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Bill Clingan didn’t want to go to the bar. By the time he was 29, he was pretty much done with the whole scene, and on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving he didn’t want to go to a local dive that was sure to be packed with people. Worse, his friends probably chose his least favorite spot in town, the kind of bar where bar fights are a daily occurrence. But Bill had nothing else to do, so he left as the crew’s designated driver. Upon arrival, he immediately dropped onto a bar stool to watch the game that was on TV and sipped his lemonade. There, if not entirely present.
Later that evening a distant relative of one of his buddies, a guy from Georgia with a deep southern tone who amused Bill like hell, came by and insisted he stop by to meet someone. He brought Bill over to a woman and said to the two of them, “You two need to talk,” his Southern tones drew out the introduction and then walked away. The woman was just as confused as Bill. Stacey Porrini had not asked him to meet and had no idea why the man insisted on the connection.
Bill and Stacey talked all night and before he left, Bill got her number. Since it was Thanksgiving, he didn’t want to interrupt his family time and planned to call after the weekend. Instead, she found him and used whatever resources she had in the pre-social media days of 1999 to find his number. “The rest,” Bill says now, “is history.” They married in 2001, had two children, and remained completely and solely devoted to each other from the night of that bar meet-up until 2018, when Stacey died of breast cancer.
Bill “talks” to Stacey a lot and often seeks her advice. Like when their daughter Olivia started dating and Bill’s first instinct was to get all Rambo when he met the poor boy, he instead thought about how Stacey would have handled it and adjusted accordingly.
And recently, as Bill stood nervously in the stands, almost shaking like he always does before a UConn game, he looked up, well over the bars of Albany’s MVP Arena. “Every time you see me looking up, I’m talking to her,” he says, and chuckles. “Just asking for a little help down here.”
It may have been divine intervention that got the Huskies out of their first-round morass and on to a Sweet 16 date with Arkansas. But there’s no denying that Stacey’s fingerprints are all over UConn’s success this season.
Donovan Clingan, the Huskies’ rising 7-foot-2 star, might look like his dad. but other than that, the newcomer Big Man is all Stacey.
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(Photo: David Butler II / USA Today)