IF YOU THINK YOU KNOW SYRACUSE COACH JIM BOEHEIM... ...GUESS AGAIN!

Let's pretend that you are a cosmetologist with supernatural
powers and have been assigned the herculean task of making over
Jim Boeheim, whose reclusive-cleric aspect and grumpy demeanor
have turned him over the years into a kind of Mr. Wilson, the
crotchety neighbor who's constantly peering out the window to
catch Dennis the Menace trampling the flower beds. Where on
earth do you begin?

Perhaps at the top. The Syracuse basketball coach's hair is
thinner than capellini and his forehead is ever expanding, so
maybe a consult with the Hair Club for Men is in order. Or you
could tell him to lose those damn dark-framed specs (does he
shower with those things on?), go for some sky-blue contact
lenses to introduce a little brightness to his appearance. Or
perhaps you might start with his walk, a long-striding gait once
described by former Syracuse coach Roy Danforth as "a western
New York skip-a-long," usually done to the arrhythmic
accompaniment of nervous, wiggling fingers. A gentlemanly Dean
Smith amble or even a Bobby Knight High Noon saunter would be
more appropriate for a big-time basketball coach.

Or should your first alteration be a radical whine-ectomy? Lower
the voice half an octave, reduce the nasal timbre and just maybe
Boeheim sounds analytical and knowledgeable instead of
"sarcastic" and "ill-tempered" (as he's usually described). Or
maybe what you have to do is cut into the man's brain and shut
down his memory bank--a steel trap that retains every slight,
every insult, every negative comment; a deep reservoir of
defensiveness that compels him to lash back at his critics at
regular intervals. Then, perhaps, Boeheim will cease to be what
his best buddy, Tony Santelli, calls him: "his own worst enemy."

Or do you stand back, study the whole 52-year-old package of
conflict and contradiction that is James Arthur Boeheim, take
into account the 483-159 career record, the .752 winning
percentage, the 17 NCAA tournament appearances in 20 seasons,
the two national championship game appearances, the loyalty and
constancy he has shown to one institution, and the dogged
you-can-knock-me-down-but-I'm-not-going-anywhere attitude, and
come to an even more radical conclusion: Forget the makeover and
leave Jim Boeheim just the way he is.

A year ago at this time, college basketball observers were
wondering how long it would take Boeheim, his team or both to
implode. As the 1995-96 season approached, starting point guard
Michael Lloyd left school rather than face an NCAA investigation
about the junior college transcript he had used to enroll at
Syracuse. The Big East Conference's alltime leading scorer,
guard Lawrence Moten, had used up his eligibility and moved on
to the NBA. The squad's star was senior power forward John
Wallace, a player who many believed had a Derrick Coleman-like
attitude but not Derrick Coleman-like skills, a potentially
inflammatory combination. Syracuse was picked as low as 42nd in
one preseason poll, and no one had the Orangemen in the Top 20.
Clearly, this was an assignment that called for a Rick Pitino or
a Mike Krzyzewski, a masterly X's-and-O's guy. Certainly it
wasn't a job for a Boeheim, who was on everybody's short list of
the Worst Coaches in America.

But a funny thing happened along the way. "Suddenly," says
Boeheim, perhaps with justifiable sarcasm, "I learned how to
coach." Though he has long advocated offensive balance, he
designated Wallace as his go-to guy, and the big forward--who
had petitioned to leave school early for the NBA in the spring
but then decided to stay--became one of the country's best
players. The coach told his can't-shoot-straight point guard,
Lazarus Sims, that it was O.K. not to shoot and turned him into
a solid, mistake-free quarterback instead. Boeheim assessed the
slow feet of players like Sims, small forward Jason Cipolla and
undersized center Otis Hill and scrapped his beloved man-to-man
defense in favor of a swarming zone that threw teams off balance
all season. And he played every no-one-gives-us-any-respect card
in his deck, turning what was supposed to be a
middle-of-the-pack Big East team into a leader of the pack that
kept getting better as the season went on.

