Culture

Thomas Haugh, Tebowmania and the Florida Gators’ Final Four serendipity

Published

9 months ago

March 31, 2025

Thomas Haugh, Tebowmania and the Florida Gators’ Final Four serendipity

SAN FRANCISCO — In summer 2022, the new Florida men’s basketball staff had zero wins, an auspicious but limited track record and one guarantee: Thomas Haugh, the lanky three-star recruit in the practice gym, was not leaving Gainesville without plans to come back. He was possibly the only human ever to be both a native of New Oxford, Pa., and a die-hard Florida fan. A 6-foot-9 devotee of Tim Tebow Mania. If anyone was going to run to the front of the line, it was him.

“They had to do a lot wrong for Tommy not to show up and be a Gator the next day,” Ryan Haugh, Thomas’ father, said Saturday on the Chase Center floor. “That was his lifelong dream. He bled orange and blue while the rest of Pennsylvania was bleeding blue and white.”

These are the serendipities that college basketball teams ride into April without knowing they’re on that ride until they get there. First, there is a very tall kid from a town of about 2,000 people who plays quarterback. Then that kid falls for the stylings of a Heisman Trophy winner. Then that kid gets too tall to be a quarterback anymore, grows yet another couple of inches and plays basketball well enough to catch the eye of an assistant coach at Richmond.

Thomas Haugh was a BUCKET for the @GatorsMBK tonight 😤
🔥 20 PTS | 11 REB | 4 3PT
A much-needed spark off the bench to help Florida advance to the #MFinalFour in San Antonio 📈#MarchMadness pic.twitter.com/RVQ3InMnXZ
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— NCAA March Madness (@MarchMadnessMBB) March 30, 2025

Then that assistant coach becomes an assistant coach at Florida and takes another look. The player can’t say yes quickly enough. And in less than three years, there is Thomas Haugh on Saturday evening, turning to the crowd with a smile on his face and his arms spread wide, celebrating the moment that Florida clinched its first trip to the Final Four in more than a decade. A moment that wouldn’t have happened without him. A moment that is the residue of a lot of other ones that might not have happened at all but did.

So Thomas Haugh scores 20 points, grabs 11 rebounds and hits two 3-pointers in the final three minutes to supercharge a No. 1 seed’s comeback from oblivion. Florida beats Texas Tech 84-79, securing the first spot in San Antonio next week. As fate would have it. “I feel like I’m dreaming,” Haugh said, with a souvenir championship baseball cap pulled low over his brow. “I was watching the round of 64 in the eighth grade, sneaking my phone into science class. Now, to say I’m playing in the Final Four is wild. It’s wild.”

And it’s, of course, not entirely providence.

Florida’s staff has built this monster of a roster by relying on its instincts and calculations in player evaluations, entirely unconcerned if they don’t align with whatever the consensus is. It’s a belief in seeing things a little differently that traces back to operating as part of an Ivy League operation years and years ago. It’s comfort with risky convictions. And it’s the process that gets you a hero of an Elite Eight game.

Haugh was, in the words of Florida assistant coach Kevin Hovde, “an insane late bloomer.” Six feet 7 going into his senior year of high school, maybe not as comprehensively serious about basketball as Division I coaches would prefer until a couple of years before that. He was on the radar when Hovde worked at Richmond. He was not, however, a must-sign no-brainer.

But Haugh did bloom, even if he needed a prep school stopover to do so. And once Hovde joined Todd Golden’s new coaching staff at Florida, the pair doubled back. Their re-evaluation recommended Haugh as a player worth adding, even if the particulars of the picture remained fuzzy. “He has a very high floor in his game,” Hovde said amid Florida’s celebration Saturday. “I thought he could defend at this level, and he has a great feel. He’s easy to play with. So I thought no matter what, he’s going to be able to play a role. But he’s surpassed our expectations.”

They imagined a steep trajectory. They got a player who is nimbly climbing a sheer cliff face.

Haugh’s per-40-minute rebounding is basically static from his first season to this one. But he’s almost incomprehensibly gone from a 45.7 percent free-throw shooter as a freshman to 80.4 percent as a sophomore. He’s better than doubled his assist rate (6.9 percent to 14.1), becoming what Golden calls a “pressure release” for the Gators guards. His 3-point shooting jumped from 25.5 percent to 33 percent, and through 37 games, he led one of the deepest and most talented teams in the nation with .225 Win Shares per 40 minutes.

