The Curious Case of a March Madness Coach’s Last Name
Something has changed since Jim Larrañaga’s last time guiding a team for the Final Four
In 2006, Jim Larranaga coached the George Mason Patriots to the Final Four.
This weekend, he’s leading the Miami Hurricanes to the same lofty peak. Only this time check the media guide, and you’ll see something that wasn’t there during the coach’s first Final Four trip.
An ‘ñ’. His name is listed as Larrañaga now.
It might seem like a small matter of semantics, but for Larrañaga and his family, it’s the culmination of a generations-long story, one that proves that there might be no place where the American Dream is more alive than in sports.
The coach’s grandfather was born in Cuba, helping run the Por Larrañaga cigar company, before emigrating to the Bronx. Larrañaga’s father wanted his children to be fully “Americanized,” and so he forbid them from learning Spanish and taught them to pronounce their last name like a Bronx native might, nasally with long ‘A’s”.
But even as a kid, Jim loved the way his grandmother pronounced their shared name, and he especially loved the way she spelled it. At his first day of Catholic kindergarten, while taking roll, a nun announced the Americanized pronunciation. Jim tried to correct her—but she wouldn’t have it. After a while, he stopped correcting people, and most everyone in the Bronx just assumed he was Italian. But still, whenever he’d sign his name, if you look at old papers of his, he’d add the unmistakable twist of a tilde, trying in a small way to hold on to a part of his past.
He’d go on to play college ball at Davidson, where the back of his jersey would have read “Larranaga.” He was drafted by the Detroit Pistons but opted to stay at Davidson and become an assistant coach instead. He climbed the ranks and then, in 2006, led his George Mason team on one of the great Cinderella runs in sports history. “His Close-Up Here, Larranaga Is All Smiles,” declared a New York Times headline from that tournament. "We never used the tilde,” Dan Reisig, a spokesman for George Mason, told WLRN. "In fact, no one at George Mason was aware of his Cuban lineage.”
But in 2011, when Larrañaga took the head coaching job in Miami, a city with America’s largest Cuban population, the athletic department noticed the way he signed his name and recognized the Cuban heritage immediately. Now, he’s galvanized that community to rally around a basketball program that’s traditionally been nothing but a second fiddle to the football team. If he wins, he might just have to light a victory cigar—maybe even one from the Por Larrañaga company.
And perhaps he’ll remember one of his first days at the new job, when he received a freshly printed stack of business cards, his name next to the iconic Miami ‘U’.
He held one up to his wife. “Hey, look at this,” he said.
Jim Larrañaga.
“They were able to do it.”
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