And there was Jim Boeheim back in the NCAA final, nine years
after his first championship game appearance, in 1987, when
Indiana's Keith Smart defeated his Orangemen on a buzzer beater
in New Orleans. And even more shockingly, there was Boeheim
joking with reporters, "laughing off all the curveballs they
threw me," as he put it, showing a charming side, swapping old
stories and compliments with his final-game rival, Kentucky's
Pitino, who happened to be the first assistant coach Boeheim
hired after taking the Syracuse job in 1976. Nobody expected the
Orangemen to beat Kentucky, and they did not, losing a 76-67
decision. But even Boeheim's critics had to admit that his
coaching in the final--Syracuse trailed by only two with four
minutes left--was flawless and, in fact, that his performance
throughout the season was as good as any in recent memory, one
that conjured up memories of Jim Valvano at N.C. State in '83 or
Rollie Massimino at Villanova in '85.

Being a master of sarcasm Boeheim doesn't quite know how to
characterize what happened to him last season. His nature is to
pooh-pooh it and make the standard claims that he has always
been a good coach and a reasonably good guy. But at the same
time he can't deny that something happened, something beyond a
runner-up finish that in a few years will be forgotten
everywhere except in Syracuse. "And what does that say about
image and public perception, that one guy can change so much in
one season?" Boeheim wonders. But when pressed, he will admit
that he is a happier person--"more whole," as one of his friends
puts it--and a long way from the guy who seemed in a perpetual
funk about something: a tough loss, an NCAA investigation, media
criticism, sloppy play, even a muffed chip shot during a
small-stakes golf match. He will also admit that he is
extraordinarily lucky because despite being cold and distant by
nature, a loner to the depths of his soul, Boeheim has somehow
managed to find love, resolve and renewal from the three most
important relationships in his life, all of them potentially
messy.

His girlfriend, Juli Greene, a woman about 20 years his junior
who, by anyone's standards, does not need a makeover, has moved
from Lexington, Ky., to be with him in Syracuse. His 11-year-old
adopted daughter, Elizabeth, lives with his ex-wife Elaine. And
then there is Elaine, a strong woman who has decided to share
Elizabeth without rancor and accept Juli without resentment. The
ex-Mrs. Boeheim was there at the Meadowlands on April 1, two
rows above Juli and Elizabeth, watching her ex-husband lose the
championship game and in the process become, for perhaps the
first time in his life, a crowd favorite. "I felt good for Jim,"
says Elaine.

Before Jim left the family business to become a coach, Boeheim
men had been burying folks in Wayne County, N.Y., since 1854.
The Boeheim Funeral Home, where the family lived, stood at 77
Williams Street in the center of Lyons, a town of about 5,000
residents that is equidistant from Syracuse and Rochester. The
fact that a seemingly joyless person like Boeheim grew up among
corpses and caskets is certainly grist for the Freudian mill,
but don't go too far with it. "It was a little strange being
there in the funeral home," says Boeheim's lifelong friend
Santelli, owner of Santelli Lumber on Route 31 in downtown
Lyons, "but I don't think it affected Jim at all." What did have
a profound effect on Jim was the hard-boiled man, also named
Jim, who ran the business. Boeheim's father wasn't exactly the
Great Santini, but he wasn't Ward Cleaver either. "My father had
a good side," says Boeheim wryly, "but he kept it pretty well
hidden."

When Jim Sr. was a young boy, his brother accidentally shot him
with a .22, and the slug remained in his back. As a result of
the wound, one of his legs was two inches shorter than the other
and he walked with a limp. But whatever game Boeheim's father
played, he played with a ferocious, even nasty, competitiveness.
Golf, Ping-Pong, pool, cards. Those were the games he played
against his son, and never did he back down for one second, even
when Boeheim was a young boy. "He beat me every way he could,
every time he could," Boeheim recalls. "It took a long time
before I could beat him--well, never in cards, but in everything
else--and when I did, he never took it well."

