Back then, the White boys -- Mike and Danny -- had no choice.
They had to wait for the snow and ice to melt in Maine before they could go outside and play basketball. Not to be deterred, they set up a makeshift basketball court with 7-foot baskets in their basement and played all day and all night long.
"It was freezing cold outside with ice on the ground," remembers Danny White, now the athletics director at UCF. "Mike was so competitive; he never wanted to lose those games. He hated losing."
Three decades later, it's evident not much has changed about Mike White, who is now the second-year basketball coach at the University of Florida.
He still hates losing as evidenced by the look of total disbelief on his face after the Gators' frustrating 68-66 loss to Vanderbilt Saturday. And, yes, he is still waiting for the ice to thaw on the nuclear winter that many critics predicted for UF's basketball program after living legend Billy Donovan left for the NBA's Oklahoma City Thunder two years ago.
It appeared the sun was starting to shine on White's program this season after the Gators started out 14-2, 5-0 in the SEC, but _ just that quickly _ the sun has gone back behind Billy's shadow once again. The 19th-ranked Gators have now lost two in a row and have looked abysmal in the process.
It's one thing to lose 57-53 on the road to 23rd-ranked South Carolina on Wednesday, but to lose at home to a struggling Vanderbilt team (9-10, 3-4) that had lost four consecutive games is cause for major concern. It's never good when your team loses back-to-back home games to the Commodores for the first time in more than a quarter-century.
"We need to improve tenfold because we took six steps back today," a distraught White said Saturday. "Our body language was bad. During timeouts, we were pointing fingers. Our culture had really improved, but today the ugliness showed up again."
It is unfortunate because it came in front of yet another sellout crowd at the beautifully renovated O'Connell Center, which just re-opened after undergoing a $65 million face lift. The building has a new scoreboard, new lighting system, new club level and even a new name -- Exactech Arena.
But there's no question the old coach's aura still infiltrates every nook and cranny of the building, although it's difficult to find a picture of Donovan among all of the giant photographs hanging in the concourses.
The photographs portray all of the incredible performers who have a appeared in the arena over the last 35 years. Question: Why are there as many pictures of Billy Joel as there are of Billy Donovan?
To his credit, White doesn't spend much time lamenting the fact that he has had to follow Donovan and instead continues to laud the former coach for staying in contact, helping him get acclimated and for "making this an incredible job."
Besides, worrying about Donovan is simply not in the DNA of White, an up-and-coming young coach who has always been obsessed with self-improvement. It started when he was kid growing up and moving across the country while his father, current Duke athletics director Kevin White, climbed the collegiate administrative ladder.
Mike's brother, Danny, says he and his brother had every gimmicky gadget and piece of training equipment on the market in order to try to build themselves into basketball players. When they lived on a golf course, they would use the cart paths to set up their equipment and run sprints with their weighted "strength shoes." Eventually, Mike built himself into a four-year starter at Ole Miss.
"We did every kind of offseason conditioning drills you could think of," Danny recalls. "Mike had absolute tunnel vision about basketball. He was older, so he would drag me out to the driveway at all hours of the day and night. There were times when the neighbors would be complaining because the ball was bouncing in the driveway at 2 a.m."
Perhaps this is why Mike White was so baffled about the way his team played on Saturday. The lack of focus and energy displayed by his players seemed foreign to him as did the "lazy" defense that allowed Vanderbilt to make 10-of-25 from 3-point range.
"It's absolutely incredible; it's beyond me," said White, who drilled his players all week on defending the 3-point line. "I guess I didn't do a good enough job explaining it."
Nobody says this was going to be easy.
Mike White should know.
Sometimes, you have to spend some time relegated to the basement before the sun finally shines on your basketball dream.
