HOUSTON — Yes, there are reasons to be skeptical. Of course there are. It has been 30 years since Chris Mullin spent any significant time at all around the college game. He has never coached a single game, any level.
He would be coming home, to a school where he was once worshipped as few have ever been so idolized, to a city that fell hard for him as a collegian and kept a light on for him his entire pro career, hoping he’d somehow find his way back to the Garden as a Knick. There are myriad things that could mar that picture, and those memories.
But here is something else to remember.
Here is Mark Jackson, talking in the spring of 1999 when he and Mullin, a couple of old Johnnies, had re-teamed under Larry Bird in Indianapolis. Here is Jackson, by that time a 12-year NBA veteran, recalling his own days as a prince of the city, his first official day as a student at St. John’s.
He met his professors. Figured out his schedule. Got himself a bite to eat at the student cafeteria. Then he headed over to Alumni Hall, eager to get on with the business of lighting up the Big East. He knocked on the coach’s door. Lou Carnesecca waved him in.
“Sit down, Mark,” the old man said in that timeless, copyrighted Corleone rasp. “You ready to get to work?”
Jackson nodded yes.
Carnesecca smiled. He knew the kid had no idea.
“You know, Mark, even the guy who gives the concert in Carnegie Hall has to practice seven hours a day, good as he is,” Carnesecca told him. “That’s how come you never hear him hit a clunker. After seven hours a day, he can do what he does in his sleep.”
Jackson shrugged his shoulders, still unsure.
“Come with me,” Carnesecca said.
They left the office and walked the few steps onto the floor at Alumni Hall. The bleachers were folded in, the scoreboard shut off. There was one person in there. Jackson recognized him, of course, from a thousand summer days at the city’s playgrounds, Brooklyn, Queens, Harlem, wherever. He remembered a few years before, they’d played a high school game against one another, Loughlin at Xaverian. Jackson had been awestruck that night.
From across the floor, Chris Mullin — already a St. John’s icon, only halfway through his career — waved.
“Get to work, Mark,” Carnesecca said.
All those years later, Mark Jackson smiled and said, “It was like being sent off to work with Einstein, man.”
Then the smile disappeared.
“Lots of guys are gym rats,” he said. “I was a gym rat. Chris was more than that. Chris, he was a scientist.”
We should remember that part of the Mullin story, because that explains who he was, what he became, and who he is every bit as much as all the tales told about the hours spent letting himself into the gym at St. Thomas Aquinas, up the block from his childhood home in Brooklyn.
For hard work only illustrates a portion of the Mullin story. Jackson was right: For a hundred years, the city has produced kids with a fierce basketball jones who worked hard, played constantly, always had a ball in their hands. In a hundred years it has only produced one prodigy, one Mozart in high-cut sneakers. One Mullin.
Did he outwork most of his peers? Sure he did. But to have seen him play was to see a clever player, ever thinking, always figuring things out on the fly. To talk to him about the game now is to ask Springsteen about chord progressions, Letterman about how to properly crack wise.
So yes: He would bring all of that home with him now. It is impossible to calculate how much St. John’s has riding on this. Mullin is the one coach for whom this is not just a big-time job, but possibly a forever one. It isn’t the same gig it was 30 years ago, which is why you were hearing so many potential candidates were thinking twice.
For Mullin, THIS would be the job. There is no chance he would take this on as a whim, on a lark. He has a good life in the pros. And he knows better than anyone the potential pratfalls that await. He is expected to take the job anyway.
Once upon a time, Mullin could have fled Brooklyn for Duke, or become Ralph Sampson’s wing man at Virginia, and chose to stay home instead, and all that did was alter forever the history of St. John’s basketball. Now he is expected to come back, a gifted scientist seeking a familiar old laboratory.
Maybe it won’t work. Maybe it can’t. But damn, it’s hard to bet against him.