ALBANY, N.Y. — Bill Clingan did not want to go to the bar. At 29 years old, he was pretty much done with the whole scene and, on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the last thing he wanted to do was hit some local watering hole sure to be crushed with people. Worse, his friends chose probably his least favorite spot in town, the kind of joint where bar fights are common. But Bill had nothing else to do, so he went as the crew’s designated driver. Upon arrival, he promptly plopped himself on a barstool to watch whatever game was on the TV and sip at his soda. There, if not entirely present.
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Later in the evening a distant relative of one of his buds, a guy from Georgia with a deep Southern drawl that amused the hell out of Bill, came up and insisted he come meet someone. He brought Bill over to a woman, and told the two of them, “You two need to talk,” his Southern twang dragging out the introduction, and then walked away. The woman was every bit as confused as Bill. Stacey Porrini hadn’t asked to meet him, and had no idea why the man insisted on the connection.
Bill and Stacey wound up chatting the whole night, and before he left, Bill got her number. Since it was Thanksgiving, he didn’t want to intrude on family time and planned on calling after the weekend. Instead, she found him, using whatever resources she had in the pre-social media days of 1999 to suss out his number. “The rest,’’ Bill says now, “is history.’’ They married in 2001, had two kids and remained devoted entirely and singularly to one another from the night of that bar meeting until 2018, when Stacey died of breast cancer.
Bill “talks” to Stacey an awful lot, and often seeks her advice. Like, for example, when their daughter, Olivia, started to date and Bill’s first instinct was to go full Rambo upon meeting the poor boy, he thought instead of how Stacey would have handled it and adjusted accordingly.
And more recently, when Bill stood nervously in the stands, near to shaking as he always is before a UConn game, he looked up, well beyond the rafters of the MVP Arena in Albany. “Anytime you see me looking up, I’m talking to her,’’ he says, chuckling. “Just asking for a little help down here.’’
It may or may not be divine intervention that has steered the Huskies out of their first-round morass and into a Sweet 16 date with Arkansas. But there’s no denying that Stacey’s fingerprints are all over UConn’s success this season.
Donovan Clingan, the Huskies’ 7-foot-2 emerging star, might look like his father. but otherwise, the freshman big man is all Stacey.
Donovan sits in front of his locker sporting a new bucket hat, courtesy of his NCAA Tournament swag bag. He likes the look but also figures it will come in handy in the postseason, when he picks up his fishing rod again and starts trolling for bass and trout, or hits the deep sea for some tuna. He does not plan for that to happen anytime soon. “After we’re done here,’’ he says. “Once we win a national championship.’’
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Suddenly lots of people are on board again with Donovan’s assessment. A trendy early-season pick after opening the season with 14 consecutive wins, UConn fell out of favor after losing six out of the next eight. Now the Huskies are like mom jeans and mullets, back in style, and in this case, at just the right time. The Huskies have lost two games since late January and spent this past weekend ditching Iona and Saint Mary’s with second-half explosions that showcased the bounty of riches at Dan Hurley’s disposal. The Huskies can shoot. They defend. They have great guard play, dominant big men and a silly amount of depth.
Donovan checks the last two boxes. He more than backs up Adama Sanogo; he ensures that there’s really not much of a dropoff when the honorable mention All-American needs a breather. Per CBB Analytics, Donovan’s 7.1 points per game equate to 21.7 across 40 minutes. He ranks in the 90th percentile in offensive rebounds per game, and 70th in defensive boards. His so-called Hakeem percentage, combining steals and blocks, is at the top of the charts, and his field-goal percentage in the 95th percentile. He draws fouls, hits free throws and takes care of the basketball. If you throw out the numbers and just watch him go to work, he’s got the same sort of ballet footwork as Drew Timme, just anchored on a Zach Edey body type.
Stacey starred at Bristol Central (Connecticut) High School, and parlayed that into a record-setting career at Maine. She used to tell her son how much fun it was to play in March, regaling him with stories about getting clobbered by UConn one year (105-75). Thanks to his parents (Stacy was 6-4, Bill is 6-5), Donovan was sort of born for the game. But he admits he didn’t really double down on hoops until his mom passed, finding in their shared sport a way to stay connected to her and more, a way to represent her. “I wanted to make her proud, and that was the easiest way to do it,’’ he says. “So I stuck with it.’’
It helped that, along with his parental genetic boost, he inherited their appreciation for hard work. Bill works for a utility company, which means when the weather is bad in New England and everyone else is hunkering down, he’s out working. As for Stacey, she was grading her first graders’ class work up until two days before she died. Once Donovan committed to basketball, he dove straight into the deep end. In high school, at the same school where his mom attended, he’d leave home at 5:30 in the morning to go work out, come back home to shower, and return in time for school. When the final bell sounded, he’d go back to the gym and finally head home and, in the winters, shovel snow for extra money. He had to grow into his size, sort of like a baby deer at first, all elbows and angles. But once he figured it out, he blossomed. In his junior season, he averaged 27.3 points, 17.2 rebounds and 5.8 blocks per game. Plenty of prep schools tried to lure him away. Central High counts a famous basketball writer — Adrian Wojnarowski — among its alumni but not a whole lot of famous basketball players.
