INDIANAPOLIS — It’s 30 minutes after Mark Few has been announced as one of the incoming members of the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame class of 2026. Are you ready to hear his confession?
He’s standing near the stage after the ceremony Saturday and admitting everything. Sure, he’s broken NCAA rules at Gonzaga. Broken them willingly, broken them enthusiastically.
Explanations may be in order.
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It was 2021, in the teeth of the pandemic, and the NCAA was staging its tournament in a bubble in Indianapolis. There were rules in place to avoid contact. Strictly no fraternization, strictly no mixing among the teams for anything. You stayed not only in the bubble, but kept to your own group, no matter how long you were there. Gonzaga was there 33 days. An eternity to be isolated.
Few stands here Saturday afternoon, ready to confess.
“Now I get the statute of limitations, I can freely admit that we made a pickleball court in our team room that happened to be next to Baylor’s in the Convention Center. We called it the Speakeasy tournament. You had to knock on the door and we’d look out to see who it was to let them in. We had a cooler full of refreshments after the game. It was about the only way to deal with it.”
The irony was that neighbors Gonzaga and Baylor would end up in the national championship game. But until that night, their coaches — Few and Scott Drew — had united into a killer pickleball doubles team. Unbeaten. “We stacked our team,” Few says.
Now that he’s cleared the air and owned up to that, he can get back to what a wonderful weekend this is in the life of Mark Few.
Certainly the Hall of Fame should be no surprise to anyone. He has the finest winning percentage among active coaches and has led Gonzaga to 26 consecutive NCAA tournaments and two national championship games. He’s taken a once lightly-known mid-major hidden away in Spokane, Washington and turned it into a national power. Nobody thinks of Gonzaga as a mid-major anymore. That stopped years and years ago.
But still. He is thinking Saturday about the journey from his hometown of Creswell to the dais of a Hall of Fame announcement. “A town of 1,500 in Oregon, a little tiny town,” he says of his childhood roots. “Not playing DI basketball. It (the Hall of Fame) isn’t like a dream come true because it just seemed so not even possible. So you’re just always working and grinding and trying to get better.
“I never really took the time to think about it.
“I think this is a great validation of the whole Gonzaga story. Like, hey, we’re accepted at the highest level of what’s been accomplished.”
There’s another reason he’s in town. That’s his former long-time assistant, Tommy Lloyd, taking Arizona into the Final Four. They were together for more than 20 years. Makes a mentor proud.
“I think I probably underestimated the feeling,” Few is saying. “But once I saw the game that got him here is when it really hit. You have to remember it’s a culmination of everything.”
They’ve been together often this week, their families, too. Two groups of friends who were in on the ground floor of Gonzaga. Few has a Lloyd story, from way back in 1999, when Few moved from assistant to head coach at Gonzaga after Dan Monson left for Minnesota. About two months after Few took the job, he was on the phone with Monson.
“There was small talk about what the team’s been like and I go, `Hey, who the hell is this guy that you’ve left here and he’s been hanging around here for two months? He’s not on staff or anything.’ He’s like `Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I promised his old junior college coach at Walla Walla we’d have a spot for him.”
Him was Lloyd. Few didn’t have a spot but made one and suggested Lloyd focus on his own niche, such as recruiting internationally. The two of them never looked back. This weekend has Few thinking back to their early days together.
“At Gonzaga you did everything. Everything. And Tommy had to do everything and he never complained. He’s from Kelso, Washington, which is a little bigger than Creswell but not much. We know how to work.”
Few calls Arizona’s decision to hire Lloyd in 2021 “brilliant” and says that was another validation of what has happened at Gonzaga. “At the time that wasn’t happening. First of all, assistants usually didn’t go get those high-level jobs, and certainly not usually ones from Gonzaga.”
So it’s a big weekend for Few, but he has time to address topics other than clandestine pickleball games.
Yes, he has come to understand just how unique his journey has been, staying in one place for so long in a profession where the faces come and they go. But the roots of Gonzaga have come to be important to him.
“I have 38 years of players I’m connected to that are Gonzaga players. I’m not someone who has been at three other schools and kind of lost connection with them.”
He mentions the Zags’ first trip to the Final Four in 2017. He invited every former Gonzaga player to that weekend in Phoenix. Many made the trip, and he had them walk in as a surprise to his team at the end of a film session. “It’s one of the most powerful things I’ve ever done in coaching,” he says.
Yes, he was pretty sure all along Lloyd would pull out of the much-discussed North Carolina courting this week, for the same reason.
“Tommy knew how we felt at Gonzaga. I would always tell people, don’t mess with happy. I was completely happy and content. The apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree. I think Tommy’s seen this watching me from close view.
“My dad in that little tiny town of Creswell was 54 years a Presbyterian minister at this little tiny church. And usually ministers move every five years or eight years, the congregation gets tired of them. Fifty-four years. When I was young I would never admit it but as you get old, we tend to mimic who we admire.”
And yes, Few had his chances. He mentions 2021, almost sheepishly.
“In ‘21 during our Final Four run, the North Carolina job also opened up. It just wasn’t as publicized.”
The Tar Heels on Few’s radar screen and nobody noticed? “That was the beauty of the bubble. It was more than on the radar screen.”
And yes, the way that 2021 tournament ended for Gonzaga was not pleasant. The Zags took a 31-0 record into the championship game but were soundly beaten 86-70 by Baylor and his old pickleball partner Drew. That had to linger.
“It did and it didn’t. The greatest regret I’ve had in my career is that that team never got to play in front of a crowd (because of COVID limitations). There should have been 80,000 in there watching us. There should have been 80,000 seeing Jalen Suggs’ shot (to beat UCLA in the national semifinals). There were bunch of cardboard cutouts, friends and family. All through that run we were undefeated, 40 minutes away from doing what the (1976) Indiana team had done, and we never really got any crowds to see it.”
Lloyd was on the bench with him that night, his final game it turned out as a Gonzaga assistant. Five years later, Lloyd is here with Arizona, Lucas Oil Stadium is full and Mark Few is here to be announced as a Hall of Famer. “It’s like full circle seeing Tommy get back to Indy in the next Final Four,” he says.
No word if Tommy Lloyd was in on that pickleball thing.
