Gonzaga’s NCAA Tournament run, often taken for granted, built on more than cluck

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Cluck-U Chicken.

That was the name of the only food joint open deep into a night in the early 1990s, somewhere near Santa Clara.

Details now fuzzy from the intervening decades, I found myself driving Dan Monson, Mark Few and Bill Grier on a midnight food run.

The best I can recall, Gonzaga had completed a late game in the West Coast Conference Tournament at Santa Clara, and I, the GU beat writer, was the only person in the hotel lobby at that moment who had a car capable of transporting four hungry men.

The three passengers in the economy rental were Gonzaga basketball assistants to head coach Dan Fitzgerald. The combined resumes of the three were meager at the time, but their influence on GU’s rising trajectory already was being felt.

Gonzaga was still scraping by on the cheap, rosters mostly filled with the overlooked and marginalized. The try-hard guys of Zags lore, fueled by rejection or neglect.

Against odds, those three assistants would become Division I head coaches. Monson would start a streak of absurd success at GU and sustain a long career. Grier would coach San Diego to an NCAA Tournament win over No. 4 seed Connecticut.

And Few would become a Hall of Fame finalist with the highest winning percentage of any active coach in the nation. Not to mention, be the only college coach chosen to assist the 2024 USA Olympic gold medal team.

Surely, what Gonzaga has become was rooted in the dreams – delusional at the time? – of the three guys in that car.

Had somebody told me, on that night so long ago, that Gonzaga basketball would become one of the most unlikely success stories in the history of college sports, man, I’d have choked on my chicken.

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Gonzaga players huddle up before the start of the second half of the Bulldogs’ NCAA Tournament second-round loss to Houston on March 22 in Wichita, Kansas. (Tyler Tjomsland/The Spokesman-Review)

With his team over the past month or so, Mark Few used the term…

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Source link : http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2025/mar/29/its-really-really-really-hard-gonzagas-ncaa-tourna/

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Publish date : 2025-03-30 02:06:00

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