Elaine remembers more than one family gathering ruined by a
father-son argument over a game of pool, when "one or the other
came storming out of the room." Dick Blackwell, Boeheim's
basketball coach at Lyons Central High and the former golf pro
at Wayne Hills Country Club, used to bet anyone that the
Boeheims could not complete nine holes without an argument--and
he would usually collect. Boeheim loved his father and felt the
loss intensely when Jim Sr. died of cancer at 68 in 1986. But he
describes their relationship as "prickly at best" and admits
that his father's critical nature and his all-out drive to win
rubbed off on him. "The best way to describe Jim's father," says
Santelli, "is that he wasn't a whole lot different than his son
is today."

Boeheim actually got his athletic genes from his mother, Janet,
an outstanding golfer and a gentle woman who tried to referee
the father-son arguments until her death from leukemia at age 58
in 1977. But it was that all-consuming competitiveness inherited
from his father that made Boeheim a success in sports. He wanted
to be better than everyone else, so he chopped ice off the rims
at the playground and shot baskets during school vacations. From
the moment he and Santelli started playing golf as kids, they
played for money, starting with nickels and graduating to
dollars. And they were nasty kids too, club throwers and
cursers. On more than one occasion Blackwell banished them from
the course for, as Santelli puts it, "not behaving like
gentlemen."

Boeheim looked more nerdy than nasty. The gangliness, the thin
hair, the studious-looking glasses--the whole exterior package
suggested (and still does) the know-it-all captain of the debate
team. "He didn't look like an athlete," says Santelli. "Hey, he
didn't look like anything." But aside from an inability to
escape earth's gravity, Boeheim was, in fact, a terrific athlete
blessed with good hand-eye coordination, quickness and (need it
be said) desire. He also had that steel-trap mind, a gift for
instant analysis and a refusal to make the same mistake twice.
Credit his dad for that too. Santelli remembers sitting at the
card table with Jim's parents, both master bridge players, when
the father would suddenly bring up a hand from 15 years earlier
and go over which card everyone played. "I think the mind was as
important as anything in making Jim a great athlete," says
Santelli. Boeheim puts his own acerbic spin on his heady style.
"It's funny that I was always considered one of the smartest
players," says Boeheim, "and now I'm considered one of the
dumbest coaches."

Boeheim's arrival at Syracuse as a walk-on in 1962 was one of
those fortunate convergences of circumstance that stamp a man's
life forever. That same year Fred Lewis arrived as coach and
Dave Bing, a star guard from Washington, D.C., arrived as
savior. "Those two guys," says Boeheim, "made Syracuse
basketball." The Orange, who had won only 14 games in the three
seasons before Bing joined the team, won 52 in the next three
seasons. And there beside Bing, slipping into open spots to
shoot jumpers when defenses ganged up on the star, was the
bespectacled, bookish-looking guy from Lyons who eventually
earned his scholarship. The Orangemen didn't win a national
championship during the Bing era--the farthest they got was a
91-81 loss to Duke in the East Regional final in '66. But
Syracuse became a big-time power (with a home-court pit called
Manley Field House that terrified opponents) and started to
attract a national following.

Boeheim knew he had found a home. After graduating in '66 with a
degree in history, he served as the Syracuse varsity golf coach
and assistant basketball coach, and also journeyed away from
campus each winter weekend to play for the Scranton Miners of
the old Eastern League. Eventually, Paul Seymour, his Scranton
coach, became head scout for the Detroit Pistons and invited
Boeheim to try out for the fourth guard spot behind Bing, Jimmy
Walker and Howie Komives. Boeheim weighed his options and said
no. "I don't know if I could've made it as an NBA player," he
says, "but I knew I could make it as a coach."

