Washington • When Patrick Ewing was asked this week what he thinks of Syracuse Coach Jim Boeheim, the sentence "one of the best that has ever coached in the Big East" was the second thing to come out of his mouth. First and foremost was a memory from the 1984 Big East conference title game, which Georgetown won, 82-71 in overtime, over Syracuse.
"I remember him throwing a chair in the press conference," Ewing said this week, before pausing and unleashing his wide smile. "We had some heated games."
Asked what he thinks of Ewing, Boeheim's response was also rooted in a memory more than 30 years old: as the towering, intense player who went to battle with Syracuse's Pearl Washington a couple of times a season.
"He's a player," Boeheim, 73, said, of Georgetown's 55-year-old head coach, in a phone conversation on Wednesday. " … I'm good friends with Big John [Thompson, Ewing's coach with the Hoyas]. Players are players, they're just in a different category."
Then he paused to chuckle.
"Well, he's just becoming a coach. It's new."
Ewing and Boeheim's relationship has been trapped in amber since the 1980s, but on Saturday at Capital One Arena, a new chapter in the Georgetown-Syracuse rivalry begins when Boeheim will confront Ewing the coach instead of Ewing the player.
"It was the intensity with which both teams played, and Patrick and Georgetown brought that intensity and you had to bring it right back at them to play against them," Boeheim said. "We just had great games. It wasn't just one or two, it was multiple. They were all great games. They were almost always a battle down to the wire — there were very few that didn't go down to the wire. We were both probably at the peak of our games at that time.
"Those are the games you think about when you take a moment — I don't take a moment too often. I thought I would by now, but I don't; I'm focused on this year, but when I do reflect, it's on the Georgetown-Syracuse games. They were great, they were games you live for."
For Ewing, Saturday's game against the Orange (8-1) is an important milestone that falls just nine games into his head-coaching career. It's the biggest test yet for the Hoyas (8-0), who have the weakest nonconference schedule out of the 351 teams in Division I.
Coaching in this game, especially against Boeheim — Syracuse's coach for 42 years and 1,370 games — feels like a rite of passage for Ewing. His collegial relationship with Boeheim is still in development.
"I'm not Patrick the player anymore, now I'm Patrick the coach," Ewing said when asked if Boeheim still sees him as a college kid. "He knows that — he doesn't see me in that light anymore. But in terms of relationship, that's something that's got to be developed."
So Ewing has set about building a rapport with Boeheim little by little. When the two would run into each other on the recruiting trail this summer, Ewing teased the longtime coach about that most unthinkable outcome: that Boeheim's youngest son, Buddy, a high school senior who in November signed a National Letter-of-Intent to play at Syracuse, might one day wear a Hoyas uniform instead.
"I joked at him about recruiting his son, I'd tell him I have a scholarship here for him," Ewing said, cracking himself up.
"He said, 'You can go ahead and send it. It'll be sitting there, it won't be signed. But you can still send it.' "
Back in spring, Boeheim praised Georgetown's hiring of Ewing and particularly appreciated it as a continuation of the basketball tradition Big John began.
"The two biggest names in Georgetown basketball history are John Thompson and Patrick Ewing," Boeheim said this week. "That's pretty good."
That tradition, and its update with Ewing, is what the Syracuse coach says spices up a series that otherwise lost some edge.
Like others in college basketball, Boeheim points out that Syracuse departing for the Atlantic Coast Conference after the 2012-13 season mellowed the rivalry, though this will be the third consecutive season they have met in nonconference play.
Boeheim also looks at the game differently this year, now that Louis Orr is an assistant on Ewing's staff. Orr was a member of Boeheim's first recruiting class at Syracuse, graduating in 1980, and was an assistant on his staff in the late 1990s. His No. 55 jersey is one of a dozen former Orange players to hang in the Carrier Dome rafters. "There's a family member there; that changes the dynamics of the way you look at that game, I think," Boeheim said.
"It's still an historic game, it just doesn't mean as much anymore," he continued. "But, it's still there for history, and there are going to be a lot of people there Saturday that think it's important. … It's hard to get back to Georgetown-Syracuse when Patrick was there and there were 32,000 people and all. It's hard to get to that level."
Ewing acknowledged the rivalry isn't what it was. But asked if it still holds meaning for the fans, he said: "I think it does. You'll see on Saturday afternoon."