He saunters across his Manley Field House office, dodging papers strewn across his floor, haphazardly arranged chairs and a racquet-stringing machine that sits obtrusively in front of his desk. His eyes fix on a half-unraveled spool of tennis-racquet string lying next to the machine. He picks it up and spins the string around his fingers.

‘Do you know the story of the frog and the scorpion?’ Mac Gifford asks a visitor.

He stops spinning the string. He’s ready to spin a story instead. After all, Gifford is a storyteller. In fact, if he could do something other than coach the Syracuse tennis team, he’d be a writer. He would take the box of outlines and story treatments tucked away in his closet and turn them into a screenplay. Or he’d keep a diary. He thinks people would read it. Though Gifford might disagree, of all the characters in all his stories, he is the most intriguing.

‘Well,’ he says, ‘the story goes like this.’

Then he tells about a frog and a scorpion standing in front of a river. The scorpion asks to ride the frog’s back to the other side. ‘No,’ the frog says, ‘you’ll sting me.’ The scorpion answers, ‘No I won’t. If I did, we’d both drown.’ So the frog acquiesces. Halfway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog. ‘Why’d you do it?’ the drowning frog asks. ‘It’s just my nature,’ the scorpion says.

‘And that’s why I coach,’ Gifford says. ‘It’s my nature. It’s what I do best.’

A few minutes later, Gifford is telling his visitor about his career path, how it has shaped his unique views of competition and winning. Then he’s laughing at his disorganized, chaotic ways of handling details. Later, he’s lecturing about his Zen-like philosophies.

He’s telling stories, and by the time he’s finished – stopped only by the realization that he is late for practice – it becomes apparent his nature is hardly that simple. While his eccentricities and disorganization frustrate some players, many are drawn to his laid-back disposition, insights and passion. He is neither the frog nor the scorpion but a character much more complex, one whose essence cannot be so easily defined.

In his spare time, Gifford golfs. Pretty well, too. He begins the season a 12 handicap and is a six by fall. Or so he says. He rarely keeps score with pencil and paper. At the end of his round, he just visualizes his shots and then estimates his score.

‘I don’t like to compete,’ he says. ‘It should be just man against nature.’

But competition, as much as it clashes with his platonic outlook, has always been part of Gifford’s story. His father, William, was a doubles ace at Cornell, and once played in the U.S. National Championships at Forest Hills, where Gifford’s mother, Anne, was a member. As William moved his family from Washington to Alabama to Denver to Boston and eventually to Syracuse, Gifford skied and played football and tennis.

He stuck with tennis at nationally ranked California-Berkeley from 1969-73. He studied physics there until a C-minus on a midterm persuaded him that he disliked the academic competition of the sciences. After taking an introductory course, he switched to anthropology. Observation and deep thinking suited his personality better.

After college, Gifford abandoned graduate-school plans to play tennis. Every weekend he’d try to land in a tournament somewhere. Sometimes he’d win a couple hundred dollars, sometimes he would have to sleep on someone’s floor. It wore on him. By the early 1980s, he quit.

‘Tennis is hard,’ he says. ‘You go out and try to kick someone’s butt every time. It’s not really our nature to do that, I don’t think.’

Instead, he discovered coaching, which allowed him to observe, dissect and strategize. He established a reputation as one of the best tacticians in Central New York. Just by watching someone for a couple minutes, he could pinpoint subtle flaws in a person’s technique.

In 1994, SU head coach Jesse Dwire asked Gifford to work with him as a part-time assistant. Together, they turned the Orangewomen into one of the Big East’s top teams. But in 1999, following a sexual-harassment scandal, Dwire resigned. The players went to Director of Athletics Jake Crouthamel and asked that Gifford be promoted to head coach.

‘It was an obvious choice,’ Crouthamel says. ‘He knew the players, the players knew him.’

Gifford quickly stabilized the program. In his first four seasons, he compiled a 43-36 record. This season, with a 6-2 conference record, SU should qualify for the Big East Championships. As a head coach, Gifford has balanced his winning-isn’t-everything attitude against a desire to play with the conference’s top teams.

‘It’s about helping people and all that kind of stuff,’ the 52-year-old Gifford says. ‘That’s where my strength lies.’

Organization, crisis management, planning, these are not Gifford’s strengths. He loses his keys, is late picking up players for practices and misses deadlines. It’s all part of a chaotic system that is at once frustrating and amusing to players and coworkers.

During Gifford’s second season as head coach, after a match outside Atlanta, the team van got a flat tire on the way to the airport. Gifford pulled the van onto the shoulder, stepped out and took a look at the tire.

‘OK, what do we do?’ he asked his weary team.

‘Um, maybe we should change the tire?’ senior Shareen Lai suggested.

Seemingly unsatisfied by her answer, Gifford drove the van to the nearest gas station. There, he left the van to find a pay phone and call for roadside assistance. Lai changed the tire while he talked on the phone. The team arrived at the airport just in time to catch the flight to Syracuse.

‘As far as organization, I don’t think he’s the best one out there,’ says Lai, who played for Gifford from 1997-2000. ‘He’s kind of in la-la land half the time.’

