The Best American Sports Writing 2015

by Wright Thompson

  Swish.

  The Fords dog-piled Rosand. Twenty-odd years later, reserve guard Nick Cirignano would remember that moment above all others. “After that horrible season, it was such an elated moment,” he says. “We jumped on top of him, and he was giggling like he just stole something. I’ve never felt happier in my life.”

  Unfortunately there was still overtime.

  Back and forth the lead went until, again, the Fords found themselves down by three with seconds left. This time it was Rulewich—the stoic sophomore who’d been the team’s best player all season—who had the ball in his hands and a chance to tie it at the buzzer. In the stands, his father, Butch, who’d attended every one of Joey’s games since CYO ball, watched and prayed.

  Joey took one hard dribble and pulled up from behind the line. The backspin was perfect. The shot was on line. It hit the rim. It swirled in.

  And then out.

  Joey fell to the ground. Butch slumped. Hooks collapsed. Greenie died a thousand deaths.

  The Streak lived for at least one more season.

  The postmortem was not pretty. For the season, Haverford’s average margin of defeat was 34 points. No player finished in the top 10 in the conference in anything. At the awards banquet, Hooks chose not to give out an MVP award. One could have made a case, and some on campus did, that Haverford had just completed the worst season in modern college basketball history.

  By now, the media was on to the story. In a feature in the Philadelphia Daily News titled “It’s Not Whether You Win,” Hooks was described by reporter Bill Fleischman as “34 going on 64.” The writer also quoted Greenie as saying, “We’re real young and we just had a year from hell.”

  Kannerstein, the athletic director, stood by Hooks in the article. He described the coach as possessing “a lot of energy and a low discouragement threshold.” Later in the article Kannerstein summed up his coach with an unfortunate turn of phrase: “David has exceeded my expectations in terms of energy and failure to give up.”

  That spring, attention was momentarily diverted from the Streak when the women of Haverford went on strike. Not just any kind of strike though: a fellatio strike.

  The problem began when the freshmen on the lacrosse team, which was also coached by Hooks, painted a sign to rally the campus for the end of the school year’s competition between Swarthmore and Haverford for the Hood trophy. Their choice of slogan managed to be both tasteless and clueless: SWAT WILL GET DOWN ON THEIR KNEES AND GIVE US HOOD.

  This went over about as well as you’d expect. In these pre-Internet days, campus conversation centered around the six-foot-by-eight-foot cork-backed comment boards outside the student center. Within hours the boards were filled with angry missives: about how offensive the slogan was; about how it encouraged a sense of male dominance. Some commenters wondered if it didn’t connote violence.

  As was protocol at Haverford, the honor council held a “plenary” akin to mediation. A day later, with no resolution, the women of Haverford concocted their own slogan in response. That’s when the small construction paper signs began showing up, taped to lampposts, the walls of dorms, and the sidewalks. In black print they read: FELLATIO STRIKE.

  As luck would have it, Jeremy Edwards returned from Spain just in time to catch the tail end of the strike (which was eventually resolved to everyone’s satisfaction). Well, he thought, it appears as if nothing changed at Haverford while I was away. The same applied, he noted, to the fortunes of the basketball team.

  After all, the last time the Fords had won, in January 1990, Jeremy had been the leading scorer.

  The Sports Illustrated College Basketball Preview arrived in Hooks’s mailbox in October 1991, with Christian Laettner on the cover. Like thousands of other Philadelphia-area residents, Hooks leafed through the issue, past the stories about Duke, Michigan, and LSU center Shaquille O’Neal. Then, on page 122, he saw it. The story’s headline: “Can the Fords Get Started?”

  It began: “Haverford (Pa.) College almost has to have a better season than it did in ’90–91. The Fords, 0-25 last season, have a 36-game losing streak that dates back to January 1990.”

  Hooks, who aspired to be a Division I coach, had always dreamed of making it into Sports Illustrated. But not like this.

  Fortunately, reinforcements were on the way. The first was Gabe O’Malley. The son of an Irish bar owner, Gabe was a tough, smart redhead who’d been a star six-foot-four forward at BB&N School in Cambridge. The second recruit was a six-three shooting guard who transferred from a far-off land known as California: my brother, Duffy.

  Duffy was a rare breed at Haverford: a player with both length and range. An all-conference player in high school, he had been the last cut at UC San Diego, a perennial DIII power. In Haverford he saw a second chance.

  Adding to the good feeling in the fall of 1991, Edwards—Jer!—was returning to the team, along with big Tim Ketchum and Russ Coward, who were back from season-long injuries. Haverford suddenly had what appeared to be a (relative) wealth of talent. There was talk of a .500 record, perhaps even a run at the postseason.

