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Chris Mullin’s hiring as the next men’s basketball coach at St. John’s University, reported on Monday and expected to be officially announced at a press conference on Wednesday, took me back. Boy, did it ever.
All the way to the first half of the 1980s, when like some of you, I was a student at the Vincentian-run university in Queens at the same time Mullin was starring on the school’s basketball team. Over the four years we were in college together, I watched closely as Mullin dropped more feathery left-handed jumpers into the basket at Alumni Hall, as it was called then, than I can recall.
They all came flashing back this week as St. John’s University’s first-year president Conrado “Bobby” Gempesaw reached back across the decades to place Mullin back atop the basketball program at St. John’s. Honestly, nobody knows how Mullin will pan out as a coach. There is no track record, no wins and losses recorded on the sidelines. Still, it was a bold move meant to re-establish the Johnnies among the ranks of college basketball’s top teams.
That was always the way it was with Mullin at St. John’s. He led his St. John’s team to a place in the NCAA’s Final Four in 1984-1985, the same year two other Big East powers, Villanova and Georgetown, played for the national crown that Villanova improbably won.
Mullin wasn’t the only star. He was ably assisted, literally, by guard Mark Jackson, then a sophomore out of Bishop Loughlin High School in Brooklyn, who would go on to play and coach in the NBA, and by Walter Berry, a tremendous college player, and Bill Wennington, the 7-footer who also played for the Chicago Bulls and other NBA teams.
Yes, they were a talented lot, and none more so than Mullin. The stories you’ve heard about him are true. He really did have a key to his parish school’s gym, St. Thomas Aquinas in the Flatlands section of Brooklyn. I know because I heard it from the parish custodian himself years later at a basketball tournament there.
Everyone knows about Mullin’s play at Xaverian High School in Brooklyn but before then he played at Power Memorial Academy in Manhattan, a Catholic school now closed.
He was hard to miss at St. John’s, and his story has been told by many. The university’s career points leader with 2,440, he was a first-team All-American as a senior and a three-time Big East Player of the Year, back when that conference was the best in college basketball. He went on to play on two U.S. Olympic basketball teams and enjoyed a long and successful NBA career.
The year before the Final Four season, I had a chance to cover the men’s basketball team at St. John’s as a sportswriter for the college paper, The Torch. Getting an opportunity to travel with the team to road games at Pittsburgh, Syracuse, DePaul and NCAA regional play in North Carolina was a pretty heady experience for a college junior and a great way to learn the craft.
As a student journalist I had an opportunity to see the players and coaches close-up. I’ll never forget a couple of the pre-game dinners Coach Lou Carnesecca permitted us to attend at Dante’s Restaurant, just down Union Turnpike from the school. What an incredible gentleman he was and still is, a superb teacher as well as a great coach.
I’ve thought about Carnesecca, now 90, a couple of times this week, about how proud he must be that Mullin is once again the face of St. John’s basketball. In many ways, the program has been searching for that face since Carnesecca left coaching more than two decades ago.
Yes, it’s nice to have Mullin back in New York City, where it all started for him. And back home at St. John’s.
