NCAA tournament -- Mitch Henderson is Princeton -- A coach, a university and the one million connections to march madness

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Princeton coach Mitch Henderson has invited noted author John McPhee to be a book club guest and occasionally joins him for bike rides. Henderson frequently meets noted economist Gene Grossman at Small World Coffee in town.

When Henderson had a chance encounter with Golden State coach Steve Kerr at the US Open in Queens, New York, a few years back, he found out Kerr's father graduated from Princeton. He tracked down Malcolm Kerr's senior thesis from 1953 — «Islamic Reform in Egypt in the Early 20th Century» — and delivered Kerr a bounded copy.

«I will never forget that,» Kerr told ESPN. «It was one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me.»

As Princeton sits two games from the school's first Final Four since the 1965 team led by Bill Bradley, the school's run to the round of 16 as a No. 15 seed illuminates the depths of the bond between Henderson and Princeton. He represents both connective tissue between the school's rich basketball history and someone so tied to every aspect of the school he jokes he'd drop his office and Jadwin Gymnasium in the heart of campus.

«Mitch is Princeton,» former Princeton assistant Marcus Jenkins said. «He embodies everything that is Princeton and Princeton basketball.»

Henderson started in the program's memorable NCAA tournament win over UCLA in 1996, a scrappy guard indelibly memorialized for leaping in the air to celebrate Princeton's iconic upset. The next two years, he emerged as the heartbeat of teams in 1996-97 and 1997-98 that went undefeated in the Ivy League and rose as high as No. 8 in the country.

Henderson has downplayed the nostalgia tied to those teams, as he wants his current stars like precocious point forward Tosan Evbuomwan (14.8 ppg) and