Chasing Perfect Page 5
Chris thought she was marrying a teacher. Heck, I thought she was marrying a teacher. That’s all I’d ever wanted to be, other than a ballplayer. So that’s what I was working toward, only I wasn’t making a whole lot of forward progress. Very quickly, coaching had become a real passion. I was finding that I had a talent for it, and my teams were doing well, but there was no money in coaching. I think I made a $200 stipend my first year as the freshman coach at St. Anthony—if it was any more than that, it wasn’t a whole lot more. I didn’t really know what I was doing when I first started out as a coach. I knew how to play, that’s all. I knew how to win. And I was good at connecting with my players and finding ways to motivate them. But I didn’t really pay attention to fundamentals, to strategy. That would come later too.
A part of me thought it would have been nice to teach at St. Anthony once I finished college, because I made a real connection to the place, to the faculty, to the students, but they weren’t hiring, so I started working as a substitute teacher in the Jersey City school system. I was lucky enough to hire on as a pool sub at Dickinson High School, which was almost like being a full-time teacher. You didn’t get all the benefits that came with a full-time job, but the work was steady. I was a part of a permanent pool of substitutes for the entire school district, and Dickinson had over 3,500 students, so there was always an opening that needed to be filled. Occasionally, you’d show up and they wouldn’t need you in the high school, so they’d send you to one of the grammar schools in the district.
It was a decent arrangement—not quite as secure as a full-time teaching job, but a lot better than a straight substitute teaching gig, where they’d either call you or not, depending on the day. The only drag was that you couldn’t really teach. As a substitute, you’re more like a traffic cop than an educator—you’re a disciplinarian, really. You spend most of your time giving out cut slips, breaking up fights, trying to keep the incorrigible kids from getting under your skin. In my case, because I was so young, the students kept testing me. A lot of teachers, they can stand in front of a classroom with a certain authority, but I didn’t have that when I first started out. I was too close in age, too close to that time in my own life, so I think the kids kind of sniffed that out and gave me a hard time. Plus, when you only have a group of kids for a day, there’s not a whole lot you can do with them, other than work your way through the regular teacher’s lesson plan or maybe go over the assignments. Sometimes, though, you’d get a more open-ended placement—meaning you’d know in advance that a certain teacher would be out for a couple days, or even a week or more, so then you’d be able to get to know the kids a little bit, maybe do some interesting things with the material.
More and more, during basketball season, I found myself watching the clock and counting down the hours until practice, because that was the time I could really feel like I was teaching these kids, like I had something to offer that might make a difference. It was like being stuck, running in place, but then at the end of the day I’d be cut loose. It was frustrating, and I talked to my father about it from time to time, about how it felt during the school day like I wasn’t making the kind of contribution I wanted to be making, so he tried to get me to think of a different career, maybe something to do with law enforcement. Chris thought this was a good idea too. She could see I was frustrated with the way things were going on the teaching front, so she encouraged me to let my father help me on this, to try something new. It worked out that there were opportunities opening up in probation in the Hudson County court system, so my father made a couple calls and helped me get a job as a provisional. This meant that I could take the civil service test and then work part-time as a provisional for a year or so until I could get hired off the list on a full-time basis. So that’s what I did. In between, I supplemented my income by grabbing whatever odd jobs I could squeeze into my busy schedule, whatever I could find to fill the time and start putting together a stake for our young family. I even taught gym for a stretch at St. Anthony.
