AUBURN HILLS, Mich. — In the secluded throes of March Madness, at 4 a.m. Pittsburgh time on the Sunday of the first weekend, a youthful 68-year-old coach with fresh agony flashing through his brain sat alone at an eight-seat conference table in a hotel suite and cussed repeatedly at himself. He held a pad with a basketball-court diagram and jotted play after play that might have worked where the one hours prior hadn’t. He sat wretched with lament until the morning light peeked in and he texted his sister.
“Can I come back with you?” he typed, having learned during the pandemic that traveling separately from his team eased strain on everyone involved.
“I’m leaving at 7. Can you be ready?” she replied.
“I’m ready right now,” he replied.
Then Greg Kampe, coach of the utmost darling of the 2024 NCAA men’s basketball tournament, Oakland University of Michigan, left the gladness and meanness of March Madness. He left in a back seat with sister Karen driving and two friends also riding. For the four hours they rolled along, he said, “There couldn’t have been four words said.” He arrived at his Detroit condo to his Double Doodles Rookie and Yogi, who greeted him with a pleasing lack of awareness “that I screwed up those last 17 seconds.” He switched on tournament games he would not watch, sprawled on the couch at noon and slept all the way to 10 the next morning. He might have eaten something sometime. He can’t quite recall.
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Then he whooshed into a week surrounded by people still breathing the ample fumes of euphoria — in the grocery store, at the bowling alley, around the campus at the 67-year-old university not far north of Detroit — because No. 14 seed Oakland had toppled No. 3 seed Kentucky, 80-76, in the round of 64 on March 21. Strangers thanked him and thanked him and thanked him. Yet even as the glee and gratitude swirled around him, his own mind reeled and howled because No. 11 seed North Carolina State bested Oakland, 79-73, in overtime in the round of 32 on March 23, moments after Oakland grabbed possession with 17 seconds left in regulation and the score tied at 66.
That’s when Kampe, beholding a team he adored for its magical chemistry and all else — “I love this team,” he would say in each postgame locker room — spotted a trace of uncertainty in that team and so, at 13.5 seconds, did something so bloody natural and yet now so bloody painful.
He called a timeout.
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“And I’ve got to live with that the rest of my life,” he said in his office the following Wednesday, soon adding: “It’s just — I can’t let it go. And I know it’s going to haunt me.”
So as his sleeps began stalling on multiple nights through the week, and as he would wake and draw up more plays, and as it echoed the years of waking up shaking after dreams replaying a tormenting overtime defeat to then-No. 1 Michigan State in December 2015 when a winning layup in regulation danced on the rim and fell off, the 2024 tournament continued and chucked a further tangle atop the churn.
N.C. State reached the damned Final Four.
“It’s just a weird time of emotions,” Kampe said the day after that.
Is it ever.
It might even epitomize the turbulent mind of a familiar subspecies, the coach.
By the time N.C. State’s DJ Burns Jr., that fresh folk hero of 6-foot-9 and 275 pounds, missed a tricky short shot from the left with 21.7 seconds left, and the ball rolled off the right side of the rim at 20.5, and Oakland’s great Trey Townsend rebounded and planted by 19.7 and then flipped to teammate DQ Cole to start upcourt at 17.2, everybody in the arena not prone to lunacy knew the novel Golden Grizzlies could hang with just about anybody in the field. “Cinderella” didn’t fit. Townsend had 30 points and 13 rebounds atop his 17 and 12 against Kentucky, and newly famous Jack Gohlke had 22 points and eight rebounds to follow his outrageous 10 three-pointers against Kentucky.
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On umpteen occasions during the brisk 40 years gone by, Kampe celebrated wins soon after calling such timeouts. Yet he rues this one for that lousiest of sports reasons — it didn’t work — and because it gave N.C. State’s Kevin Keatts a chance at strategizing. And as Oakland began its play that all witnesses knew would go to Townsend, N.C. State began its unforeseen reply with big man Mohamed Diarra in an unforeseen place.
“All game long, when we ran something similar to that, they would stay [back near the basket] because he’s the center,” Kampe said. They “stayed back and let [Oakland] make that pass, which had an influence on why I ran that play, because they were letting us do it during the game. But again, if I hadn’t called time out, they wouldn’t have had a chance to change” the approach.
“It blew the play up,” he said.
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Oakland never got a hint of a shot, and a frantic pass from way out yonder strayed out of bounds with 1.5 seconds left, tacking on another strand of agony. As Kampe plotted a hopeful March Madness play, the officials reviewed whether Diarra’s hand had scraped the ball, one of those possession replays almost impossible to decipher, not that Kampe will ever do any deciphering. “I’ll never watch it,” he said of the call that tilted to the Wolfpack. “I never will watch it. I don’t want to see it, because if they made a mistake, I don’t, I don’t, I …”
He trailed off there.
The Wolfpack won in overtime, and Kampe did a final news conference, upbraided himself for the 17 seconds and spoke an old and curious truth about March Madness: The elimination hurts less than the cessation of the collaboration. “I don’t get to coach them anymore,” he remembers thinking.