Boeheim moved decisively toward that goal in '76 when Danforth,
who had taken over for Lewis in '68, decided to return to
Tulane, his alma mater. Syracuse was going to open the job to a
national search when Boeheim, still an assistant, paid a visit
to then vice chancellor Cliff Winters and said, "I want this job
because I'm the best man for it. If you decide to open it up,
that's fine, but I want to let you know that if you do, I'm
leaving. I need the job now because there are some things I have
to do." Winters gave him the job, and Boeheim did the things he
had to do. He interrupted Pitino's honeymoon to interview him
for a job, hired him and dispatched him to Cincinnati to sign a
skinny high school star named Louis Orr. Then Boeheim drove to
Rochester to firm up the commitment of a formidable big man
named Roosevelt Bouie. In four seasons the Louie and Bouie Show
won 100 games and lost only 18. And Jim Boeheim became the Man
Who Never Left.

"It all seemed pretty easy at first," Elaine Boeheim says. "Jim
would go 26-4 or 24-5, and everything would be fine." She is
sitting in the kitchen of her comfortable home in DeWitt, a few
miles east of Syracuse and just a quarter mile from the
development where her ex-husband lives. They met at an oral
surgeon's office where Elaine was working as an assistant. He
would bring the players over for exams, and eventually he asked
her out. They married in June 1976, two months after Boeheim got
the head job.

Well, it didn't turn out to be so easy. The wins always came,
but never the Big Win. They lived in a fishbowl. Her husband
agonized over each loss, never fully enjoyed the wins. She
suggested that he lighten his sarcastic tone with the press, but
he never listened. The only constant in their life was the film
projector that whirred deep into the night. "He'd come home
after two losses in a row and tell me, 'All right, curtail your
spending. I'm going to be getting out of coaching,'" says
Elaine. "Of course, he knew and I knew he wouldn't."

Yes, Boeheim was a lifer and, beyond that, a lifer who walked
the same Syracuse ground year after year, hearing the same
criticism over and over again. The pressure to win grew intense.
In the mid-'80s, the Boeheims separated briefly, got back
together, separated again. The '87 championship game loss to
Indiana took an enormous toll. To this day the inveterate tape
watcher has never seen a tape of that game, although he has been
unable to avoid seeing the replay on TV of the Smart baseline
jumper that certified Knight as a genius (once again) and turned
Boeheim into Boobheim. "If Keith Smart doesn't make that shot
and we win, does that mean I'm a great coach?" Boeheim asked
himself--and still asks himself--repeatedly.

In 1990 a series of articles in the Syracuse Post-Standard led
the university to conduct an intensive 13-month investigation of
its men's basketball program. It was a terrible time to be
Boeheim and, for Elaine, a terrible time to be around him. No
major abuses were uncovered, but in his desire to win the Big
One, Boeheim had undeniably made some mistakes. He had forged a
relationship with a New York City street agent named Rob
Johnson, who steered several players to Syracuse, most notably
Conrad McCrae. Boeheim had let his close friend Bill Rapp Jr., a
Syracuse car dealer, into the Orangemen's inner circle, and Rapp
was accused of slipping $50 bills into the Christmas cards of
several players. (Rapp denied the allegation.) A couple of other
boosters had committed various indiscretions, too, and one of
them, restaurateur Fred Grimaldi, was forced to disassociate
himself from the program. The result was two years' probation,
including a one-year ban from the NCAA tournament, for "lack of
institutional control."

Also, it was around this time that the Boeheim-can't-coach
charge picked up steam. His underachieving '89-90 team, which
featured Coleman, Sherman Douglas, Billy Owens and Stevie
Thompson, was widely considered the most talented in the
school's history, yet it didn't get out of the Sweet 16. The
following year another powerhouse Syracuse team lost to Richmond
in the first round of the East Regional--the first time a No. 2
seed had lost to a No. 15. It was a dark period for Boeheim
personally, and his less-than-ebullient personality made it even
darker for those around him. He and Elaine separated again in
'93 and finally divorced.

