THE thing that breaks your heart, if you truly care about the sport of basketball in this city, is just how deep the fissures and fractures are right now at St. John’s. The fabric is failing, the culture is coughing, and college basketball as we have always known it dies a slow, brutal death along Utopia Parkway.
Whoever comes in with the spackle and glue – be it Mark Jackson or whomever – had better keep those subway MetroCards in his pocket, and his memory focused on what matters at St. John’s. Namely, New York City.
It’s easy to forget sometimes. We give the Knicks too much credit, thinking they set the basketball agenda for New York’s basketball soul, but it’s never been that way.
In their history, the Knicks have been lousy far more often than they’ve been great and they’ve always been populated by outsiders. That fabled 1970 team, about whom so many urban poems have been penned? The starting five hailed from Louisiana, Michigan, Georgia, Indiana and Missouri. They found each other in New York, but their games were groomed elsewhere.
St. John’s was always different. St. John’s was always about New York, and New York was always about St. John’s. If you grew up in New York, if you played basketball here, then St. John’s was in your consciousness every day. Not every New York kid wound up there. Plenty did.
“There’s something you should understand,” a longtime coach in the city’s Catholic League said yesterday. “You have no idea how much it hurts to see what that program has become, because for years, guys like me, we all felt we were a part of the good that went on there. Some of us never sent a player there, but it didn’t matter. St. John’s allowed all our kids to see what the ideal was. ‘You want to be a New York player, kid? Look at how they do it at St. John’s.’ “
This is what Mike Jarvis, in his ceaseless arrogance, from his sanctimonious perch high above the fray, has never been willing to learn. And it’s why he probably doesn’t even notice the saddest collateral damage of this program he’s reduced to ruin: New York doesn’t care about St. John’s anymore.
Fairfield and Hofstra already have stolen games in Alumni Hall. The kids from St. Francis of Brooklyn get their crack next week, after Duke is done stomping the Red Storm carcass this weekend. Apathy has replaced what was once the fiercest, most parochial kind of loyalty. There are acres of empty seats in Alumni Hall. There is a string of alienated high school and AAU coaches, most of them too angry to ever be wooed back, one of whom said this summer: “What’s most infuriating is [Jarvis] doesn’t even know how it’s all gone wrong. He thinks we’re the problem.”
Five years ago, Jarvis said this about broadening his recruiting base outside New York’s borders: “There are kids we are going to go after knowing full well we may be in the final competition with Duke, Kansas and North Carolina. So what? We’re going to go after them, because as far as I’m concerned we have more to offer than any other program in the United States of America.”
Tuesday night, five years after this globalization policy was enacted, a few minutes before his team would be humiliated by Hofstra, Jarvis was on the radio saying, “You can no longer say in college basketball that you should beat someone just because you’re at home and the opponent is considered inferior.”
Oh, really? In that case, why should St. John’s invest $735,000 in a basketball coach at all?
In the same way you can’t expect a dreadful program to turn itself around right away, you can’t expect 60 years of excellence to disappear overnight. It’s taken some time for Jarvis to whittle away the tapestry carefully crafted by Joe Lapchick, Frank McGuire, Lou Carnesecca, Frank Mulzoff and Fran Fraschilla. But the cracks are finally visible. The foundation is foundering. A New York savior is needed. Immediately.