His office is a testament to his helter-skelter approach to organization. Random papers, posters and cardboard boxes dot his floor. Next to a Panasonic television, stacks of VHS tapes form a sort of lopsided castle. His desktop is invisible under papers. He has a trashcan and a recycling carton, but both are nearly empty.

‘It’s very overwhelming,’ Gifford says, thumbing through a 2-inch thick stack of mail. ‘I have paper from eight different sources I need to answer to.’

Even Gifford’s speech is disorganized. During a conversation in his office, he’ll pause mid-sentence to check his e-mail and then ask, ‘What was I saying again?’ Other times, he’ll walk out of the office as he’s talking, only to return moments later, talking about something else.

Sometimes, though, his disorganized ways are advantageous. He’ll delay departing for a road trip for half an hour so a player can attend class. Every afternoon, he rallies with players who missed practice because of class. On April 8, he told the team he wanted to practice before leaving for Morgantown, W.Va. When they objected because of academic obligations, he scratched the idea.

‘One of the good things about Mac is he’s very laid back and relaxed,’ sophomore Wei-Ming Leong says. ‘He’s really patient.’

Says Gifford, ‘The team helps me to be more organized. I help them to be more go-with-the-flow.’

Like any good storyteller, Gifford understands that a powerful story can move people. In his first season as head coach, he showed his team ‘Somebody Up There Likes Me,’ the story of Rocky Graziano, who escaped a life of crime to become a boxer. Three years ago, before a road match, he made the Orangewomen watch ‘Remember the Titans.’

Inspirational movies are only one of Gifford’s psychological tricks. He has used meditation, visualization and Zen-like philosophy lessons, too. Some players benefit, others laugh. Either way, they are struck by the uniqueness of his approach.

Says Anna Khvalina, who played for Gifford from 1997-2000 and now coaches at Rochester, ‘There’s no doubt he’s trying to help the players. He always tries to get in your head a little bit.’

Not everyone lets him. When Gifford showed ‘Somebody Up There Likes Me,’ Khvalina remembers, ‘a lot of people did not take the movie seriously.’ In his unorthodox approach, Gifford risks turning off players.

‘People can get frustrated,’ Lai says. ‘He’ll come over and say something and you’ll think, ‘That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.’ It’s rude, but they won’t listen to him all the time. He has been very patient.’

If Gifford is offended, he hides it. He defends his techniques, pointing out skiers and boxers use visualization and meditation. Even cats, he says, visualize before pouncing on prey. Once, he suggested a more efficient practice might have players just visualize the perfect shot.

Psychology, he says, is as important as physical ability. He remembers a former player leading a set, 4-1, when a dog walked onto the court. The other player petted and played with the dog before its owner retrieved it. Relaxed from her encounter with the dog, the player rallied to beat Gifford’s player, 6-4.

‘I want to get them to do this, because this is so important to training,’ Gifford says. ‘But these guys are so young, they think it’s crazy. If they have no interest in it now, hopefully someday they will.’

A couple of days before the Big East Championships four years ago, riding in a rental van on their way to a Miami hotel, players gawked at the luxurious hotels and homes outside. Gifford asked them, ‘If you had a choice between being able to do something really well and having a million dollars, what would you choose?’

Without hesitation, the players said they would take the money. They talked about the cars they would buy and the houses they would build. Gifford tried to persuade them that talent makes a person unique and makes life worthwhile. The players began to discuss how their talent could make them $1 million. Then they started talking about the cars they could buy again. Gifford dropped the subject.

He hates frivolous conversation and small talk. He pushes for something deeper, more intellectually stimulating. At a team dinner earlier this season, he announced, ‘Tonight, we’re not going to discuss the mall. We’re only going to talk about current events.’ On road trips, he reads The New York Times and does crossword puzzles. When he stumbles on an interesting word, he’ll ask his players, ‘What does this mean?’ Just for fun, he’ll poll their opinions on abortion or the war in Iraq.

‘One thing that drives me crazy is when they start with, ‘What’s your favorite fast-food restaurant?’ or ‘What’s your favorite television show?” Gifford says. ‘I’m just thinking, ‘My God, this is so inane!”

Says Associate Director of Athletics Janet Kittell: ‘He’s a thinking coach.’

That can sometimes be an asset, as when Gifford relaxes with Leong or senior Marion Charlier, talking about current events or world issues. Other times, this alienates Gifford from people. As much as his stories, wit and easy-going demeanor draw players to him, his abstract thinking, disorganization and unorthodox ways estrange some of them.

Three years ago, while sitting on a courtside bench in Drumlins Tennis Center watching Masha Kabanova and Shervin Saedinia rally, Gifford shook his head and said, ‘You know, I believe in a different God than they do. They believe in walls and malls and CDs. I believe in things that can’t be explained.’

When practiced ended moments later, Gifford huddled with the two players, walked off the court and disappeared behind a curtain. A minute later, he reappeared. Smiling sheepishly, he walked back to the bench, picked up his keys and left again.

Published on April 19, 2004 at 12:00 pm