Also, he comes off the bench. For all but seven of the games he’s played in two years. “He’s a winning player,” Golden said. “He just finds ways to impact the game and to help the team. One of, if not the most unselfish guys out there, just being comfortable coming off the bench when he could be starting for pretty much any team in America.”

Haugh is, essentially, the avatar for Florida’s plan and the success it’s engendering. The Gators have welcomed players other power-conference programs might not take. Though the idea was to create depth that can overwhelm teams, this also requires players willing to be depth components. The Gators, meanwhile, have been unflappable — their longest losing streak this year is one game — because they have so many alternatives for whomever might not have it on a given night.

So here was Haugh, a 9.5 points per game scorer once again content in a reserve role in the Elite Eight. Then he logged 30 minutes — third most of any Florida player against Texas Tech — and stepped into a 3-pointer to make it a six-point game with 2:50 to play. And another to make it a one-possession contest less than 30 seconds later. Walter Clayton Jr. might have taken it from there, but there was nowhere to take it without Haugh’s confidently seizing those two moments.

“I just got the ball and I was like, probably need a 3-pointer here, so just throw one up and see if it goes in,” Haugh said with a laugh. “No, my teammates found me, and I made the shots. Which, thank God, I did.”

His parents still might not quite grasp why a football player from Gainesville, Fla., caught hold with a kid from a pin dot in Pennsylvania — “I questioned every day why there was orange and blue in our house,” said Ryan Haugh, a former football player at Division II Shippensburg University — but they rolled with it. Jennifer Haugh even put Tim Tebow’s book in front of her son. And at any rate, there were worse idols to have.

“His drive, his tenacity, just never quit,” Ryan Haugh said. “That sunk in a little bit. As you saw today.”

And that brought everyone to Florida, and that brought Florida to a Final Four. Amid the postgame hubbub, Thomas Haugh wondered aloud about meeting Tebow someday. This almost surely will happen after what transpired Saturday at the Chase Center. The happy coincidences in Thomas Haugh’s story are being steadily replaced by sure things.

“Obviously,” Golden said of the selfless sophomore who helped will the Gators to San Antonio, “he’s going to start for us next year.”

(Photo: Kyle Terada / Imagn Images)

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Culture

Video: 250 Years of Jane Austen, in Objects

Published

2 weeks ago

December 18, 2025

Press Room

Video: 250 Years of Jane Austen, in Objects

new video loaded: 250 Years of Jane Austen, in Objects

To capture Jane Austen’s brief life and enormous impact, editors at The New York Times Book Review assembled a sampling of the wealth, wonder and weirdness she has brought to our lives.

By Jennifer Harlan, Sadie Stein, Claire Hogan, Laura Salaberry and Edward Vega

December 18, 2025

Culture

Try This Quiz and See How Much You Know About Jane Austen

Published

3 weeks ago

December 16, 2025

Press Room

Try This Quiz and See How Much You Know About Jane Austen

“Window seat with garden view / A perfect nook to read a book / I’m lost in my Jane Austen…” sings Kristin Chenoweth in “The Girl in 14G” — what could be more ideal? Well, perhaps showing off your literary knowledge and getting a perfect score on this week’s super-size Book Review Quiz Bowl honoring the life, work and global influence of Jane Austen, who turns 250 today. In the 12 questions below, tap or click your answers to the questions. And no matter how you do, scroll on to the end, where you’ll find links to free e-book versions of her novels — and more.

Culture

Revisiting Jane Austen’s Cultural Impact for Her 250th Birthday

Published

3 weeks ago

December 16, 2025

Press Room

Revisiting Jane Austen’s Cultural Impact for Her 250th Birthday

On Dec. 16, 1775, a girl was born in Steventon, England — the seventh of eight children — to a clergyman and his wife. She was an avid reader, never married and died in 1817, at the age of 41. But in just those few decades, Jane Austen changed the world.

Her novels have had an outsize influence in the centuries since her death. Not only are the books themselves beloved — as sharply observed portraits of British society, revolutionary narrative projects and deliciously satisfying romances — but the stories she created have so permeated culture that people around the world care deeply about Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, even if they’ve never actually read “Pride and Prejudice.”