By then, though, they had adopted Elizabeth. It was Elaine who
had pushed for the adoption in 1985 even when Jim resisted, and
it was Elaine who made it easy for Jim to see Elizabeth whenever
he wanted. It's still that way. If Boeheim returns from a road
trip by 9 p.m., he drives by Elaine's house and, if the light is
on in Elizabeth's room, he can stop in and kiss her goodnight.
"Actually," says Elaine, "sometimes he does it at 11 o'clock."

One day recently, Boeheim, a man who is guarded with his
feelings, leaned back in his office chair, crossed his bony
fingers and unburdened himself to some degree. "When you go
through a divorce and you're in the public eye, it's very
tough," he says. "But my ex-wife has been extraordinary. To
enable me to see my daughter, to keep that most important part
of my life intact, means more to me than I could ever describe.
Elaine knew that everyone should have someone to love without
reservation, and that's what Elizabeth is to me. I can never
thank Elaine enough for allowing that."

And now there is Juli, whom Boeheim met at a party in Lexington
on Derby Day in '94. After Juli came to live in Syracuse last
year, Elaine went out of her way to share Elizabeth with her,
too. "Juli's a wonderful person," says Elaine. "I can't think of
anyone I'd rather have Elizabeth be with." A recent call to
Elaine's house found Juli paying a visit. What do they talk
about? "Well, not about Jim," says Elaine. She admits there are
moments when she feels resentment toward Boeheim for the
divorce, the awkwardness of sharing their daughter with another
woman and the general anxiety of being the ex-wife of the
basketball coach in a town where he is the most public of
figures. But she has come to grips with all that. She takes a
newspaper clipping off the refrigerator door, a short article
about a memorial service for a young boy who was accidentally
shot and killed by his friend. Throughout the service, the dead
child's parents each sat with an arm around the boy who fired
the shot. She has one passage underlined, a quote from the
minister that says, "Forgiveness frees you." Elaine smooths out
the clipping. "I love that quote," she says. "I try never to
forget it."

Hubie Brown, a onetime coach and now a TV commentator, once
asked Pitino what he was going to do on his vacation. "Oh, my
wife and I are going to Bermuda with Jim Boeheim and his wife,"
answered Pitino.

Brown looked authentically puzzled. "Why?" he said finally.

Boeheim tells this story about himself and laughs ruefully.
"That's my image," he says. "No fun, no personality, no nothing."

That's not what Juli Greene saw when she was introduced to
Boeheim. They began playing backgammon and chatting and
laughing, and pretty soon everyone else at the party had left
for dinner. There they were, the thirtysomething young woman
from Lexington who looks like a beauty queen and the fiftyish
man who looks like a harried headmaster. "What did I see in
him?" Juli ponders the question. "I saw someone who is bright
and funny and well-read and mature and realistic. But I see
someone who can be playful, too. The other night we were running
around his house chasing each other like a couple of
12-year-olds. All I know is that the attraction was instant!"

Boeheim rejects the notion that Juli is responsible for "the new
Jim Boeheim" who seems to have surfaced over the past year.
Well, he can reject it all he wants, but virtually everyone
around him thinks it's true. She seems to be the antidote to all
his negative qualities. He is grumpy, she is relentlessly sunny.
He hides his feelings, she is open, "much too open to suit Jim,"
she says. He is set in his ways and stodgy, she likes change.
Her biggest success has been getting Boeheim to retire what they
jokingly call his "uniform"--a blue blazer and gray slacks. And
people have noticed. "He once showed up in a bad gray suit and a
pair of high-waters," remembers former Orangemen guard Dwayne
(Pearl) Washington. "Man, that was the worst. But now? The man
looks good, real good."

With or without high-waters, it was a huge step for Boeheim to
begin appearing publicly with Juli. He still steadfastly refuses
to give her age and laughingly, but firmly, keeps her from doing
it, too. "The youngest estimate I've heard is 24," says Boeheim.
"That's just not true." After being pressed he allows, "All I'll
say is she's over 30. Barely, maybe, but over 30." If they have
plans to marry, they have not revealed them, but it seems like a
good bet.

