Mere months after Jim Larranaga did what few thought to be possible _ leading tiny George Mason past a handful of college basketball's preeminent powers and into the Final Four _ his cultural identity was reborn at a Las Vegas dinner table.
In 2006, while helping to coach at Michael Jordan's fantasy camp, a three-day event in which wealthy patrons paid close to $20,000 to rub elbows with the game's all-time great, Larranaga sat with Jose and Jorge Mas, two prominent Miami businessmen. The trio began discussing their ethnic backgrounds, with the two brothers delving into their Cuban heritage. Larranaga asked if they knew the nationality of his last name.
"It looks Italian," Larranaga recalled Jose saying.
No, Larranaga replied, informing them of a tilde over the "n." He, too, had ties to Cuba. And, in that moment, Larranaga's true name was inadvertently unearthed.
Five years later, Larranaga was named the head coach at University of Miami, the Mas brothers' alma mater, and near the end of his second season, references to him on the athletic department's website started to come with the correct spelling, tilde and all. This Bronx-born coach who many assumed for years was Italian, has reinvigorated the Hurricanes basketball program in his 5{ years at the school while, in some ways, reshaping his identity.
"The tilde is a symbol, a letter that's a part of our culture," said Tony Hernandez, Miami's deputy director of athletics. "It's what he's done with it. You could have the (tilde) and not do the other things he has done and nobody would really be looking up to him. What he's done and the way he's embraced this community and this culture, he's become a part of South Florida and, by doing that, people really look up to the program and him and what he has done here."
Larranaga's family history is a long and expansive one that, for years, was belied by the go-to spelling of his last name.
The roots of that tree go back to Spain. At some unknown point, the Larranaga family moved to Havana, Cuba, where his grandfather was raised and eventually met his wife. After marrying and relocating to Key West, Fla., they had two children, one of whom moved to New York in his 20s, got married and raised six children, including Jim, in the Bronx.
On his first day of kindergarten in 1954, Larranaga's teacher was unable to pronounce his last name in its preferred form, instead saying it with extra emphasis on the third 'a.' It stuck.
"From that day forward, all my friends and everybody just referred to me as LARE-uh-NAY-guh," Larranaga said. "I finally just gave in to that."
When he got into coaching, he didn't make an attempt to re-establish the original spelling and reading of his name, if only because there was such variance to it anyway. None of his five siblings, for instance, pronounce their last name the same way.
As technology progressed, he couldn't figure out how to put the tilde over the n when typing and, although he would include it in his signature, it often looked like nothing more than a line because of how quickly he wrote it. In his 14 seasons at George Mason, the school never used the tilde, largely because it wasn't aware of his Cuban background.
When the Miami job came open in 2011, Larranaga reached out to Jose Mas, who was good friends with several members of the school's board of trustees, about suggesting him as a candidate. That conversation eventually led to an interview and a job offer, with the school well aware of his Cuban lineage before he arrived on campus.
The man who had dreamt of coaching in the ACC since his days as an assistant at Virginia in the late 1970s and early 1980s had found his way back to the conference. With that opportunity has come success. The Hurricanes won at least 20 games four times in Larranaga's first five seasons, something that had been done only six times from 1966 until his arrival, and twice made the Sweet 16, the second and third such appearances in program history.
"He has been able to build our program to a level it's never been at before," Hernandez said. "For us to have two Sweet 16 seasons, to win the ACC tournament and regular season (in 2013), to be able to accomplish what he has in a short period of time is really remarkable."
Those strides have gone beyond the court, where Larranaga's lineage, personality and his team's record have connected Miami basketball with the surrounding community and made it relevant in a way it hadn't been before. In November, the university sold out its season-ticket allotment for the second consecutive season, the first time in program history that had been done.
To those at the school such as Hernandez, the tilde's impact only goes so far and means so much. It is, after all, just a difference of a single letter. Larranaga's overall influence, however, has been undeniable.
"We don't have the tradition that a Duke has or a North Carolina has, or even that a Pittsburgh has," Larranaga said. "We just haven't been at it nearly as long as some of these other programs. But we're heading in that direction. We've established a very unique culture here and people have really bought into it. We're very happy with the direction we're going in."
