Mike Tranghese found himself in a bind.

As he prepared for his wedding in 1996, Tranghese, the commissioner of the Big East conference, realized he did not make arrangements to be married in a Catholic church. Tranghese and his fiancée, Susan, were to be married in a civil service, but Tranghese wanted to be wed in a sanctuary.

‘I forgot how to do the Catholic portion of it,’ Tranghese said. ‘It’s not like you just walk in and you say you get married if you are Catholic.’

He had only a few days to set up the wedding. So he made a phone call to a close friend, someone he could count on to pull some strings and arrange the wedding on short notice.

That friend was John Marinatto, then the athletic director at Providence College. Marinatto made some calls, sped up the process, and a few days later served as Tranghese’s best man. Thirteen years later, Marinatto is set to play another big role in Tranghese’s life: as his replacement as commissioner of the Big East. Marinatto will be only the third-ever Big East commissioner in the conference’s history.

After a 19-year stint, Tranghese will leave his perch atop the Big East on June 30 and hand over the reigns to Marinatto. After weathering the storm of the near-collapse of the conference five years ago, and subsequently building it up into one of the nation’s most recognizable and successful leagues, Tranghese’s retirement paves the way for Marinatto, who has been immersed in Big East athletics almost his entire life.

Athletic directors, chancellors and conference personnel maintain that the league remains headed in a positive direction, despite losing Tranghese, who has been an employee since its inception.

‘(Marinatto) has been an insider, so there will be a lot of continuity,’ SU Chancellor Nancy Cantor said. ‘Which I think will be a real plus when you have the conference in recent years that has gone through transition. It’s nice to have that continuity. I think that’s much less of a challenge than one might imagine.’

Tranghese and Marinatto are cut from the same cloth. They met during Marinatto’s freshman year of college, when Marinatto served as manager of the Providence basketball team and Tranghese was one of the school’s sports information directors.

From there, Tranghese became the first employee of the newly established Big East conference in 1979 under commissioner Dave Gavitt, serving as Gavitt’s right-hand man. Back then, there were only two employees of the conference and just six collegiate sports. But in that time, Tranghese set himself up to be the man to succeed Gavitt as the commissioner of the conference 11 years later.

‘Once Dave left and we had to appoint another commissioner, we started looking back on some of the things that Mike was really involved with that we at the time weren’t necessarily aware with or didn’t take note of,’ said former Syracuse Director of Athletics Jake Crouthamel. ‘And it became very obvious when it came time to replace Dave that Mike was indeed the guy we wanted.’

Marinatto finds himself in much the same role. He served as the athletics director at Providence for 14 years before becoming the senior associate commissioner of the Big East in 2002. He learned under Tranghese’s watch, picking up different ways to handle issues. Marinatto said one of the biggest things he learned was to always take a step back and look at a situation before responding to get a good perspective.

He immersed himself in the Big East, learning the ins and outs of the conference. Though there was an outside search for Tranghese’s replacement, the feeling of continuity that would be established with the hiring of Marinatto was a real driving point.

‘To me, when you hire somebody, you look at their passion first,’ Louisville Athletic Director Tom Jurich said. ‘If you look at somebody that wants to have a commissioner’s job, and then somebody that wants to have a commissioner’s job be their life, that’s another thing. John is that person.’

‘You ask any athletic director or coach and they all feel the same way that we’re kind of on the same page in moving in the right direction,’ Providence AD Robert Driscoll said. ‘That is because of the way Michael leads the organization.’

Marinatto will inherit a conference that is stable with membership and television contracts, thanks to the hard work of Tranghese during his tenure. Those who know Tranghese often say his ability to keep the conference together after the raid by the Atlantic Coast Conference in 2004 is one of the biggest points of his legacy.

In that year, perennial football powers Miami and Virginia Tech left for the ACC. One year later, Boston College bolted, too. Football in the Big East was devastated – the exodus left just five teams (Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Rutgers, Connecticut and West Virginia) remaining in Tranghese’s league.

The outcome did not look good.

‘A lot of people blamed him, which wasn’t fair. Maybe we need some new leadership, there was a lot of anger being expressed in a variety of ways toward the departing schools and anybody else the schools could target,’ former Syracuse Chancellor Kenneth ‘Buzz’ Shaw said in a telephone interview. Shaw was chancellor at SU during the transition. ‘He was under that kind of pressure, and he was under pressure from us to find solutions.’

Tranghese said there was a period of three to four weeks where the league looked like it was going to dissolve. He started preparing for the dissolution of the conference. But with the help of Marinatto and Shaw, among others, the Big East survived.

Shaw told Tranghese previously that it might be in the conference’s best interest to continue, but they needed a plan to go forward. The plan would be the 16-team formation. While others wrote the Big East off, a resurrection was in store.

The Big East added Louisville, DePaul, Cincinnati, South Florida and Marquette to develop the biggest conference in the nation, a cross-country conglomeration of institutions with prowess in both basketball and football.

‘It’s night and day,’ Cantor said. ‘If you looked at (the Big East) now and didn’t know that it had gone through a transition, it would seem like a very well-functioning cohesive conference.’

Patrick Nero, the commissioner of the America East Conference, was senior associate athletic director at Miami during its transition to the ACC. He said Tranghese was very respectful to the institutions that were leaving and was never bitter about the situation the Big East was facing. He worked to make his conference even stronger – and he succeeded.

‘If you look at the Big East today versus the Big East before the defections, they’ve actually come out of it stronger,’ Nero said. ‘That’s just a tribute to Mike. He went and got some very good replacements, and they’ve done a great job.’

The conference is also stable with television contracts. The Big East currently has a contract with ESPN to air football and men’s and women’s basketball games on the station until 2013-14. The league also has deals with SportsNet New York and CBS Sports.

‘It’s very important,’ Jurich said. ‘That’s something we have to continue to look at and continue to grow with as markets change. We need to be able to change with them, because we are a very productive product out there. The relationship (Tranghese) has with all the media is probably second to none in this country.’

The stability of the conference helped make the decision for Tranghese to step down an easier one. Tranghese also said it was enough after 19 years and thought it was time to move on to something.

Another factor, though, helped Tranghese decide to step down this summer.

‘Michael hates to travel,’ Marinatto said. ‘He hates to fly. So many of the stories when we travel, the flights get a little choppy. He has this expression on his face where you know it’s not going to be a good trip.’

Now, in steps Marinatto. He is already working on what he said is his biggest challenge, which is securing the bowl-game bids for football when they expire after the 2009-10 season. Marinatto and Big East Associate Commissioner of Football Nick Carparelli are in conversations to put the conference in good standing when the negotiations take place.

‘We’ll be focusing our time to complete that cycle and get that in place for the four years that follow,’ Marinatto said.

But for now, he can at least know that he is taking over a conference that is ‘stronger today than it has been in its 30-year history,’ Carparelli said. Marinatto already knows the league in and out, so he has a leg up on getting started and settled into his new job.

Meanwhile, Tranghese will finally be able to take in his first Big East men’s basketball tournament at Madison Square Garden as a fan. He said he will make the pilgrimage from Bristol, R.I., to watch the five-day event.

‘I’ll go to the Garden, I’m a fan,’ Tranghese said. ‘The best part of the job is the games. Next year I can sit and watch games, and there’s nothing better than that.

‘I’ve been lucky,’ he added. ‘I look back on it, and to be honest with you, I remember when it all started. To look back on when this whole thing began and to now where it is 30 years later, it’s so overwhelming.’

mrehalt@syr.edu

Published on April 22, 2009 at 12:00 pm