ANAHEIM – You would have to get there awfully early to make sure you got a seat in those days, or a spartan slab of bleacher, and sometimes that meant getting there before the lay-up lines for the four o’clock freshman game and sitting through the 6:30 jayvee game in order to be there when the varsity teams finally tipped it off at 8:15 or so, packed like lemmings, more familiar with your neighbors than any of you wanted to be.
It was always worth it, of course, because in those days we honestly believed that while basketball might have been invented at a teacher’s college in Springfield, Mass., it was only perfected by the kids in the suburbs, on Long Island, specifically in the Catholic League, where every Tuesday and Friday during the winter you could see some of the most unforgettable games anywhere.
In our world, that was the God’s honest truth.
So maybe you would head out to Oyster Bay, to St. Dominic’s, where Tim Kempton and Jimmy Christian were playing for Ralph Willard, where a few years before that another gym rat named Rick Pitino had started a lifetime internship consumed by the game. Maybe it would be Hicksville, and Holy Trinity, where Matt Doherty was playing under Bob McKillop, looking as cool and polished in green and white as he would in sky blue a few years later for North Carolina.
If you had a car, you could push it out to Smithtown, to St. Anthony’s, where an old St. John’s Redman named Gus Alfieri won about a million games, always (seemingly) 45-42, always choking an opponent’s spirit with defense in that dark, cavernous gym of his, filling its air with his relentless, staccato bark.
Or you could go the complete other way, and go to the wonderfully cramped bandbox at St. Agnes in Rockville Centre, where a grouchy, old man named Frank Morris preached a mantra of “12-7-4” (as in months of the year, days of the week and hours of the day that basketball should be practiced by the truest members of the faithful), where he got mad if his players took more than eight or nine seconds to take a shot, where he’d give the ball to guys like Brian Mahoney and Frankie Alagia and Bernard Woodside and Billy Donovan and tell them to push it and keep pushing it until their lungs collapsed.
Even my school, Chaminade, had its moments. We sent Vinny Caraher to Boston College and Eddie Newman to Fairfield, and McKillop had played for us back in the day, before winning all those games at Trinity and Long Island Lutheran and, for the past few years, at Davidson College. The great Joe Mullaney went to Chaminade. We had our moments, even if for the most part they were to prove that in every league, somebody has to play the part of the Knicks.
Man, those were good times, and some damned good ball, and if we maybe seemed a bit parochial about it all, well, hell, we were (they were parochial schools, after all). A lot of times – though not always – our teams would get dusted by the city teams when they’d meet. There used to be a postseason All-Star game called the Newsday Classic, featuring city versus suburbs out at Nassau Coliseum, and the best memory of that is the night my buddy Hammer drained a halfcourt shot and won a prize. Mythology is always a lot more powerful, and comfortable, than reality, whether you’re talking about the Zeppelin concert you saw back in ’79, the first time you caught the midnight showing of “Rocky Horror” or sitting in those gyms, watching those players on all of those nights.
Didn’t matter. We thought we were the center of the basketball universe. No, it was more than that: we knew we were. We knew what we were watching every Tuesday and Friday night. We knew what we were seeing.
Funny thing, too. Suddenly, it seems, we may have been right all along.
Suddenly, out of our ranks comes Donovan, the coach at Florida, and if you think he’s a driven, focused guy now, you should have seen him 25 years ago, under the lights at Hickey Field on Sunrise Highway, weaving his way through defenses and mosquitoes and August humidity so thick it was like playing ball inside a someone’s attic. He sits atop college basketball now, at age 40. One of ours.
So, too, was Doherty, and never forget that while Roy Williams might have driven the North Carolina Tar Heels to the finish line last year, he only did it because he inherited one of the most talented teams of the last 10 years from Doherty.
So, too, was Pitino, and Willard, and Christian, who’s going to get himself a pretty big job soon if he keeps winning games at Kent State, and McKillop, who would have been a hell of a hire at Seton Hall, a guy who’s been coaching John Beilein basketball since before Beilein was doing it, and Jimmy Valvano (even if he came out of the public leagues, at Seaford High).
No one’s ever confused Long Island with Indiana, or with New York City, or with Kentucky, or with Chicago, or with any of the other places where so many bright basketball stars were born. No one ever will. Maybe we were kidding ourselves, all those years ago. But memory insists that isn’t so.
And after watching Donovan clip the nets in Indianapolis earlier this week, so do the eyes.
(Mike Vaccaro’s e-mail address is [email protected]. His Yankees-Red Sox book, “Emperors and Idiots,” will be released in paperback May 9.)
VAC’S WHACKS
Bobby Gonzalez finally gets to work the Big East, the biggest room in college basketball, after a basketball lifetime when no gym could contain his big dreams and bigger ambitions. Good for Gonzalez, finally getting his crack at the big time. Better for Seton Hall, who hired the guy who’ll get them back to the big time, and keep them there.
There has never, ever, ever been a dumber dispute than the “Enter Sandman” debate that held New York City hostage this week.
You take three parts Armando Benitez, two parts Braden Looper and two parts John Franco, you stir it in a bowl, you throw it in a mixer on high for 20 seconds, then you add just a pinch of Doug Sisk for old time’s sake, and you know what you get? You get Jorge Julio.
My only thought about the Benson Chronicles is this: For those who think Anna was simply in it to ride on her husband’s coattails … if that were true, shouldn’t she have found more famous coattails than those belonging to Kris Benson?