With her 250th birthday this year, the Austen Industrial Complex has kicked into high gear with festivals, parades, museum exhibits, concerts and all manner of merch, ranging from the classily apt to the flamboyantly absurd. The words “Jane mania” have been used; so has “exh-Aust-ion.”

How to capture this brief life, and the blazing impact that has spread across the globe in her wake? Without further ado: a mere sampling of the wealth, wonder and weirdness Austen has brought to our lives. After all, your semiquincentennial doesn’t come around every day.

By ‘A Lady’

Jane Austen’s House, Chawton, England

Austen published just four novels in her lifetime: “Sense and Sensibility” (1811), “Pride and Prejudice” (1813), “Mansfield Park” (1814) and “Emma” (1815). All of them were published anonymously, with the author credited simply as “A Lady.” (If you’re in New York, you can see this first edition for yourself at the Grolier Club through Feb. 14.)

Where the Magic Happened

Janice Chung for The New York Times

Placed near a window for light, this diminutive walnut table was, according to family lore, where the author did much of her writing. It is now in the possession of the Jane Austen Society.

An Iconic Accessory

Jane Austen’s House, Chawton, England

Few of Austen’s personal artifacts remain, contributing to the author’s mystique. One of them is this turquoise ring, which passed to her sister-in-law and then her niece after her death. In 2012, the ring was put up for auction and bought by the “American Idol” champion Kelly Clarkson. This caused quite a stir in England; British officials were loath to let such an important cultural artifact leave the country’s borders. Jane Austen’s House, the museum now based in the writer’s Hampshire home, launched a crowdfunding campaign to Bring the Ring Home and bought the piece from Clarkson. The real ring now lives at the museum; the singer has a replica.

Austen Onscreen

Since 1940, when Austen had a bit of a moment and Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier starred in MGM’s rather liberally reinterpreted “Pride and Prejudice,” there have been more than 20 international adaptations of Austen’s work made for film and TV (to say nothing of radio). From the sublime (Emma Thompson’s Oscar-winning “Sense and Sensibility”) to the ridiculous (the wholly gratuitous 2022 remake of “Persuasion”), the high waists, flickering firelight and double weddings continue to provide an endless stream of debate fodder — and work for a queen’s regiment of British stars.

Jane Goes X-Rated

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

The rumors are true: XXX Austen is a thing. “Jane Austen Kama Sutra,” “Pride and Promiscuity: The Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen” and enough slash fic and amateur porn to fill Bath’s Assembly Rooms are just the start. Purists may never recover.

A Lady Unmasked

Jane Austen’s House, Chawton, England

Austen’s final two completed novels, “Northanger Abbey” and “Persuasion,” were published after her death. Her brother Henry, who oversaw their publication, took the opportunity to give his sister the recognition he felt she deserved, revealing the true identity of the “Lady” behind “Pride and Prejudice,” “Emma,” etc. in a biographical note. “The following pages are the production of a pen which has already contributed in no small degree to the entertainment of the public,” he wrote, extolling his sister’s imagination, good humor and love of dancing. Still, “no accumulation of fame would have induced her, had she lived, to affix her name to any productions of her pen.”

Wearable Tributes

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Jane Austen fan wants to find other Jane Austen fans, and what better way to advertise your membership in that all-inclusive club than with a bit of merch — from the subtle and classy to the gloriously obscene.

The Austen Literary Universe

Elizabeth Renstrom for The New York Times

On the page, there is no end to the adventures Austen and her characters have been on. There are Jane Austen mysteries, Jane Austen vampire series, Jane Austen fantasy adventures, Jane Austen Y.A. novels and, of course, Jane Austen romances, which transpose her plots to a remote Maine inn, a Greenwich Village penthouse and the Bay Area Indian American community, to name just a few. You can read about Austen-inspired zombie hunters, time-traveling hockey players, Long Island matchmakers and reality TV stars, or imagine further adventures for some of your favorite characters. (Even the obsequious Mr. Collins gets his day in the sun.)

A Botanical Homage

Created in 2017 to mark the 200th anniversary of Austen’s death, the “Jane Austen” rose is characterized by its intense orange color and light, sweet perfume. It is bushy, healthy and easy to grow.

