Published: June 07, 2008 01:15 am      

COLUMN: Tranghese won’t forget Georgia night

MORGANTOWN — He was, by his own admission, an unlikely candidate for greatness.

“A little Italian kid from Springfield, Mass.,” is the term he used to describe himself.

He was too small to make the team, so he became the trainer.

A humble beginning for Mike Tranghese, who now says his future brought him to the point where “I walked with kings.”

He talks not of Louis XIV, Henry VIII or Kong, all great in their own way.

No, he talks of Louie Carnesecca and John Thompson and Jim Boeheim and Jim Calhoun, kings in the sport of college basketball.

But there was no king present that night in Atlanta when he walked home from the Georgia Dome, his greatest moment now complete and requiring lonely contemplation.

What better time to recall that contemplation for a man who was the first hire of the Big East Conference and its second commissioner on the day he announced that he would be leaving the job on June 30, 2009.

West Virginia had just completed the resurrection of his football league, defeating Georgia of the Southeastern Conference in the Sugar Bowl, giving his conference that had been savaged and left for dead by the Atlantic Coast Conference, who snuck off in the night with its three top football members — Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College.

You ask him his greatest achievement and it comes back to the way he handled that crisis, coming at the time when he first was considering retiring.

“I’d been thinking about it,” Tranghese admitted. “I thought about leaving four or five years ago. That’s when we went through losing schools, but I wasn’t about to leave at that point. I wanted to leave when I felt the conference was in good shape.”

He wasn’t the only one thinking of leaving. The remaining schools like West Virginia, Syracuse and Pittsburgh were facing unsure futures.

“What made it work was that we had no choice,” Tranghese said. “Schools had nowhere else to go. They had no eyes for anyone and no one had eyes for them.”

And so he made a bold move, added Cincinnati, Louisville and South Florida as football and basketball members and increased his basketball conference to 16 teams by also bringing in Marquette and DePaul.

The basketball conference was the nation’s best.

“You had to be brain dead to not think this was a great basketball conference,” he said.

But football was a different story. The BCS bid was in jeopardy. The conference had no history, no respect.

And then came that Georgia night when West Virginia ran circles around the Bulldogs, a victory Tranghese calls the most significant in his 30 years with the conference.

It was the night the Big East re-arrived on the national football scene.

“That took the burden off everyone,” Tranghese said.

Relieved, he poured himself a cup of coffee and headed back to the hotel on foot as his aides all grabbed the shuttle or cabs.

“It took more than 40 minutes,” Tranghese said.

Forty minutes to be alone with his successes. Forty minutes to smile the smile that everyone connected with his conference was smiling.

Forty minutes to present himself as a potential mugging victim on the mean city streets.

He cared not.

“It wouldn’t have mattered. I probably would have won,” he said.

On this night, he was invincible.

Survival, he said, that was his greatest accomplishment, going from a regional basketball league riding the rise of ESPN into an industry leader in both football and basketball. So much to remember, so many great moments.

He remembers 1985 when he had a young league that had sent three teams to the Final Four.

“We were trying to find our way,” he said. “I remember Memphis coming out of the tunnel and hearing the cheers. Then Villanova came out and everyone in the place stood and was chanting ‘Big East!’ It sent chills down my spine,” he said.

But now he’s had enough. The league is sound ground and he’s happy to stand there, his fear of flying having gotten to be something more than just a phobia. He is giving the presidents of the Big East a year to find a successor, time for himself to wind down.

“For the last 30 years, I wake up every morning and one of my first or second thoughts has always been the league,” Tranghese said. “But it just felt right to me. I knew it was going to be hard whenever I did it.”

E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.