Tranghese

PROVIDENCE — To get to see him in that first year you had to walk into the downtown advertising firm of Duffy & Shanley, past desks and people who had no clue who you were or where you were going, to a small cubbyhole office in the back.

That was the office of the Big East Conference in 1979, and that’s where you found Mike Tranghese. There was no sign, no receptionist, not much of anything.

This was the conference that was going to change college basketball in the east?

It’s easy to take it all for granted now, to forget what it was in the beginning, back when it was little more than an idea floating around in Dave Gavitt’s head. To take it for granted that the Big East office always has been here, giving us a cachet in the world of college sports that we wouldn’t remotely have without it.

Back then. Tranghese’s job was to try to sell this this new conference, to make sure that people understood that the Big East was not some new taste treat from McDonald’s, but a powerful new force in college basketball. I was trying to eke out a living as a freelance writer at the time, and my job was to write the weekly newsletter, a weekly house organ full of stats and feature stories that were sent to both subscribers and various newspapers around the east, and every week I would drop off my stories in that small office.

This was the Big East Conference?

No one would have ever believed it.

Amazingly enough, it was only six years afterward that the Big East had three teams in the Final Four in Lexington, Ky. I saw him there and he just shrugged, then smiled. What was there to say? Six years earlier he had been in that small office in the back of Duffy & Shanley, and he remembered.

All that came rushing back to me the other day when I heard the news that Tranghese was stepping down as the commissioner of the Big East at the end of next year, the sense of how far he’s come since then, how different the conference is, how different college sports are.

For even then, in 1979, Tranghese was a great story, someone who came down from his native Springfield to interview to be the PC sports information director seven years earlier and, as fate would have it, met Dave Gavitt.

“I had been offered two other jobs in New England and PC paid the lowest,” he said. “Basically, I was investing in Dave.”

They became so close that the unofficial rule back then was that if you needed a quote from Gavitt, who always seemed to have a hundred or so balls in the air at any one time, you went to Tranghese. He gave you the Gavitt quote. It wouldn’t have gone over in a journalism seminar, certainly. But that’s the way it was.

So it didn’t come as any surprise in 1990 when Tranghese succeeded Gavitt as the Big East commissioner, Gavitt going off to run the Celtics. He already had been Gavitt’s alter-ego for years, had been there from the beginning, knew all the players, all the personalities, all the palace secrets. If Mike Tranghese didn’t exist in 1990, the Big East would have had to invent him.

Almost from the beginning, conference football had been the elephant in the living room. Football always has been the tail that wagged the dog, and he wasn’t even comfortable in the commissioner’s chair before he had to deal with the football future’s of Syracuse, Pittsburgh and Boston College.

Were the three going to leave the Big East to go off and play big-time football somewhere else?

Were they going to stay in the Big East in basketball and go somewhere else for football?

Does the Big East bring in more football schools to play with them?

“It’s the worst possible time to get this job, no question about that,” he said then.

This was the landscape he inherited, a turbulent time in college athletics. The Big East always had ignored the elephant in their living room. Suddenly, they no longer had that luxury.

So Tranghese began his tenure as the Big East commissioner, and in the beginning it was a little like jumping on stage after Sinatra had just got done doing “My Way.” How do you follow that comet that was Gavitt? How do you start to take the Big East into the future when the perception was that Gavitt could have solved all the conference’s problems with a few morning phone calls and still have time to play 18 holes at Agawam in the afternoon?

That, too, was the landscape Tranghese inherited.

In retrospect, he’s been a great commissioner. And let’s not kid ourselves, the Big East went to 16 teams three years ago, and that’s a lot of difficult personalities, a lot of agendas, a lot of juggling to do. Just dealing with the coaches alone is like herding cats.

He said the other day that he’s going to leave at the end of next season, which will be 30 years since he first walked into that little office in the back of Duffy & Shanley.

And who would have ever believed that back in 1979?

Who would have ever believed that the Big East would become the absolute colossus it’s become, one of the true giants in American college sport, reaching heights unimaginable back when it was just an idea running around in Gavitt’s head?

And who would have ever believed that Tranghese would become one of the biggest players in college sports, ready for a ride back there in 1979 that no one could have envisioned?

But that’s what he’s been, one of this state’s great sports stories.

Someone we shouldn’t take for granted.

breynold@projo.com