Word: carril
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...Carril, 59, knows these things because he has been conducting this particular seminar at Princeton University for 23 years. For lack of a description in the course guide, let's title it Advanced Principles of Human Movement in a Confined and Well-Defended Space. His students call it varsity basketball; his opponents think of it as water torture. No one anywhere teaches the course more skillfully. Says Princeton Dean of Admissions Fred Hargadon: "If we were in Japan, Pete would be designated a Living National Treasure." Instead, Carril may have to settle for merely being the best college basketball coach...
...that his fellow coaches need any warning about Carril. After the Georgetown game, John Thompson graciously admitted that he had been outcoached. Jim Boeheim of Syracuse wants to avoid that possibility entirely. + "You never want to play Princeton -- never," he has said. After Princeton scared the bejabbers out of mighty Michigan State, losing earlier this season by two points, Jud Heathcote sang the same tune. "We don't want to play them anymore." Jim Valvano, the coach at North Carolina State, says playing a Carril team is like going to the dentist: very painful. Carril accepts the backhanded compliments...
...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...