This went on for a year or so, but I didn’t mind the long, uncertain hours because I knew at the other end there’d be a career in probation. I just had to put in my time and twiddle my thumbs until my name came up on the civil service list, and I’d be all set. And in the meantime, I had my coaching gig, which was turning out to be my real focus. No, it wasn’t a way to make a living, but it was certainly a calling, and one of the great side benefits to a career in probation was that it would leave my afternoons and evenings free during basketball season. The hours were a lot like teachers’ hours, so there was a good fit. I was assigned to my old neighborhood, so I knew the streets like I knew my own name. Turned out I even knew some of the guys I had on probation. Guys I’d gone to school with. Guys I’d played ball with. In fact, I used to play softball and two-handed touch in a couple bar leagues in town, but because a lot of my teammates were in the system it was becoming a conflict of interest. Still, I told myself, this was all part of the job, all part of growing up. I’d had a lot of fun, playing ball all over the city, but it was time to set some of that aside and do whatever I needed to do to get off to a good start at work, to make the right impression, to leave a mark.
My arrival at St. Anthony coincided with the school’s first big successes on the basketball court. My first year as freshman coach, the varsity won its first state championship, under coach John Ryan, the guy who hired me. The following year, 1968–69, they won it again. It was like the dawn of a new era. When I was growing up, St. Peter’s Prep was probably the best basketball team in Jersey City. There were about a dozen high schools in the city at the time, and we all played each other. St. Anthony had always had a competitive team, but we knew them as a small Catholic school that tended to play in the middle of the pack. They were decent, but not great. They’d had some good individual players, but because it was such a tiny school, they never had the depth of talent you’d find at some of the other schools. At St. Peter’s Prep, for example, we had over 1,000 boys in the student body; at St. Anthony, there were just over 150, so it was tough for them to compete.
In a typical high school program, it’s the varsity coach who sets the tone. He’s keeping tabs on whatever’s going on with the junior varsity, and if there’s a budget and a demand for a freshman team, he’s got his hands in there too. Whatever style he likes to play, whether he’s a defensive coach or a run-and-gun type of coach, it’s usually reflected in the younger teams, because the idea is you’re developing players who will one day step up to the varsity and play in that coach’s system. So as a freshman coach, you don’t really get to call the shots. You coach the game of course. You make all the substitutions and work the refs and create the matchups, but your main job is to feed and fuel the varsity team, long-term. At St. Anthony, the way John Ryan ran the program, the freshman and junior varsity coaches were assistant coaches on the varsity team as well, so I had to be at all those practices, all those games, in addition to our freshman schedule. And I had to groom my guys and prepare them to step up and play for Coach Ryan somewhere down the road. So there was a lot going on, a lot of different agendas to follow.
In those days we bounced around a lot of local gyms. Remember, St. Anthony High School didn’t have its own gym, so we grabbed whatever gym time we could, wherever we could. For a long time we practiced at White Eagle Hall, the bingo hall at St. Anthony Parish downtown. I used to love our workouts at White Eagle because the gym was smaller than a regulation court, and there was almost no out-of-bounds territory before you ran into one of the side walls, so our practices there were intense. Our guys would beat each other up pretty good in that gym, which I always thought was an advantage; it forced us to play tough and smart. Our players loved it too, only I don’t think they loved it so much in the middle of any one scrimmage. Really, those games were cut-throat, brutal, but they kept coming back after graduation. It became a real rite of passage after they went away to play college ball: they’d come home from school on break and run with
us at White Eagle. They looked forward to it, my former players all said—but when they were playing for me, I don’t think anyone looked forward to it. There was too much at stake. They weren’t playing just to play. They were fighting for my attention, fighting for minutes. Just fighting.
We also used the Sacred Heart gym, where my wife, Chris, used to go to school, and the court at the Number 5 school, which was even smaller than the White Eagle gym. Depending on where we were practicing, our guys had to sometimes hop a bus after school—not a school bus, mind you, but a regular Jersey City bus out to Greenville—just to get to practice. Or we’d pile the kids into our own cars and ferry them back and forth. So there was a lot of coordinating, a lot of hustling, just to manage the schedules of all three boys’ teams, and a lot of that fell to the head coach. He’d let me know where we were practicing and when.
