said here Friday. "You're proud of a lot of things, too - proud of representing Duke and our team. I also acknowledge it's a pretty rare thing to have three of us in the Final Four."
When Pearl reached the 2019 Final Four in his fifth season at Auburn after stints at Southern Indiana, Milwaukee and Tennessee, he counted as more of a rarity. He became the fifth Jewish coach in a men's Final Four, following Nat Holman (City College of New York, 1947 and 1950), Harry Litwack (Temple, 1956 and 1958), Guy Lewis (Houston, five times between 1967 and 1984) and Larry Brown (UCLA and Kansas, thrice between 1980 and 1988). By Friday, Pearl raved about the United States just before saying: "I tell my players that there are going to be obstacles to success but not roadblocks. I don't want to hear it, that just because of antisemitism, racism, profiling, you can't be anything you want to be."
Having 75 percent of coaches at a men's Final Four be Jewish might have seemed more far-fetched to him during his childhood, except maybe not quite.
"I'm going to think that as a young Jewish boy growing up in Boston, I would have been proud," Pearl said. "But I also think back then it would have been a surprise to some of my peers that weren't Jewish. They may have been like, ‘There's no way that would be the case,' because obviously we're not athletic enough. That's not the stereotype. There is a stereotype about teaching, you know?"
Pearl's vocality on these subjects long since involves expounding in block paragraphs, whether on a podcast with a rabbi or a dais before reporters. His stalwart support for Israel has mingled with his expansive gratitude toward his native United States in becoming a fixture of his presence at March Madness. He finished an answer Friday about the three coaches, noting how basketball has breathed in "the inner cities, in the ghettos and neighborhoods [in which] most of American Jewry lived." Then he got a question about the nonconference schedule. Then he said, "I want to finish your question" - the earlier question.
Then he spoke of Israeli war hostage Edan Alexander and said: "Just a reminder that while we're all celebrating this incredible championship here in San Antonio, there's tremendous suffering going on in the Middle East, and we pray for peace and the hostages to come home. If the hostages are released, maybe the death and the dying will stop."
At these Final Four dreamscapes that feel so far from the world's rotating buffet of horrors, there's always a hotel bustling with coaches. Here it's adjacent the famed River Walk, and Belzer spoke Thursday while members of the Jewish Coaches Association happened by and chatted briefly. There was Steve DeMeo, the coach at Northwest Florida State who used to assist at Iona, Providence, UCF, Hofstra, East Carolina and St. John's. There was Eran Ganot, the coach at Hawaii.
Everyone agrees the three-coach occurrence carries deep meaning and evidence of multiplied opportunities. Said Belzer, a man of considerable energy also involved in various college-sports-related businesses and also teaching law classes at Rutgers: "I think the average American doesn't recognize that Jews are a very small minority, not just in the United States but globally. And there is a disproportionate amount of Jews that have gravitated toward the business of sports and in particular basketball. But ironically, a lot of Jews have not had an opportunity to be head coaches, for whatever reason. We could sit here and debate what that is."
That's why, those 20 or so years ago, having noticed the coaching organizations of other faiths such as Christianity, they "literally started off by putting posters at the Final Four." It was: "Let's see who shows up." As they showed up in trickles and then larger trickles and told of some of the issues they faced, they knew that C.S. Lewis moment of fresh friendship: What? You, too? I thought I was the only one.
"The idea," said one of the founders, Pearl, "was simply there weren't that many, and I wanted to give these younger guys that were in [graduate assistant] positions or former players who are kind of getting started a little bit of hope that they could be successful as teachers and as mentors and as ministers, in this case in the game of basketball." They helped build a connectivity that has helped coaches find jobs in their volatile field, and shines one Final Four detail, the fact that Pearl coached both Scheyer and Golden on the U.S. team in the 2009 Maccabiah Games in Israel. Golden later joined Pearl's Auburn staff for two years in the mid-2010s.
"I was one of the first to hold his son," Pearl said.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, the connections have proved more vital as coaches, often working in regions without many Jews, have coped with the aftereffects of the Hamas attacks on Israel, Israel's protracted retaliation and the loud campus protests against that retaliation. "Hopefully one of them wins," Belzer said of Pearl and Scheyer and Golden, "but at the end of the day I think the fact [is] that there can be some irony, that there can be three Jewish coaches coaching in the Final Four after all the antisemitism on college campuses in the past year."
If one of them does win, he might have won partly because he's Jewish.
That came up in a story Golden told Thursday, about the recruitment of the great Florida player Walter Clayton Jr., who had entered the transfer portal from Iona. Clayton hailed from Lake Wales, not so far below Orlando and within an uncomplicated drive from Gainesville, to which Clayton and his family made a promising visit. He also had played for Rick Pitino at Iona, and when the vying time came for Clayton's large skills and enormous will, Pitino, by then at St. John's, vied. "Really hard to beat Rick Pitino, man," Golden said.
When Golden learned from Clayton's mother that her son might be tilting back north, that call happened to come on Easter. So Golden and associate head coach Korey McCray jetted up in a whoosh to New York, met with Clayton, reiterated intricate plans and got an assurance before departing that night.
Now they're here at the Final Four, and Clayton is the foremost reason, and it's a Final Four wherein Golden says, "I guess one of the benefits of being Jewish is that we don't celebrate Easter."
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