Hal Cohen, 1976-1980
Cohen, a steady guard for Boeheim’s first teams as head coach, doesn’t remember the exact moment they met — it must’ve been at a summer camp when Boeheim was still an assistant, he said.
The biggest Boeheim “first,” though, was the new head coach’s first media blow-up. It was 1977, and a freshman named Magic Johnson brought his Michigan State team to town for the Carrier Classic. Johnson dazzled, but he coughed up nine turnovers in a 75-67 loss for Michigan State, Cohen said.
Led by senior forward Marty Byrnes (19.9 points per game), Syracuse won the in-season tournament at Manley Field House. But the media members in attendance voted for the flashy Johnson, not Byrnes, as the most valuable player.
“When they went to announce the MVP, we assumed it would be Marty,” Cohen said. “We’d never heard of a player not on the winning team to win the MVP.”
Boeheim, too, apparently assumed as much.
“Boeheim was very annoyed with the writers at that point,” Cohen recalls. “That was the first chair toss of his career during a postgame interview. (He) walked off the podium and threw the chair.”
Herman Harried, 1984-89
When Harried first met Boeheim, he thought he was a quiet, lowkey guy. He went to dinner with SU’s staff and had a brief meeting with Boeheim in his office.
Harried spent five years at Syracuse, missing one because of a knee injury, and was a reserve player on the 1987 team that advanced to the Final Four. But what stood out to Harried the most was Boeheim’s intelligence — it’s his greatest asset, he said.
“He can counter things that other coaches and teams are trying to do on the fly, which you got to be pretty good to be able to do,” Harried said.
Stephen Thompson, 1986-90
Growing up in Los Angeles, Thompson dreamed of attending UCLA. But then the Big East started to grow in popularity and get more broadcasts on ESPN. Syracuse, Boeheim and the Carrier Dome got more attention.
Boeheim traveled across the country to Thompson’s house for a recruiting visit in 1984 or 1985. Thompson was 16 years old at the time, and everything about the meeting was “mesmerizing,” he said.
Boeheim pitched that Thompson’s style of play — getting up and down the floor in transition, getting to the rim, playing good one-on-one defense — would mesh perfectly with Syracuse’s system, and he compared his potential role to Georgetown’s David Wingate. He thought Thomspon could even lead the Orange in scoring as a freshman, although that didn’t happen after mononucleosis limited him.
Thompson, now an assistant coach at Oregon State, averaged 18 and 17.8 points per game his final two seasons before spending a year in the NBA and playing professionally overseas. He became an honorable mention All-American his junior and senior seasons at Syracuse, too.
“The vision of what they saw came to fruition as my career went on, for sure,” he said.
Mike Hopkins, 1989-1993 (assistant coach 1995-2017)
Even though he grew up on the West Coast, Hopkins loved watching the Orange play as a middle schooler. He remembers the image of Boeheim and Georgetown coaching legend John Thompson face-to-face at midcourt. Hopkins became a “huge fan” of Pearl Washington and Rafael Addison.
So when Boeheim visited his home in San Mateo, California, Hopkins was in awe.
“It was like you were talking to a god,” Hopkins said. “Coach Boeheim, he’s just so tough, so competitive. Never back down. So when I met him, you saw the different side. You saw the funny, smart, caring and just honest and real.”
Boeheim was up-front with him about how Hopkins would fit into the program, something Hopkins has emulated as an assistant and now as head coach at Washington. Hopkins even has a Boeheim impression that’s calm and almost satirical, complete with hand gestures and a nasally voice.
“Just really appeal(ling), really simple, really authentic,” Hopkins said. “I think that’s why we had a lot of success in recruiting in the program.”
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Lasting Impressions: A look at Jim Boeheim's 1st moments with 5 decades of recruits - The Daily Orange
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