'It's a full-circle moment': Inside Bruce Pearl and Todd Golden's special bond

SAN ANTONIO — Bruce Pearl and Todd Golden go way back, which is why they don't exactly look forward to the days when one of them has to beat the other. That's what makes Saturday's SEC Final Four showdown between conference regular-season champion Auburn and tournament champion Florida even more fascinating — because the two have come a long way since the 2009 Maccabiah Games.

It was 16 years ago that Pearl was the head coach of the United States team at the games, also known as the "Jewish Olympics." He was leading a team that featured his son and now Auburn assistant Steven Pearl, as well as Golden, who was playing professional ball for Maccabi Haifa in Israel at the time. The U.S. rallied for a thrilling gold-medal victory, using a seven-point run to force overtime and then pulling out a 95-86 win behind former Stanford star and All-Pac-12 selection Dan Grunfeld, who scored 25 points. 

"Let me tell you something: Todd could shoot the ball," Pearl said. "He was a scoring point guard, not a great defender [with a laugh], but he played hard. He could really score the ball and shoot it, and he got downhill in the lane at a high level. And, more than anything, Todd was a fierce competitor.

"He passed it when he had to. He was not the type of point guard you wanted to play with, thinking you were going to get a ton of touches. Your best way of getting the ball from him was if you went to the rim on a back cut because then you could get an offensive rebound."

That sarcasm displayed by Pearl speaks to the bond the two SEC coaches have. When Golden worked for Kyle Smith at Columbia and was trying to grow in the profession, Pearl was the one to give his former Maccabiah guard a phone call to offer him the director of basketball