But they had one — Stacey — and that was enough to convince Donovan, who wears her number 32, to stay put. As a senior, he led Central to a 28-0 record and a state title, making him something of a folk hero locally.
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The pull to stay home for college — the Storrs campus is only 40 minutes away — was understandably strong. The Porrini/Clingan clan is an extended Irish/Italian crew, the village that essentially helped Bil raise his kids. After Stacey died, Bill says he felt like he was in a fog for two years. “My kids did more for me than I think I did for them,’’ he says. “Some days, I’d just lean on Donovan and cry, and he’d be telling me, ‘It’s going to be OK.’ They got me through.’’ But Bill didn’t want Donovan to ever feel like he settled, or look back at his choice and say, “What if?” He wanted him to want to go somewhere, not simply choose it because it was easy. Bill insisted that Donovan, who became a top-100 recruit, take college visits.
Together, they checked out Michigan (Donovan’s favorite team to watch growing up), Syracuse, Ohio State and finally Connecticut. Bill says he was probably harder on the UConn coaching staff than any other, peppering them with questions because he knew that staying home also meant extra attention and likely added pressure for his son. Despite all of that, one day into the visit Donovan came into the hotel room and told his dad he was committing that night, before a scheduled BBQ dinner with the team. Bill pushed back a little, making him explain what made Connecticut so different. “He said it felt like home,’’ Bill says. “How could I argue with that?”
At his first summer practice, Donovan Clingan took the ball in the low post and started to dribble like he always did in high school, working to back down his defender. Only this time, the guy didn’t budge. “It was like a brick wall,’’ he says now with a shake of his bucket-hatted head.
Clingan has done a lot to elevate his game in the last year. After bulking up to near 290 in high school, he’s dropped 40 pounds via a committed diet. He’s worked on his agility by running ladders and jumping rope, and he hit the weight room hard, adding muscle to a frame that might best have been described as a tad doughy before. “But to be honest with you, from June 1, he’s had to play against Adama every single day,’’ Hurley says.
It is like checking into a private tutorial, where Sanogo has schooled Clingan on aggressiveness and physicality, showed him better angles to block shots and forced him to become even more creative to score. At first, it was demoralizing. “I got down on myself,’’ Clingan says. “I was thinking that maybe I’m not good enough for this level.’’ Hurley assured him he was, that he simply needed to come to practice armed with the belief that he could handle Sanogo. Today is the day that you dominate Adama. That became the mantra. It took him weeks to even be able to budge the junior off the blocks, and he’s still not sure he’s ever quite dominated him. But eventually the fights became fairer, Clingan pushing Sanogo as much as Sanogo pushed him.
The result is a tag team that is unlike almost any other in college basketball. Sanogo’s production is up (14.8 points per game to 17.3) while his minutes are down (29.2 to 26.6), in large part because Clingan is there to spell him. Together they’ve helped the Huskies anchor a defense that ranks 14th in KenPom and dominate the offensive glass, where they sit second. In the second-round game against a Saint Mary’s team that prides itself on rim protection and rebounding, the Huskies notched 34 points to the Gaels’ 30 inside the paint, and limited them to three offensive rebounds.
“I feel like I’ve surprised myself a little bit,’’ Clingan admits. “I didn’t think I could be as physically strong as I’ve been. But battling against Adama, that’s why I keep getting better. So many little things that I’ve seen improvement on.’’
The attention, naturally, has now started to find the big man. Along with the adoration from back home and the steady string of messages from in-state fans, he has a NIL store and 31,000 Instagram followers, including Chet Holmgren. He is not the star for UConn, but he’s quickly becoming the not-so-secret weapon.
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Yet Clingan seems entirely disinterested in all of it. He barely pays attention to his social media, even if it’s Bill Walton saying he plays like “a four-year NBA veteran” and especially when a post for his girlfriend’s birthday is hijacked by complaints about a Seton Hall game. It is the smart place to operate from. Bill Clingan, however, admits he’s slightly less good at it. “Twitter happy,’’ is Clingan’s euphemism for his dad.
Bill also can’t quite conjure the same placid approach to the magnitude of each game. He’s already worried about keeping his cool at the West regional in Las Vegas. “Fun? I mean yes it’s fun,’’ he says. “But as a parent of a kid playing, do you ever relax? I know I don’t. I’m a nervous wreck before the game. I tell myself all the time, ‘What would Stacey do?’ She was like my balance.”
The answer, Bill has learned, is not only up in the heavens; it’s on the court, in a son who looks just like him but acts just like his mother.
(Top photo of UConn’s Donovan Clingan: Rob Carr / Getty Images)