William Fox

Ty Jerome started every game for the only number one seed in history to lose to a number sixteen. Eleven months later he was an all tournament pick on the national champion. Tonight he scored 45 points for the Memphis Grizzlies. He is from New Rochelle, New York, and he went to Iona Preparatory School there. Harvard recruited him. So did Temple and Davidson. Tony Bennett found him by accident. The Virginia coach was in a gym scouting somebody else. His father Mark put a basketball in his crib. By two he was dribbling two of them at once in Washington Heights. At eight he was playing for the Riverside Hawks against kids two years older, and the family drove all over the city for it. Rucker Park, Dyckman, Coney Island. He was playing against Donovan Mitchell in those tournaments. One weekend he played five baseball games and six basketball tournaments. Mark had played a little at Lafayette and he coached his son hard, so that nobody could say he had a favorite. "I screamed and yelled at him probably too much." Now the night everybody remembers. March 2018. Virginia had gone 31 and 2. The best team in the country, the number one overall seed, and Jerome a sophomore starter. UMBC beat them 74 to 54. A sixteen seed had never beaten a one seed. Not once, in the entire history of the tournament. Here is the part worth knowing. Jerome stayed on the floor until the final whistle, and then he went and sat down in front of the reporters. Somebody asked him whether he was aware that a sixteen had never won before. "I think everyone's aware of that. Thanks for bringing that up again." His father had already left the building. Here is how Mark describes the walk back to the hotel. "Longest walk of my life." "Just heartbreak and pain." "There was no fixing that night." Mark says his son was alright again inside a week. Mark himself needed a long talk with the head coach. Andscape is where the family laid all of that out. The next season Jerome started all 37 games. Virginia won the national championship and he made the all tournament team. That summer he turned up at the NBA Summer League in a shirt with the UMBC logo on it and Virginia printed over the top. He was a top fifty recruit out of high school, not a nobody, and he is in his eighth NBA season. One enormous night in October is one night. But he was on the floor for the worst loss in the history of college basketball, and he was on the floor eleven months later when they won the whole thing. And tonight he made seventeen of twenty five.