Many hardcore fans know about this, but it's always fun to read excerpts like these, on days like today! 
GLENDALE, Ariz. — That this started, or restarted, with a then-75-year-old Jim Calhoun nearly kicking Dan Hurley’s ass is so perfectly Connecticut that the scene should replace the state flag. It was early spring of 2018. Hurley was the recently named UConn head coach and Calhoun was the retired patriarch of the program, one whose endorsement helped secure Hurley’s hiring.
Hurley’s first practice with his inherited team was an abomination. He’d left a job he loved at Rhode Island because UConn is a premier brand in college basketball, a place that, at the time, had won four national titles in the prior two decades. But what Hurley saw didn’t look like anything he was expecting. It was so bad Hurley called his agent to ask about backing out of the deal and seeing if Rhode Island might take him back. The agent explained to Hurley that the buyout in his contract made such a move impossible, so Hurley had to accept that he might’ve made a mistake.
The situation was so dire that Hurley eventually walked into Calhoun’s on-campus office, where he worked while assisting the school as a quasi-statesman. As Hurley remembers it, the conversation began with him telling Calhoun something like: “This is bullsh–. Nothing is in place. This is UConn. Where’s the infrastructure? What’s been going on here?”
Calhoun looked at the cocky 45-year-old. Then, never one to suffer timidity, he introduced Hurley to the real UConn Basketball.
“He said, ‘Are you sh—ing me? Maybe you’re not the person we should’ve hired. If you ever come in here like this again, I’ll never talk to you,’” Hurley said late Monday night, remembering back. “I mean, he ripped me.”
Hurley told the story from a hallway in the bowels of State Farm Stadium.
theathletic.com
GLENDALE, Ariz. — That this started, or restarted, with a then-75-year-old Jim Calhoun nearly kicking Dan Hurley’s ass is so perfectly Connecticut that the scene should replace the state flag. It was early spring of 2018. Hurley was the recently named UConn head coach and Calhoun was the retired patriarch of the program, one whose endorsement helped secure Hurley’s hiring.
Hurley’s first practice with his inherited team was an abomination. He’d left a job he loved at Rhode Island because UConn is a premier brand in college basketball, a place that, at the time, had won four national titles in the prior two decades. But what Hurley saw didn’t look like anything he was expecting. It was so bad Hurley called his agent to ask about backing out of the deal and seeing if Rhode Island might take him back. The agent explained to Hurley that the buyout in his contract made such a move impossible, so Hurley had to accept that he might’ve made a mistake.
The situation was so dire that Hurley eventually walked into Calhoun’s on-campus office, where he worked while assisting the school as a quasi-statesman. As Hurley remembers it, the conversation began with him telling Calhoun something like: “This is bullsh–. Nothing is in place. This is UConn. Where’s the infrastructure? What’s been going on here?”
Calhoun looked at the cocky 45-year-old. Then, never one to suffer timidity, he introduced Hurley to the real UConn Basketball.
“He said, ‘Are you sh—ing me? Maybe you’re not the person we should’ve hired. If you ever come in here like this again, I’ll never talk to you,’” Hurley said late Monday night, remembering back. “I mean, he ripped me.”
Hurley told the story from a hallway in the bowels of State Farm Stadium.
How UConn became college basketball’s unlikeliest modern Camelot
UConn’s back-to-back national titles have come at a time when mass parity is flattening the landscape of college basketball.
theathletic.com