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UConn Basketball Vault Author to Visit Borough

Davis to discuss Huskies and his coffee-table book at Whittemore Library.

Ask author Ken Davis about his relationship with Jim Calhoun, and he may respond with a hearty laugh – as he did when I posed the question to him.

“There have been bumps in the road, obviously,” Davis says. “We had a little falling out… There were times when he didn’t want to talk to me.”

On the other side of the coin, when the sometimes prickly UConn basketball coach was undergoing radiation treatment for cancer, Davis was “the only reporter he granted access to.”

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Davis, a much-honored basketball writer and former Hartford Courant beat reporter for UConn hoops, is the author of University of Connecticut Basketball Vault: The History of the Huskies (Whitman Publishing; $49.95). He will discuss his new coffee-table book and the Huskies men’s program at the Whittemore Library on Wednesday, June 1 at 6:30 p.m.

In photos and text, this beautiful body of work encompasses 110 seasons of UConn basketball, from the very first game – on Feb. 8, 1901, when the school then known as Connecticut Agricultural College played Willimantic High School – through the 2009-10 season. (For the record: CAC 17, Willimantic 12.)

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The first two national championship teams, 1998-99 and 2003-04, are covered in detail, of course. But Davis has “regrets about the timing of the publication,” since the Huskies’ remarkable run through the 2010-11 Big East and NCAA tournaments that led to the third national title occurred well after the book’s arrival in bookstores last fall. “Hey, what can you do?” he says.

The timing was much better with Davis’ first book for Whitman Publishing, University of Kansas Basketball Vault. It was published on the heels of the Jayhawks winning the 2007-08 NCAA title. This was a labor of love, too: Ken is a 1980 Kansas graduate.

Davis joined the Courant in September 1985, after stops at newspapers in St. Joseph, Mo., Binghamton, N.Y., and Baltimore. He was just in time to chronicle Dom Perno’s ninth and final season as head coach – a disappointing 12-16.

As Davis recalls, it was a time when “Arnold Dean and Scott Gray (at WTIC) were inundated with calls, ‘Get out of the Big East and go back to the Yankee Conference.’”  

Calhoun, who had built a strong program at Northeastern, succeeded Perno, but the turnaround wasn’t immediate. When leading scorer Cliff Robinson and starting guard Phil Gamble became academic casualties in January 1987, his first team lost seven of its last eight games and finished 9-19.

“Symbolic of how bad the facility was, they were still using rotary-dial phones (in the basketball office) when Calhoun arrived,” Davis says.

As beat writer and then as the Courant’s national basketball writer, Davis chronicled the Huskies’ climb up the national ladder, up to and including the national championships of 1998-99 and 2003-04. He accepted a buy-out from the newspaper in 2005, but has remained on the scene as a college basketball columnist for NBCSports.com – which enabled him to cover UConn’s 2010-11 national champs.

Davis’ book takes the reader through six eras: “An Interesting Game to Watch, 1901-1931”; “Cheer Connecticut, 1931-1946”; “Welcome to Big Time Basketball, 1946-1969”; “A Sleeping Giant, 1969-1986”; “Finally, a Final Four, 1986-1999”; and “The Top of the Mountain, 1999-2010.” The Foreword is by none other than Calhoun and the Afterword came from Ray Allen, probably the greatest Huskie of them all.

He thought the research for this monumental project was “going to be really hard,” but he found the people at the Thomas J. Dodd Center on campus “very helpful.”

“The hardest part after that for me were the last two chapters,” he says, “boiling it down because so much had happened.”

Calhoun as well as three of his predecessors as head coach, Perno, Dee Rowe and Fred Shabel, were helpful along the way, as were many of the players. “Tony Hanson and Wes Bialosuknia, they’re so proud of what they did,” Davis says. “I just got a nice note from Bialosuknia saying how much he enjoyed the book.”

(I can attest to the skills of many of those early players and coaches. As sports editor and later executive sports editor of the Waterbury Republican-American, I chronicled a multitude of UConn games across 18 seasons. I considered the Waterbury-bred Hanson a friend. Dee Rowe was, and is, a true gentleman.)

Complementing Davis’ prose and the more than 200 photos are pull-out replicas of old schedules, player questionnaires (Worthy Patterson and Jim Ahearn), press releases, game tickets and box scores (including the memorable 1967 shoot-out between Bialosuknia and Rutgers’ Bobby Lloyd; Wes scored 40, Lloyd 39; UConn won, 84-77). They give the book a scrapbook feel.

“When I was leaving Baltimore and the News-American – a newspaper that no longer exists – to come to Hartford, I never would have dreamed that UConn basketball would become so successful on the national stage,” Davis says.

For those who are unable to attend Ken Davis’ June 1 appearance at the Howard Whittemore Memorial Library, 243 Church St., Naugatuck, copies of the book can be ordered at http://kendavis55.wordpress.com. For information, contact John Wiehn at the library, 203-729-4591.

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