Word: carril
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Carril's one-liners sometimes run to several sentences and relate to the verities, as he sees them, of his sport. And life. To wit, basketball is a game most artfully performed by poor boys growing up on mean, urban streets. "The ability to rebound is inversely proportional to the distance one grew up from the railroad tracks," he likes to say. Since the best rebounders and shooters from inner-city schools are in demand at institutions that offer athletic scholarships, which Princeton does not, and rarely meet Princeton's rigorous admissions requirements anyway, Carril must cast his lines elsewhere...
...Carril grew up as a no-car-garage guy in a $21-a-month apartment hard by Quinn's Coal Yard in the hills of eastern Pennsylvania. His father, an immigrant from Castile, Spain, spent long days, weeks and years shoveling coal into an open-hearth furnace run by Bethlehem Steel. What Pete remembers most clearly about this Depression-era environment was the ethnic bonding prevalent among the Spanish, Polish and Italian inhabitants. "We always had food to eat," he says. "Families stuck together." The absence of material possessions was an advantage, Carril believes. "It made us innovative, creative...
More organized sports pointed the direction away from the furnaces. Too puny for his first love, football, Carril discovered hoops in the seventh grade. "It was the game I could play," he says. And how. Pete was a dervish guard at Liberty High School, leading the team to consecutive 24-3 records. That earned him a place at nearby Lafayette College, where a raffish free spirit named Willem van Breda Kolff came to coach and inherited Pete, then in his senior year. "I had my preconceived notions," says van Breda Kolff of his sawed-off, would-be star. "He threw...
...small for the pros by maybe 4 in. in van Breda Kolff's opinion, Carril embarked on a career as a high school government teacher and basketball coach. He won early and often. In 1966 he applied for the coaching job at Lehigh and got it by default. One year later, as van Breda Kolff was completing a five- year-long coaching tour de force at Princeton, he recommended Carril to succeed him. The incumbent thought his protege would be a hard sell. "Pete is not in Princeton's image," says van Breda Kolff. "He is not gray flannels...
...much for the importance of image. But Carril actually did try, taking up orange-and-black bow ties at one point. That is Armond Hill's first memory of him, when Hill was a senior at Bishop Ford High School in Brooklyn. (Carrilism: Always recruit at schools whose names begin with Bishop or Monsignor.) "I saw this short guy with a bow tie and a big cigar lying down in the bleachers," Hill recalls. "After the game he came down and told me everything I did wrong and that he could make me a better player. It was that, more...