Aunt Jane

Jane Austen’s House, Chawton, England

Hoping to cement his beloved aunt’s legacy, Austen’s nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh published this biography — a rather rosy portrait based on interviews with family members — five decades after her death. The book is notable not only as the source (biased though it may be) of many of the scant facts we know about her life, but also for the watercolor portrait by James Andrews that serves as its frontispiece. Based on a sketch by Cassandra, this depiction of Jane is softer and far more winsome than the original: Whether that is due to a lack of skill on her sister’s part or overly enthusiastic artistic license on Andrews’s, this is the version of Austen most familiar to people today.

Cultural Currency

Steve Parsons/Associated Press

In 2017, the Bank of England released a new 10-pound note featuring Andrews’s portrait of Austen, as well as a line from “Pride and Prejudice”: “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!” Austen is the third woman — other than the queen — to be featured on British currency, and the only one currently in circulation.

In the Trenches

During World War I and World War II, British soldiers were given copies of Austen’s works. In his 1924 story “The Janeites,” Rudyard Kipling invoked the grotesque contrasts — and the strange comfort — to be found in escaping to Austen’s well-ordered world amid the horrors of trench warfare. As one character observes, “There’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight place.”

Baby Janes

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

You’re never too young to learn to love Austen — or that one’s good opinion, once lost, may be lost forever.

The Austen Industrial Complex

Elizabeth Renstrom for The New York Times

Maybe you’ve not so much as seen a Jane Austen meme, let alone read one of her novels. No matter! Need a Jane Austen finger puppet? Lego? Magnetic poetry set? Lingerie? Nameplate necklace? Plush book pillow? License plate frame? Bath bomb? Socks? Dog sweater? Whiskey glass? Tarot deck? Of course you do! And you’re in luck: What a time to be alive.

Around the Globe

Goucher College Special Collections & Archives, Alberta H. and Henry G. Burke Collection; via The Morgan Library & Museum

Austen’s novels have been translated into more than 40 languages, including Polish, Finnish, Chinese and Farsi. There are active chapters of the Jane Austen Society, her 21st-century fan club, throughout the world.

Playable Persuasions

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

In Austen’s era, no afternoon tea was complete without a rousing round of whist, a trick-taking card game played in two teams of two. But should you not be up on your Regency amusements, you can find plenty of contemporary puzzles and games with which to fill a few pleasant hours, whether you’re piecing together her most beloved characters or using your cunning and wiles to land your very own Mr. Darcy.

#SoJaneAusten

The wild power of the internet means that many Austen moments have taken on lives of their own, from Colin Firth’s sopping wet shirt and Matthew Macfadyen’s flexing hand to Mr. Collins’s ode to superlative spuds and Mr. Knightley’s dramatic floor flop. The memes are fun, yes, but they also speak to the universality of Austen’s writing: More than two centuries after her books were published, the characters and stories she created are as relatable as ever.

Bonnets Fit for a Bennett

Peter Flude for The New York Times

For this summer’s Grand Regency Costumed Promenade in Bath, England — as well as the myriad picnics, balls, house parties, dinners, luncheons, teas and fetes that marked the anniversary — seamstresses, milliners, mantua makers and costume warehouses did a brisk business, attiring the faithful in authentic Regency finery. And that’s a commitment: A bespoke, historically accurate bonnet can easily run to hundreds of dollars.

Most Ardently, Jane

The Morgan Library & Museum

Austen was prolific correspondent, believed to have written thousands of letters in her lifetime, many to her sister, Cassandra. But in an act that has frustrated biographers for centuries, upon Jane’s death, Cassandra protected her sister’s privacy — and reputation? — by burning almost all of them, leaving only about 160 intact, many heavily redacted. But what survives is filled with pithy one-liners. To wit: “I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.”

Stage and Sensibility

Austen’s works have been adapted numerous times for the stage. Some plays (and musicals) hew closely to the original text, while others — such as Emily Breeze’s comedic riff on “Pride and Prejudice,” “Are the Bennet Girls OK?”, which is running at New York City’s West End Theater through Dec. 21 — use creative license to explore ideas of gender, romance and rage through a contemporary lens.

Austen 101

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Austen remains a reliable fount of academic scholarship; recent conference papers have focused on the author’s enduring global reach, the work’s relationship to modern intersectionality, digital humanities and “Jane Austen on the Cheap.” And as one professor told our colleague Sarah Lyall of the Austen amateur scholarship hive, “Woe betide the academic who doesn’t take them seriously.”