In all the years I’ve been coaching at St. Anthony, I don’t think we’ve played another school that didn’t have its own gym. Even the schools that have bad gyms have a gym. We’ve played in some crappy places over the years, but my kids have never walked onto a floor and complained about the conditions. It’s like it’s been programmed into them to appreciate the opportunity to play on any floor, to make whatever adjustments they need to make in their game, to compensate. In some of these gyms, like the Number 30 school in town, the ceiling is so low, you can’t really take an outside shot from the top of the key. The short kids tend to do well on that kind of floor, because they can still shoot. The tall kids, they put up a shot and the ball will hit the climbing ropes, which goes down as a turnover.
Once, we played at a tournament in Florida and had to scramble for a place to practice. Somehow we wound up playing at a local Catholic school with indoor/outdoor carpeting instead of a regular gym floor. We’d played on tile floors, on cement floors, on linoleum floors … but never on indoor/outdoor carpet. The court was lined like a basketball court, only with chalk instead of paint or tape, so my guys were a little off their game. (We managed to win that one tournament, though, after practicing on that surface, so maybe our guys had an extra bounce in their step, fresh legs, from all that time on the carpet.)
After two years, John Ryan moved me up to coach the junior varsity, and our games became a little more meaningful, our practices a little more competitive. The kids on my team were a little bit older, a little bit bigger, a little bit better. Basically, they were one year closer to being varsity players, so I tried to ratchet up the intensity in our practices and in my style during games. For the most part, this worked out pretty well, but every once in a while my emotions took over—at least, a little bit; at least, at first. I was a bit of a hothead, I guess you could say. Even today I can flash my temper on the bench during the game, but I like to think I can control my hotheadedness. At least I think to try, but back then I wasn’t always in control. I was still young, still finding my way as a coach, still learning how to develop these young players so that winning didn’t always matter as much as growing their game. But I hated to lose. Happily, we didn’t lose all that much—just two games my first JV season, but I think one of those losses came back to bite me. We were up by twenty points in a game against St. Peter’s New Brunswick, in their gym, and then the game got away from us. All of a sudden we couldn’t hit our shots, and St. Peter’s couldn’t miss, so they eventually took the lead. They ended up winning the game, and I’m afraid I went a little berserk. In the locker room after the game, I put my hand through a blackboard. I hit it pretty hard—so hard our school had to pay to replace it. In my defense, I was upset about the loss—but, really, that’s no defense when you’re supposed to be coaching kids and setting a good example for them. You’re supposed to keep a measure of control. The only good piece to my little tantrum was that it happened behind closed doors, in a locker room, but of course word got out. There were damages—beyond the cost of replacing the blackboard.
John Ryan ended up having a big influence on me as a coach. He took me under his wing, started sending me out to coaching clinics, gave me a push. I began spending a lot of time with him and some of the older coaches. I always tell people it was John and his crew who taught me how to drink beer properly. After practices, we’d usually go out to Richie & Pat’s Tavern, or Dahoney’s, or Gillick’s. There were a bunch of Jersey City taverns they liked to frequent, and we’d sit down and have our beers and talk about our team. Before long, we’d lay out a bunch of loose change on the bar and start diagramming plays with the coins. Or someone would pull out a napkin and start drawing plays on that.
I’d never know how long we’d be out. Sometimes it was just for a beer or two. Sometimes we stayed out for a couple hours. On those nights I’d go searching to find a pay phone so I could call Chris and tell her I’d be late. I’d say, “It’s one of those nights. We’re doing the Xs and Os. I don’t know when I’m gonna get out of here.”
Up until this time I’d been coaching with my gut. I knew the game from playing it, not from studying it, talking about it, or breaking it down. I knew what it took to win, but not what it took to put your team in a strong position to win, game after game. It took hanging out with John Ryan and his assistant coaches to get me to really analyze my approach, to understand the Xs and Os aspect of the game. It forced me to develop my own philosophy, my own style. It was like learning to play chess. It was one thing to know the basic rules, to understand which pieces can move in which way, to just play, but it was a whole other level to develop a winning strategy, to anticipate and try to counter your opponent’s moves, to know when to be aggressive, when to defend. All of that.
