The suits. It must always start with the suits.
Impeccably tailored and always matched to the perfect shirt-tie-pocket square combination, the suits have more than made the man. They have defined him.
Jay Wright is what he wears: handsome and never mussed, his life a finely woven piece of fabric stitched into an effortless existence. His is a coaching career gifted on a silver spoon, the one-time young, hot coach of the moment, whose Italian leather loafers have waltzed along, following the trajectory up, up and up to yet another Final Four berth for Villanova.
"Hell no, that is not true," said Wright's former assistant Billy Lange, who is now an assistant with the Philadelphia 76ers. "We've shared a lot of long car rides down I-95, a lot of conversations. This has not been easy. He's had a lot of ups and downs."
In reality, Wright has been accused of being an empty suit as frequently as he has been lauded for wearing well-tailored ones. His career reads more like a hyperactive EKG than the steady and upwardly mobile path of a well-dressed man.
He has made mistakes -- foolish ones and selfish ones -- and reinvented himself and his career more than once. To be blunt, neither he nor his career is as well-pressed as you might think.
Here's how fickle fate can be: Had Villanova not acted swiftly -- either gently nudging Steve Lappas out the door or not quite stopping the former coach when he went to UMass (the version depends on whom you ask) -- Wright would have become the head coach at Rutgers in 2001. Which means one of two things: 15 years later, we wouldn't be hearing from Wright any longer, or the Scarlet Knights would be really good.
"We had to move pretty quickly to get his attention," said former Villanova athletic director Vince Nicastro, who now works as an associate director with the university's law school. "He was already pretty far down the road with Rutgers. Had we waited a day or two, he may have been so far down the path he wouldn't be able to come back and consider the Villanova job."
Instead, Villanova, where Wright had worked as an assistant under Rollie Massimino, swiped the most popular young coach on the market -- Wright was coming off his second consecutive NCAA tournament berth at once downtrodden Hofstra -- out from under its then-Big East rival.
The Scarlet Knights, who recently hired Steve Pikiell, are on their fifth head coach since then. Villanova is in its second Final Four.
He made it look so easy. That was part of the problem. It's not supposed to be easy -- at least not for shiny new pennies in their first big-time gigs.
Yet there was Wright, in his second season on the job, signing Allan Ray, Randy Foye and Curtis Sumpter and then adding the exclamation point: highly sought-after McDonald's All-American Jason Fraser. He stole all four from the New Jersey/New York area, right out from under the noses of the Big East power brokers, which didn't exactly endear him to his peers.
"Oh, absolutely, other coaches were jealous," said West Virginia assistant Billy Hahn, who got to know Wright when he was the head coach at La Salle from 2001 to '04. "He's got these Hollywood looks. He's young. He's getting all these great players. People were not happy."
On campus and around Philadelphia, though, folks were thrilled. Wright visited campus cafeterias, quite literally jumping on tables to fan the flames of interest in his team, and when his first squad finished 19-13 and in the NIT, no one blinked.
They knew what was coming.
NIT. NIT. NIT. Phone code scandal. NCAA violations.
That's the abbreviated version of the popular, young coach's not-so-upwardly mobile trajectory from the 2001-02 season to 2003-04. Three NIT berths, with each receiving lessening degrees of acceptance as that red-hot recruiting class matured, made worse by back-to-back black eyes of NCAA malfeasance.
At the end of the 2002-03 season, the Wildcats suspended 12 players for placing unauthorized long-distance calls with an athletic department employee's phone access code (unbeknownst to the employee). The suspensions were of varying degrees and staggered, so Villanova could field some sort of a team.
Still, when the Wildcats went to Siena for an NIT game, they dressed five scholarship players and two walk-ons.
"I remember they booed Siena because we were only down two at the half," said current Boston University head coach Joe Jones, Wright's assistant at Hofstra and Villanova.
The next season, after another NIT appearance, Wright convened yet another press conference to discuss an NCAA investigation. A two-year investigation revealed that the basketball program had committed enough minor violations (including impermissible contact and arranging transportation for a recruit) to add up to a major violation, and the school was hit with two years of probation.
"Understand [that] Villanova is Jay's dream job, and he considers himself to be a steward of the place," Lange said. "That was hard on him. He owned every part of it, but that was really hard on him."
At a breakfast meeting between Wright and a reporter before the 2004-05 season, at the since demolished Villanova Diner just down the road from campus, Wright came prepared to answer questions about the tumultuous start to his Villanova tenure.
"OK, go. Whaddya got?" Wright asked.
"Well, you're on the hot seat," the reporter replied. "What do you think of that?"
"You're right," Wright said. "I deserve to be. So what do you want to know about it?"
(Full disclosure, that reporter was me, and for weeks, my email inbox had been pinging with more than a few missives complaining that Wright wasn't right for Villanova.)
Understand that Philadelphia is generally a town that largely ignores college sports until at least the end of the Eagles' season. Back then, the Birds were in the midst of three consecutive NFC Championship game appearances. If people were noticing Wright and Villanova, that wasn't a good thing.
And they were noticing -- noticing a coach who came in with fanfare and a lauded recruiting class but then produced only middling results and NCAA embarrassment.
"It starts with you," a fan said at halftime of the Wildcats' second game of the season against Temple, while slamming his hands on the press table at the Palestra and staring at me. "You have to get this guy fired. He's a phony pretty boy. He looks good, but he can't coach."
"Yo dawg, we 'bout done here?"
Saint Joseph's coach Phil Martelli swears Kyle Lowry interrupted him mid-recruiting pitch and uttered those words.