He and the team reached the hotel, where the incongruity of the outer and the inner started to shout. Grateful fans in the lobby hugged, cried and cheered. Kampe addressed them and thanked them. Oakland had joined the basketball map. Its forever coach headed upstairs to a team meal and texted his three sons, who had converged from around the country and converged now in an upstairs lobby among seven people reliving. Around 2 a.m., Kampe headed for his room and his tumult.
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As the fickle little turns of the 17 seconds took up shop in his head, the dreadful urge to remake the past cuddled right beside. “You don’t want to sit here, ever, and say stuff and not give credit to the opponent,” he said days later. “The opponent, I’m sure they’re saying, ‘Man, we defended that last play, and that’s why we won.’ And they’re right. They’re 100 percent right. But from my perspective, I could have run stuff where they couldn’t have defended it.”
Instead, “The two leading scorers on my team didn’t touch the ball in the last 17 seconds.”
Here his tone got rather grave.
“And that’s bad.”
So his mind plays the abominable soundtrack of what-if. It would be easier to lose after a good shot missed, or by some score such as “60-52,” he said. “And you know,” he said, “I’m lying there on my pillow at night, can’t sleep, and I’m thinking, you know, I’m daydreaming it: ‘What if I don’t call a timeout?’ ‘What if I would have just run a play we call Loop Kick?’ ‘We should have run Loop Kick.’ And I’m lying there: ‘Why didn’t I run Loop Kick?’ ”
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Loop Kick, he said, entails “a quick entry pass to Townsend, and you spread the floor, he ducks in, you throw it to him, and you get the hell out of his way. It takes two seconds.” As a further exercise, his unquiet mind designs plays for the next time somebody defends Oakland as did N.C. State in that situation. “Those are nonstop thoughts,” he said. “And that will go on for years. For years.”
Yet outside his mind and inside campus and thereabouts, the delight hadn’t fizzled. People stopped him in stores, on campus. When he went bowling last week in adjacent Rochester Hills, he and friends bowled down alleys with a floating electronic sign above the pins reading: “Congratulations to Coach Kampe and your 2024 OU basketball team. You showed America that Wildcats are no match for Grizzlies.” The cigar bar he enjoys in Detroit became a harbor of fine rehash.
One game among the 1,236 he has coached at the school, the win over regal Kentucky, had tweaked the tenor of his interactions. “Usually people nod their head or, ‘Can I take a picture?’ or something like that,” he said. “Now they want to talk, they want to hug me, they want to thank me. Everywhere.”
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He continued answering his thousands of texts, sometimes between 2 and 4 a.m. so people didn’t reply right then and cause him to reach again for the thumbs-up or heart emoji. Some lent supportive “excuses” that he, of course, declined to absorb.
By Sunday at the Midwest Region final in Detroit between Purdue and Tennessee, he did a radio spot, and soon Tennessee fans surrounded him for chatter and thanks. (Well, of course they did. His team had beaten Kentucky.) When he ventured to the pregame locker rooms and to coaching friends Matt Painter and Rick Barnes, the man who ushered him wound up saying, “I feel like I’m walking Mickey Mouse around Disneyland.” By Monday, Kampe saw a woman on X riding around with friends and a “life-size” Kampe cardboard cutout rising through the sunroof.
“It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced,” Kampe said of all of it.
Only sometimes have his divergent realities mingled. One guy asked why he didn’t call a second available timeout after the play went kaput, meaning he had one called timeout and one uncalled timeout to lament. (Nice.) “That’s how [messed] up this business is,” he said after a big, steady laugh. Then Monday, with the Final Four all set, he attended the dedication of a new Detroit recreation center by NFL quarterback Matthew Stafford and Stafford’s wife, Kelly, and a friend spiced some banter with a wisecrack about, “If only Coach could have come up with a play …”
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“Too soon,” Kampe replied. “Too soon.”
The friend soon texted an apology.
Meanwhile, the team Oakland had played to 66-66 headed for Greater Phoenix and the ultimate hubbub. “Everybody is so great,” Kampe said, “but there’s always, ‘We were just one possession away!’ ‘They’re in the Final Four!’ ‘That one possession!’ ‘If we would have scored!’
“Could we have done [what N.C. State did]?” Kampe said. “Oh, my God.” He said, “The wave of momentum is a magical thing in sports.” He imagines Gohlke splashing down 10 more threes in the Sweet 16, because daydreams don’t permit 0-for-10s. He reckons an N.C. State title could bolster and tantalize all at once.
Mostly, though, he dwells on 17 deathless seconds: “I think about that nonstop, that we didn’t get a shot.” He senses less-tortured days await somewhere on future calendars: “I know it’s out there. I definitely know it’s out there.” He wonders if euphoria might surpass regret at last, maybe “in the middle of the summer, one day on the golf course.” It’s just that for now, he lies on the pillow, thinks of Loop Kick, draws on his pads and embodies the woe always lurking in the intolerable, irresistible art of coaching.
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