The comment about learning to drink beer properly has nothing to do with the number of beers we’d put away on these long nights out. It has to do with the contrast to how I used to drink beers with my friends. A lot of times, all through college, we’d wind up on some street corner or other, standing outside in the cold, drinking our beers. We were just kids. But here I was, drinking beers like a refined gentleman, discussing important matters (like basketball!) in respected establishments. I’d gone from drinking beers with boys to drinking beers with men, and I took it in as a kind of rite of passage.
The reason I think this blackboard incident came back to bite me was because John Ryan ended up leaving St. Anthony at the end of that season. We didn’t repeat as state champions, after back-to-back titles, but he got an offer to become the assistant coach at Manhattan College, and he grabbed at it. Naturally, as the current JV coach, I thought I was ready for the varsity job, so I put in for it, but a lot of the administrators didn’t think I was ready. They thought I had a volatile personality. Looking back, they were probably right, but I didn’t see it that way at the time. There was one priest in particular, Father Walter Walewski, who didn’t like me at all, probably because we were too alike. I was a young alpha male, and he was an old alpha male. Trouble was, for me, Father Walewski ended up becoming the chief administrator of the high school, so it didn’t exactly help my coaching career that I kept butting heads with him.
I never knew for certain if that blackboard incident cost me the varsity job, but it certainly didn’t help. And it certainly didn’t make me feel very good when the school offered the job to Bill Brooks, who’d been an assistant coach at Seton Hall. Bill was teaching in the Union City school system and thought it made sense to coach at the high school level, so he became the new St. Anthony coach. Luckily, he didn’t bring in a new staff, which meant I could stay on as the junior varsity coach, even though it kind of rankled that I’d been passed over for the varsity job. I thought I was ready for it. I thought I’d proven myself. But I wasn’t, and I hadn’t. Father Walewski and I didn’t always agree, but over time I was able to agree with him on this. I was a little too young, a little too brash—less qualified than a guy like Bill Brooks, who’d been an assistant at the big-time college level.
After all, I still had to learn my Xs and Os.
3.
1973–1974: MR. HURLEY
&nb
sp; THE IDEA IS NOT TO BLOCK EVERY SHOT. THE IDEA IS TO MAKE YOUR OPPONENT BELIEVE THAT YOU MIGHT BLOCK EVERY SHOT.
—Bill Russell
THERE IS WINNING AND THERE IS MISERY.
—Bill Parcells
I was a coach first. These days I’m a whole bunch of things. I’m an educator, a mentor, a motivator, a college adviser, a fundraiser. But coaching came first. My job was to win ball games. That’s why I was hired. The emphasis wasn’t so much on helping these kids get into college, or turning their lives around, or instilling the values of hard work and discipline. That was all a part of it, but these things weren’t exactly a priority. That all came later. Soon enough, but later.
I wanted to win. First and foremost. I wanted to win because I was competitive. I wanted to win because I wanted to keep my job. I wanted to win because these kids deserved to win. They didn’t always want it for themselves as much as I wanted it for them, but that was part of my job too—to get them to want it, to understand what winning meant, why it mattered.
Why did winning matter? Why does it matter still, after all these years? After all, winning in a vacuum is a small reward. But winning in context is huge. Why? Because winning is an outgrowth, a by-product, an emblem. It’s a reflection of your hard work, which at the end of the day is supposed to be its own reward, right?
It doesn’t always work out that a team or a competitor who puts in the most effort, who prepares the hardest, will come out on top. But over time, more often than not, that’s how it goes—and how it goes on a high school basketball court is usually tied to how it goes off the court as well. By that I mean, if you work at it, prepare, keep your focus, maintain your composure, and do everything in your grasp to get and keep ahead in the game, you’ll usually do okay in school as well.