CHICAGO _ In Utah his players and supporters called him "Jimmy Ball."
"Hey, Jimmy Ball," a fan would holler at him in the grocery store. "How's the team looking?"
Jim Boylen so loved the nickname, he copyrighted it. It's still part of his Gmail address.
"I think people in Utah liked my passion," Boylen said from his office at the Advocate Center, where the Bulls train. "I loved it there, and people were great to us. We hung a banner, man."
In Boylen's second season, the Utes shared the regular-season Mountain West title with BYU and New Mexico. They won the conference tournament and earned a No. 5 seed in the 2009 NCAA Tournament. Times were good.
"I loved living there," he said of Salt Lake City. "It's beautiful. My girls were young. We had a great house by a park. Out my window was a view of the mountains. Lot of sunshine. I also love snow and the winter. I'm a skier but I couldn't ski because of my contract."
Utah lost to 12th-seeded Arizona in the first round of the NCAAs, and then things, well, tumbled downhill at roughly the speed of a Bode Miller giant-slalom run.
Boylen's top three scorers exhausted their eligibility, and some transfers and freshmen, such as the wild Marshall Henderson, didn't stick.
His third team lost 17 times _ and by 20 points at home to in-state rival BYU. More damning was that five players transferred out, including captain Jace Tavita.
The next season was a 13-18 death march with losing streaks of seven and five games.
"I got fired on a Saturday," Boylen recalled. "That Monday I was skiing."