Lowry swears it didn't happen. That it is at least plausible that Lowry said it tells you all you need to know about the Toronto Raptors guard as a high schooler. Now an NBA All-Star game starter, his reputation then, as a malcontent with an attitude problem, preceded him.
Most everyone Wright knew -- and plenty of people whose opinions he respected -- told him not to take the Philly guard. But he took the Philly guard. His team, he thought, was wildly talented but almost too nice. They'd been "Villanova-ized," he said, remarking how Newark-born Foye spent part of a spring break surfing.
Wright needed a kid with an edge. He got one in Lowry.
"We butted heads every day -- every single day because I was going to be me," Lowry said. "One time, he told me to go run on the side of the court. I got back into practice, and I did the exact same thing -- because I could. So he made me run again. I needed to mature. I knew that. I didn't want to, but I knew it, and he forced me to."
Lowry's most Lowry-like moment turned out to be the pivotal moment of Wright's career. The guard was ejected for trying to punch Kansas' Keith Langford. With a blizzard blowing outside, the No. 2 Jayhawks trailed 38-34 after Lowry was tossed.
Villanova ended up winning the game 83-62. Wright didn't condone Lowry's punch -- he made him write a letter of apology to Langford -- but he knew the play was exactly the show of toughness his team needed and had lacked. That play and that game were quite literally a turning point for everything.
"For the players, it kind of solidified in our minds that we were good enough to be on the big stage," said Mike Nardi, who scored 11 points in that game and now serves as Wright's director of student-athlete development. "We knew it, but that was the proof we needed."
He called the offense TNT: Tempo Negates Turnovers.
Really, that was a fancy name for one-on-one isolation.
"Basically, it was, 'OK, Kyle, if you're open, you take your guy one-on-one. Or Randy, if you're open, you do it,"' Lowry said. "Do you know how many coaches are control freaks? They'd never let their players do that. Don't get me wrong. He has an ego -- a big ego -- but he doesn't care if we look good or if we look ugly, as long as we win games. He doesn't care if people like it."
People loved it because it worked. After Kansas, Villanova won 11 of its next 13 games and finished the season with 24 wins and a spot in the Sweet 16. The next year, they won 28 games and went to the Elite Eight. After a first-round exit in 2006-07, it was back to the Sweet 16 and, finally, the culmination in 2009 with Villanova's first Final Four berth since its historic 1985 title.
Wright's fancy suits and pretty shoes were finally where they belonged -- on Easy Street.
Lange and Wright were headed down I-95, driving somewhere to recruit someone. Lange had just rejoined Wright's staff after seven seasons as the head man at Navy.
This was 2011, after Villanova's second-round upset loss to Saint Mary's followed by a first-round loss to George Mason raised eyebrows but didn't yet sound the alarm bells.
"I remember, he said to me, 'It's so hard not to get intoxicated with fame,'" Lange said. "I didn't know exactly what he meant at first, but he was saying how you go to the Final Four, and guys want to show up. They want to play for you. And it's so easy to just take guys. You don't stop and think, 'Wait, this isn't what we did before.' You just do it."
After 2009, it was supposed to be simple. Instead, it became much harder. Wright has admitted that he lost his way, blinded by his own success and starry-eyed at the players who wanted to join his team. He made huge mistakes and costly ones, recruiting kids who topped the rankings but didn't necessarily match the prototype he had recruited his whole career.
The bottom dropped out in 2011-12, when the Wildcats finished 13-19, but it had been coming for years. Wright knew it. He saw it coming. He just couldn't stop it.
"Villanova got so good so fast," Lange said. "Things start to deteriorate underneath you, and you don't even know what's happening. You spend so long trying to get it back, to keep people to respecting you, and then all of a sudden, it happens. He got caught up in it. Who wouldn't?"
Players who were evaluated as one-and-dones stuck around longer than they would have liked, and a program on the rise couldn't get out of the first weekend of the NCAA tournament. Wright has admitted to some serious soul-searching. Although his administration never pressured him -- "He was never on the hot seat with us," Nicastro said -- Wright pressured himself to change.
The coach, along with his staff, made a conscious decision to stop recruiting players who merely wanted to play at Villanova and instead target players Wright wanted to coach at Villanova.
It's a nuanced difference but a big one. There are no obvious NBA first-round draft picks on this year's roster. There isn't even a first-team All-American. Jalen Brunson is the lone McDonald's All American; the next highest-rated player coming out of high school was Ryan Arcidiacono, who was 46th in his class.
"He decided to stop playing the game," Lange said. "He wasn't going to worry about out-recruiting whatever school name you wanted to insert. He wasn't going to out-whatever some other school. He kept saying, 'I'm going to do Villanova.' That wasn't easy to do, and it took some guts, but that's what makes him him."
Wright's version of Villanova is back in the Final Four.
The popular, young coach is neither so popular nor so young anymore. His name still crops up in the coaching carousel, but it is usually quickly dismissed. Wright, who turned Kentucky down seven years ago, has made it clear he doesn't plan to leave Villanova for another campus. An NBA gig? Maybe down the road, but not anytime soon.
He's 54 now, which makes him the second-oldest coach in the Big East (to 55-year-old Dave Leitao of DePaul) and the longest-tenured boss in the league by three years. He is easily the most comfortable in his own skin.
"You know how you know Jay Wright is real?" Hahn said with a laugh. "He's got some gray showing in his hair. He's letting it go. He's not covering that crap up. People who don't know him, they'd think he'd cover that gray up immediately and go lay in a tanning bed somewhere. They have no idea about this guy."