CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Tony Bennett does not handle attention all that comfortably. He’s never one to seek a spotlight and, to my mind, has never called a member of the press in search of credit or to suss out a buzzy behind-the-scenes rumor. Bennett, sometimes to the frustration of the media, is often humble to a fault. Predictably, that humility was on display again Friday, perhaps for one last time.
“The University of Virginia is an amazing place because of people like Tony,” athletic director Carla Williams said during her introduction of Bennett’s retirement press conference.
As Williams’ opening remarks led into a standing ovation for Bennett, the coach predictably donned a sheepish grin, his shoulders slouched as he channeled the energy of a child who doesn’t know what to do with their body when everybody is singing the happy birthday song to them. If they’d have let Bennett retire without nothing more than a paragraph’s worth of a press release, he probably would have taken it.
What a surreal scene it was, though. One of the game’s greatest coaches is walking away, on this odd day of the 18th of October, nearly on the eve of the season, becoming the latest high-profile coach to pull the ripcord. And in doing so, Bennett puts that much more attention on the unstable environment of college athletics that has a lot of people soul-seeking and scrambling for solutions to existential problems that go a hell of a lot deeper than one man’s decision to no longer coach basketball.
“I thought it would be a little longer, to be honest, but it’s been on loan and it’s time for me to give it back,” Bennett said as he held back tears. The scene raised the question of why a 55-year-old was stepping away like this, 18 days before the start of the 2024-25 season, and Bennett provided answers.
After his news conference, he took even more questions in a one-on-one interview with CBS Sports,…
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