Little Tommy Haugh Says 'No' To The Gold

A Story About Things That Mattered More Than Money To A College Athlete Who Put Loyalty And Love Of The Game First  

Once upon a time, about 850 miles and a million dreams away from where it was seeded, there lived a very tall boy named Tommy. They called him, “Little Tommy, which was funny, because Tommy was not little at all. He would grow up to be 6-9 in his socks, with arms that reached nearly to the clouds and a basketball in his hands that looked about the size of a grapefruit. 

He wore orange and blue, and when he ran down the court, the floor trembled with respect — the polite way that floors have of saying hello to someone important.

Tommy had come a long way from New Oxford, Pa., a small and quiet town where the trees grew thick and the winters were cold and a boy’s dreams were the warmest thing around. He had Florida decals on his book bag representing his dreams of the future and his admiration of Tim Tebow. He already knew what and who he wanted to be.

He had come south to play for a place he called his dream school, to play for a coach named Coach Golden and to play alongside boys who had become more than teammates — they had become his people.

And oh, how Tommy could play.

The world of basketball — that beautiful, screeching-sneaker, swish-of-the-net world — has a door at the very top. A golden door. And behind that golden door lives a thing called the NBA, where the very best players in the world go to play, and where the paychecks are so large you could wallpaper a house with them and still have some left over for the garage.

Every boy who picks up a basketball dreams about that door.

And in the springtime, after Tommy’s third year with the Gators, when the Florida season was over and the last confetti had been swept from the floor, the men who guard that golden door came calling.

They had notebooks and IPads and clipboards and numbers — very large numbers — and they said:

“Tommy. Little Tommy. We have been watching you. You scored seventeen points  a game. You grabbed six rebounds. You are long and quick and smart and only twenty-two years old. We want you. Come through the door. Here is your fortune.”

They called him a lottery pick, which is a very fancy way of saying: We will pay you millions of dollars to play the game you love.

Millions. Of. Dollars.

The whole basketball world leaned in, held its breath, and waited.

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Because here is what you must understand about the modern world of basketball, and indeed about the modern world of almost everything: The story is always supposed to go one way:

A boy gets good at something. The men with money show up. The boy takes the money. He goes.

That is the story. That has always been the story. 

Players follow the dollars the way rivers follow the valley — there is no fighting it, no questioning it. It simply is.

Coaches do it too. When Tommy’s coach, the already trending-toward-greatness Todd Golden was being whispered about by the Golden State Warriors — there is that gold reference again — the famous, glittering Golden State Warriors, out there in California where the sun sets over the Pacific and the basketball is fast and the money is faster — people shook their heads and said:

“Well. There goes Coach Golden. Golden to Golden State. What a story. What a headline.”

You see where we’re going with all these references to gold and Golden – clearly that is the metaphor of nuggets in little Tommy’s story.

Was he going for the gold or staying for/with Golden?

Everyone assumed they knew. Everyone always assumes.

The rivers run to the sea. The players take the money. The coaches follow. That is just how it goes.

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Except.

Except Tommy had a secret. Not the kind of secret you whisper behind your hand, but the kind that sits quiet and warm in your chest, that you only discover when everything around you gets very loud and you go very still inside.

Tommy had unfinished business.

There were teammates who had stayed — big Alex Condon, his frontcourt brother, his friend from far-off Australia who had also looked at that golden door and said, not yet. If Alex could say no, Tommy thought, maybe saying no was not so strange after all.

There was a court that still smelled like possibility.

There was orange and blue still pressed against his heart.

There was a national championship banner already hanging in the rafters — the Gators had won it all, when Tommy was barely getting started — and somewhere deep inside his six-foot-nine frame, a voice whispered:

What if we could hang another one?

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And so, on a Tuesday morning in April, when the whole basketball world was leaning forward with its hands on its knees, waiting for Tommy to say yes to the millions and the golden door and the story that always goes one way —

Tommy cleared his throat.

And he said no.

Not an angry no. Not a sad no. A warm, sure, eyes-wide-open no.

“It’s not just about NIL,” he said, which is the fancy way players talk about money these days. “It’s about the opportunity to compete alongside my teammates, play for Coach Golden, and represent a university that I love.”

The room got very quiet.

Then the whole basketball world made a sound like a record player scratching to a stop.

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What?

He said no?

To the millions?

To the lottery pick?

But nobody does that. Nobody has done that since Miles Bridges at Michigan State way back in 2017. You can’t just — you can’t — that’s not — but the money — but the door — but —

Yes.

Tommy said no.

And across the building, Coach Golden looked at the Warriors and their Pacific sunsets and their shining arena and said: I am definitely planning on coaching the Gators.

And suddenly the old story — the rivers always run to the sea story, the players always take the money story, the coaches always chase the bright lights story — that old story had a crack right down the middle.

Because it turns out stories can surprise you.

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Some people said Tommy was foolish.

Some people said he was smart — after all, there was still good money to be made right there in Gainesville, through NIL deals and the kind of love a whole state gives a boy who stays.

But Tommy, if you looked at him closely, did not look like a boy doing math.

He looked like a boy who knew something.

He looked like a boy who understood that there are things you cannot buy with a lottery pick, things that have no price written on them in any notebook or on any clipboard:

The way your teammates look at you on the court when the game is on the line.

The way a student section sounds when it erupts in orange and blue.

The particular weight of unfinished business — heavier than any trophy, lighter than any regret.

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So little Tommy laced up his shoes again.

And Alex Condon, the big Australian, laced up his, too.

And Coach Golden walked back into the practice gym and drew up a play on his whiteboard.

And in Gainesville, in the warm Spanish-moss-and-sunshine land where a tall boy from Pennsylvania had once arrived with dreams, something old-fashioned and almost forgotten stirred back to life.

It was loyalty. The kind that does not have a price tag. The kind that shows up when the golden door swings wide open and the room beyond it glitters, and you look at it — you really look at it — and then you turn around and walk back to your people.

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The story is not over, of course. Stories about unfinished business never are.

The Gators will play again come November, in their orange and blue environs of their ExactTech Arena, already teeming with anticipation. Little Tommy — now tall, unhurried, big-hearted Tommy now a full grown man with one dream accomplished and maybe another one on the way.

Some will say he made the wrong choice.

Some will say he made the right one.

But all of them, every last one, will watch.

And maybe, just maybe, they will be reminded of something they had nearly forgotten:

That the things we love — really love, with all the bones in our six-foot-nine frames — are worth staying and fighting for.

Even when the golden door is wide open.

Even when the whole world says: go.

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And so little Tommy stayed.

And that, more than any fortune, is a story worth telling.

The End.

(For the Gator Nation, and for everyone who ever turned around at the golden door.)

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