Geno Auriemma the latest to show the grace of aging

At 70, the UConn coach is part of a Gray uprising.

How about that Geno Auriemma? His Connecticut team was trying to wriggle out of foul trouble without reaching for the injury lifeline Monday night, an excuse many coaches use even if they aren’t missing five useful players. Yet he exuded the peace that usually comes with 11 NCAA championships, and Paige Bueckers and the rest of the Huskies took the younger USC Trojans to school, 80-73, in a regional final. 

Auriemma and UConn now go to the national semifinals and face the Caitlin Clark Five, who were glad all over when they eliminated national champion LSU.

By the way, Auriemma turned 70 during the first weekend of the tournament.

It kind of reminded you of Andy Reid, whose Kansas City Chiefs stumbled throughout the autumn. Patrick Mahomes couldn’t throw downfield, and when he did, his passes found hands that made Roberto Duran’s look soft. 

On Christmas Day, Kansas City lost at Las Vegas, 20-14, and fell to 9-6, with four losses in its previous six games. It meant the Chiefs would finally have to win playoff games on the road, so they shrugged and did exactly that, beating Buffalo and Baltimore, and then somehow got off the mat to win the Super Bowl over San Francisco. Reid has now won three Super Bowls with the Chiefs.

By the way, Reid turned 66 last month.

A layer of wise old heads has left the coaching and managing professions over the last few months. Dusty Baker (74) resigned last fall, 12 months after he won a World Series in Houston. Nick Saban (72) left Alabama. Pete Carroll (72) left the Seahawks’ sideline, although it appears he was punted upstairs, rugby style. Bill Belichick (71) was celebrated by the Patriots, but he was also fired, and no NFL team hired him, six Super Bowl wins notwithstanding.

Dean Smith (66) and Mike Krzyzewski (77) both ended their coaching careers at Final Fours.

Rick Bowness (69) has supervised Winnipeg’s turnaround and will contend for NHL Coach of the Year. Jim Rutherford, 75. has made the daring and drastic moves, as Vancouver’s club president, to make the Canucks a definite threat to bring Canada the Stanley Cup for the first time since 1993.

Rick Pitino, 71, made St. John’s a viable Big East commodity in his first year, although he wasn’t invited to the NCAA tournament. Rick Barnes, 69, coached Tennessee to the regional final last weekend. Kelvin Sampson, 68, had Houston at either No. 1 or No. 2 in the wire-service polls most of the season. And Jim Larranaga was 73 when Miami made its first Final Four trip last spring.

By now you can tell where we’re going.

Those who demand age limits for our coaches, players, politicians, media people, and entertainers might be onto something. 

For instance, when someone in New Hampshire asked the 52-year-old Nikki Haley about the causes of the Civil War, she didn’t mention slavery. Maybe she’s too young to be President. 

And commentator Clay Travis, 44, flayed the LSU women’s basketball team for congregating in the locker room, instead of coming onto the court to stand for the Star-Spangled Banner prior to the regional final vs. Iowa. A couple of phone calls might have informed Travis, had he been interested, that coach Kim Mulkey, no pointy-headed liberal, uses the same routine before each game.

So is it ridiculous to insist on an age minimum, like maybe 55, before you’re hired to coach or opinionate?

Such a rule might cause you to miss a Mozart figure in the coaching profession, like Sean McVay or Terry Donahue. But just think of all the Brandon Staleys, Josh McDanielses, Kliff Kingsburys, Matt Patricias, Jayce Tinglers and Ryan Saunderses we would have been spared.

Now, obviously, some of the best coaches in history were hired before they were 40, like Scotty Bowman and Don Shula for starters. All executives feel and hope they are hiring a Coach-for-Life, at least until such coaches have a losing season. And, just as obviously, coaches (and players) hang around longer these days because they’re making real money. John Wooden had plenty of coaching left in him when he retired at 64. Ara Parseghian hung it up when he was 51. Bill Cowher walked away when he was 49 and never returned.

Brian Snitker

But there is a Gray Ceiling in the coach-hiring business these days, and it also applies to play-by-play broadcasters and general managers. Brian Snitker is an exception. He managed five minor league teams in the Braves’ system before he became the fulltime varsity manager at 61, at the players’ urging, and won a World Series three years later.

New ideas are inevitable and welcome. Old managers need to accommodate them, to an extent. But the everyday problems, the ones that come out of the blue and bring no precedent with them, are easier for a guy like Snitker, who might have encountered such things in Myrtle Beach or Richmond, than for a 34-year-old ex-player who’s filling out his first lineup card.

This goes far beyond sports, of course. Our next President will either be 82 or 78 on Inauguration Day. They might not be the best illustration of the virtues of the golden years. But President Biden mangled sentences and voiced wild exaggerations when he was in his 40s, and former President Trump has never not been a huckster and a fabulist. Have you heard Sen. Bernie Sanders lately? He is 82, and yet there is no more cogent critic of Israel’s Gaza strategies, no better advocate for economic and health care reform….unless it’s Sen. Angus King of Maine, who is 79.

Dwight D. Eisenhower served two terms as President in the 1950s but was disrespected, at the end, as a Yesterday Man. Heart problems and other illnesses might have fueled that perception, but Ike was only 70 when he handed it off to John F. Kennedy, who was 43 upon inauguration. History demonstrates that Kennedy’s judgment, and that of his young Ivy League cohort, was no more enlightened on the issue of Vietnam than Eisenhower’s.

Ronald Reagan was nearly 70 when he was elected the first time and nearly 78 when he left the White House. When he took office he assumed a 3-point stance toward the Soviet Union, and when he left he had moved decisively to dissolve that same country and liberate Eastern Europe. 

He fumbled through his first Presidential debate with Walter Mondale in 1984 but in the rematch he basically pocketed the election when he said, “I will not make age an issue in this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” Mondale, 56, laughed on the outside, like everyone else, but surely he heard electoral votes going down the drain in the background.

Reagan’s confusion was evident at times, and he officially developed Alzheimer’s after he left office, and he had a wife and a chief of staff and other couturiers who fiercely protected him. But in the crucial moments, Reagan appeared strong and coherent. Once an actor, always an actor, yes, but as Lou Cannon’s biography suggests, being President is the role of a lifetime.

George H.W. Bush was 69 when he left office, having closed the book on the Cold War that Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev opened. George W. Bush was 54 when he took office, 62 when he left, and his miscalculations in the Middle East took almost 4,500 American lives and distorted and damaged tens of thousands more.

Remember John Edwards? He was John Kerry’s Democratic running mate in 2004. That ticket lost to Bush, but not by much. Edwards ran for President in 1988 when he was 55. He wasn’t going to win anyway but his career imploded when an affair with a photographer was exposed, just as his wife Elizabeth was dying of cancer. He could have been a heartbeat away. 

And, as long as we’re cataloging things, Sam Bankman-Fried is 32.

But then there’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the most inspirational wartime leader since Winston Churchill, and he’s only 46. Ultimately that’s the point. Age, when compared to ability and performance, should be no more than a footnote.

On Friday night Geno Auriemma’s team will be opposing Iowa, fueled by Clark but coached by Lisa Bluder, who will turn 63, week after next. That means someone of a certain age will be coaching for a national championship on Sunday, a time when certainty is welcome.