GAINESVILLE, Fla. – Todd Golden’s first crack at playing international basketball was for Bruce Pearl. Golden got his first power conference coaching job at Auburn, where he was hired by Pearl. Nearly a decade later, Golden’s first game as a Southeastern Conference head coach came against Pearl. Eventually, Golden’s first win over a No. 1-ranked team was against Pearl. So was his first win in a Final Four.
That’s a lot firsts.
A lot of Pearl-clutching, too.
When Bruce Pearl, the future Hall-of-Famer who guided Auburn to unimaginable basketball heights, retired suddenly last summer it marked the end of an era at the school and beginning of another without sacrificing Pearl’s bigger-than-life influence. The school named Steven Pearl – the Tigers’ associate head coach, Bruce’s 39-year-old son and one of Golden’s best friends – as successor, meaning the deep-rooted Golden-Pearl connection would continue.
“They’re like family,” Golden said.
Steven Pearl (left) alongside father Bruce during last season’s run to the Final Four, where the Tigers lost to the Gators in San Antonio.
Those family ties will bind again Saturday afternoon when 16th-ranked Florida (14-5, 5-1) squares up against Auburn (11-7, 2-3) in a big SEC date at sold-out Exactech/O’Connell Center. Golden’s Gators, winners of five in a row, are playing some of the best basketball in the country and he’d like nothing better than to make it a half-dozen straight against the closest thing to a brother he has in the game.
[Read senior writer Chris Harry’s “Pregame Stuff” setup here]
The two played together in the Maccabiah Games in Israel, with Bruce Pearl as head coach. Nine years later, they shared office space on Pearl’s first staff at Auburn, where Golden was director of basketball operations for one season before being promoted to assistant. Steven was assistant strength coach before switching to the coaching track a few years later.
Golden bolted for the University of San Francisco in 2016, but the two remained tight. How close?
Well, less than 24 hours before taking the O’Dome floor against one another, Pearl went to Golden’s house Friday night for a visit. Golden did the same when the Gators played at Auburn last year.
“He’s been such a valuable resource to me,” Steven Pearl told reporters in Auburn Thursday. “Any chance I need to run something by somebody, he’s been one of my first calls, and he’s always been so gracious with his time.”
Oh, and he added one more thing regarding his buddy.
“Doesn’t mean I don’t want to go down there and kick his ass,” Pearl said.
Ask the folks in Auburn and they’ll say Steve and Bruce are different. Where Bruce has always sought the limelight and coached with unbridled emotion, Steven is more reserved and favors an analytical approach to the game.
His Florida counterpart is a mixture of both, what with his demonstrative sideline ways coupled with the program’s deep devotion to metrics.
“We’re both pretty competitive,” Golden said.
Both unafraid to share opinions, too. They demonstrated as much the last couple days amid the college hoops hot-button controversy swirling after a judge in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, issued a temporary restraining order that ruled Charles Bediako, a former Alabama forward who has played in the G League the last three years (including a game just last week for the Motor City Cruise), eligible to play again in college, despite having left school to turn pro in 2023.
The development obviously was topical in the SEC. Crimson Tide coach Nate Oats confirmed Friday he intends to play the 7-foot, 225-pound Bediako in Saturday night’s game against Tennessee. UF, the reigning NCAA champion, is trying to win the league for the first time in 12 years. Auburn, the defending regular-season conference champ, is Bama’s fiercest rival.
Coaches around the country weighed in on the nature of the ruling, mostly with disdain and criticism, some choosing their words more carefully than others. Both Pearl and Golden had their hot takes.
Charles Bediako was with the Motor City Cruise of the G League last weekend.
“If you can get a judge to file a restraining order you are in your right to do so. Doesn’t make it right, doesn’t make it wrong,” Pearl said. “For me, personally, I think it’s crazy for a couple reasons. One, it’s just so outside the scope of what we’ve done historically. Two, if we were to do that, I’d have a really hard time looking at the parents and our current kids and saying, ‘This is why we’re doing this. We’re bringing back a former pro and he’s eating into your current minutes.’ “
Golden, who when asked about the Bama brouhaha Thursday night before on his weekly “Gator Talk” radio program declared his team “would beat ’em, anyway,” flushed the issue out a little more Friday, referencing details that surfaced after the fact that the ruling judge was a prominent Bama booster.
“This is one that is more of a slippery-slope discussion, where this guy starts playing, then it opens up another can of worms, so to speak, on what’s going on out there,” Golden said. “I think we do need some intervention-slash-someone to say ‘Hey! This is why it’s okay. This is why it’s not okay.’ Like, right now, we’re just kind of sitting in no-man’s land and everybody has their opinions, but it feels like they can’t do anything because a judge ruled this in Tuscaloosa, which is kind of crazy to me that he can impact what the NCAA does with their organization; what the SEC does with their conference. I think that’s dangerous.”
The conversation on this topic will only heat up, but it will be of little concern for the two-plus-hours the Gators and Tigers are trading blows at the O’Dome.
On that matter, Golden, not surprisingly, was on the exact same page as his good friend and made it clear when asked about their relationship on the radio show.
“I want to kick his ass,” Golden said.
Call that a Pearl of wisdom.
Email senior writer Chris Harry at [email protected]. Find his story archives here.