Juli, a Kentucky grad who is pursuing a master's in special
education at Syracuse, knows she's now in the fishbowl once
occupied by Elaine. "The age difference, the fact that we're not
married, Jim's being a public figure, all those things sometimes
make it awkward," she says. "I know some people are just waiting
for me to show I'm just a dumb bimbo. But I gave up a lot to
come here. I miss the South. I miss my family. But I always
wanted someone to love and share my life with. And I know that's
Jim. And he's in Syracuse."

He probably always will be. Back on one of those Boeheim-Pitino
vacations, the husbands and wives were lying around the beach
one day when they started talking about ideal places to live. As
Boeheim recalls it, Pitino said Hawaii or some island; Elaine
said San Francisco; Pitino's wife, Joanne, said Park Avenue; and
Jim said Syracuse. They asked him again. Jim said Syracuse. Said
he wasn't kidding, said he wouldn't even consider anywhere else.
Said it was the best place on earth, and Hawaii was just
"Syracuse in July." They got mad at him and left the beach.

In an age of peripatetic, keep-trading-up-for-a-better-job
coaches, Boeheim has stayed put. He's been around long enough so
that when he used to walk around campus, people would say,
"Who's that guy with Dave Bing?" and now when Bing comes back to
visit, people ask, "Who's that guy with Jim Boeheim?" During his
two decades as coach, Boeheim has seriously entertained an offer
from only one other school. In 1986, before it hired Gary
Williams, Ohio State sent a representative to Syracuse to talk
to Boeheim, but nothing came of it. After all these years
Boeheim has gathered around him an extended Orange family.
Granted, with personalities like Coleman, Washington and Orlando
Magic center Rony Seikaly, it's a little more dysfunctional
than, say, North Carolina's, but it's a family.

Boeheim's top assistant is Bernie Fine, another Syracuse lifer.
Fine was the student manager on the Bing-Boeheim teams of the
'60s, and when Boeheim got the head job, Fine came aboard. Only
Bill Guthridge and Smith at North Carolina and Jerry Jones and
Denny Crum at Louisville have been together longer than Boeheim
and Fine. The other assistants' offices are occupied by Syracuse
products too. Orr has one, and Mike Hopkins, a guard who played
four seasons beginning in '89-90, has the other. An outgoing
Californian with a call-me-dude outlook on life, Hopkins might
seem misplaced on a Boeheim staff, but, hey, he's a Syracuse
guy. So is Coleman, and don't even think of saying something bad
about him. The subject doesn't have to be broached for
Boeheim--or Fine, for that matter--to launch into a spirited
defense of Coleman. They'll tell you he's a guy who gave 100%
every day at Syracuse and won 113 games over four years and got
19 rebounds in the '87 final and visited the team every day
during the Final Four at the Meadowlands last year. The only
negative thing Boeheim will say about Coleman is that he was a
bit of a dog in the weight room. And Coleman, no lover of
coaches, reciprocates. "I'd do whatever Coach Boeheim asks
because of the loyalty he shows to his players," says Coleman.
"We are all an extension of him and of Syracuse University.
Coach gave us the opportunity and the freedom to expand our
game. I think that really helped prepare us for the next level."

Seikaly, ringing his buzzer to begin Family Feud, begs to
differ. During an ESPN interview last March, Seikaly, a
four-year starter for the Orangemen beginning in the '85-86
season, went out of his way to torch Boeheim. He said that the
coach did not stress discipline, did not prepare his players for
the NBA or for life after it, and wouldn't be successful at all
without Fine at his side. Boeheim then took the low road,
telling the Syracuse Herald-Journal that Seikaly "has been an
idiot all his life and just continues being one." The subject
makes Boeheim uncomfortable, and he won't elaborate on it other
than to say that Seikaly later told a reporter in Syracuse that
he regretted what he had said.

All things considered, though, the Syracuse family has always
been fairly tight. Washington, who last year underwent an
eight-hour operation to remove a brain tumor, says, "This place,
Syracuse, was everything for me. And Jim Boeheim is Syracuse.
The idea that he can't coach is ridiculous, and the idea that
he's not a good guy is more ridiculous."

The case against Boeheim, the coach and the person, goes
something like this: He never won the Big One despite having
immense talent. He runs an unstructured program. He is grumpy at
best, downright nasty most of the rest of the time. He only
graduated 23% of his players in the latest six-year period
measured by the NCAA. And we're sick of looking at those glasses.

The case for him, which after last season can be stated with a
straight face, goes like this: He very nearly won two Big Ones.
Where some see lack of discipline, others see a system that is
entertaining for fans and fun for players. The talent on
Boeheim's teams was never nearly as immense as it seemed, and
the fact that he has sent 24 players to the NBA might be a
credit to his coaching, not the indictment some make it when
they point out his lack of postseason success. Clearly, Boeheim
would not be as successful without Fine, whose specialty,
incidentally, is developing big men like Seikaly; but neither
would Smith without Guthridge nor Knight without any of the
outstanding assistants who have been with him. As for the paltry
graduation rate, Boeheim pleads guilty on that score, saying his
rate was higher earlier in his career and adding, "They count
transfers against you, and we've had a lot of transfers [in the
most recent survey period]. That's a reason, but not an excuse.
There's no way to put a good light on it, and I feel bad about
it."

Off the court Boeheim performs charitable acts without much
fanfare. He is the second-leading fund-raiser in the nationwide
Coaches vs. Cancer program, started in memory of Valvano, and he
is also involved in many other good works in and around
Syracuse. But he never leaves his cynicism far behind. Last
month, after receiving a coach of the year award from the March
of Dimes, Boeheim said his thanks and added, "Of course, a few
games into the season you'll want to take it back."

On the day after that banquet, Boeheim went to the Civic Center
in downtown Syracuse to film a TV commercial. Only right before
the camera started rolling did the coach discover that he had to
climb into a Syracuse Orange mascot costume that would make even
JFK Jr. look ridiculous. "Jeez, I'm turning into Bill Frieder,"
he said, referring to the Arizona State coach known for his
wacky marketing ploys.

Not so. Say this for the coach with the short fuse and the long
memory: In two decades, he hasn't turned into anybody but Jim
Boeheim. And, maybe, at long last, that's good enough.

COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY THEO WESTENBERGER [Jim Boeheim]

COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY THEO WESTENBERGER THANKS TO JULI, WHOM HE MET AT A KENTUCKY DERBY PARTY IN '94, BOEHEIM IS A CHANGED MAN, THOUGH HE INSISTS OTHERWISE [Jim Boeheim and Juli Greene]

COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY THEO WESTENBERGER ELAINE, WITH ELIZABETH, HANDLES THE PRESSURE OF BEING "THE EX-WIFE" WITH CLASS [Elizabeth Boeheim and Elaine Boeheim]

B/W PHOTO: JAMES DRAKE BOEHEIM HAS BEEN AT SYRACUSE SINCE ARRIVING AS A PLAYER IN '62[Jim Boeheim and another player in game]

COLOR PHOTO: RICH CLARKSON PITINO (CENTER) WAS BOEHEIM'S FIRST HIRE AS SYRACUSE COACH [Rick Pitino, Jim Boeheim and others]

COLOR PHOTO: DAVID E. KLUTHO SYRACUSE REACHED THE '96 TITLE GAME, AND SUDDENLY BOEHEIM WAS A GENIUS [University of Kentucky player and Syracuse University player in game]

COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY THEO WESTENBERGER JIM AND JULI HAVE FOUND HAPPINESS IN THE ONLY PLACE HE EVER WANTED TO LIVE [Jim Boeheim and Juli Greene]