  Then, in the fall, everyone got a look at Edwards on the court. He struggled through sprints. There was no lift on his jump shot. He appeared to have really enjoyed his time in Spain. “If this guy is supposed to be our savior,” Cirignano said to Greenie after one early practice, “we’re in deep s—t.”

  Never one to disappoint, Hooks had again set up a brutal schedule, the Streak be damned. Haverford would play road games at DIII powerhouses Williams, Wesleyan, Middlebury, and NYU.

  The program also had three new faces: two new assistants—Kevin Small and Kevin Morgan—and, to the delight of the players, a bright, shapely freshman named Lila Shapiro who’d signed on as the scorekeeper. Lila, a sports nut from Baltimore, became the team’s biggest fan. She accompanied the Fords on road trips. If some of the players harbored crushes on her, she paid little attention; she was there to do a job. Besides, as she says now, “Remember, we’re talking about Haverford guys. It wasn’t like traveling with the Ohio State basketball team.”

  It didn’t take long for the preseason optimism to dissipate. In the opener, against NYU, the Fords lost 98–82, matching the Division I record for consecutive losses. The next day they lost by 32 to Neumann University. Then to Gettysburg by 33. Expectations were replaced by desperation. The Streak stood at 39. History beckoned.

  For the players, it had become painfully embarrassing. It was neither easy nor fun to be a member of That Team With the Losing Streak That Was in SI. Especially because most of the Fords had been the best players on their high school teams. These were young men who’d stayed ahead of the curve in life. They’d studied hard, worked their butts off, done well in academics. They were supposed to be going places. And now local fans came out to gawk at them, hoping in equal measure that the Fords might win and lose. Sometimes Haverford provided unintentional comic relief. Such as the time, during layup lines in a packed opposing gym, that Duffy took two strong dribbles toward the hoop and then tripped over his own shoelace, which he’d looped so long that it had become snagged on his toe. He tumbled to the floor. The fans roared in laughter.

  “Get up!” whisper-shouted a teammate.

  Only, with his shoelace snagged, Duffy couldn’t get up. Eventually, to the delight of the crowd, he crawled off the floor on his hands and knees.

  Meanwhile, and more troubling, Hooks didn’t seem to be improving as a coach. He became myopic. He had run the same offense for years, yelling out “Two! Two!” to signal the two-break on nearly every possession, just in case anyone didn’t already know what was coming. His rotations were wacky. In one game he started big Tim at center and then, after subbing him out in the first quarter, either chose not to or forgot to put him back in. In another game one of his wing players got hot, hitting three consecutive three-pointers. Hooks immediately subbed him out, to the bewilderment of his teammates. Afterward Butch Rulewich, Joey’s dad, asked Hooks why. His answer: it was h
is turn to come out.

  As much as Hooks frustrated the players, though, none of them could bring themselves to dislike the guy. He may have been in over his head as coach, but his heart was in the right place.

  Remember when big Tim Ketchum blacked out on that second day of practice? It was Hooks who insisted he get fully checked out, who cautioned him against returning early and then checked on him daily in the months that followed, becoming, in Ketchum’s words, “a kind of father figure at a scary point in my life.” Hooks’s crazy scheduling? Part of it was for the benefit of his players. He took the team to play the University of Chicago one year so Greenie could have a homecoming, and a year later he figured out a way to get the Fords to UCSD for Duffy’s sake.

  Most of all, Hooks’s character shone through in his reaction to the death of Greenie’s dad. It wasn’t just that he was the person to tell Greenie and drive him to the airport. But at the funeral, a few rows back from friends and family, Greenie noticed a lightly sweating, not-so-lightly crying bear of a man. During the season, while living on a $35,000 annual salary, David Hooks had paid out of his pocket to fly to Chicago to support one of his freshman benchwarmers.

  This was the side to Hooks that not everyone saw, hidden behind his relentless optimism and occasional buffoonery. He truly cared, about the kids and the team. And now the Streak was slowly destroying him.

  He’d taken the Haverford job out of desperation. His fiancée had been accepted into a graduate program at Drexel, and the couple was moving to Philadelphia from North Carolina. Needing a job, any job, Hooks applied to 70-odd schools in the metropolitan area. Meanwhile, Haverford needed what amounted to a coaching unicorn: someone qualified to coach both basketball and lacrosse who would do so with no paid assistants, a tiny budget, and no promise of a faculty position. All for low pay.

  In his first two games as coach, Haverford lost by a combined 111 points. On the drive home to his one-bedroom apartment on City Line Avenue that second night, Hooks fantasized about driving into the river. Anything to avoid that kind of embarrassment again. As he would later tell a Philadelphia Daily News reporter, “Any sane person would have packed his bags up at that point and split.”

  But of course that’s not what Hooks did. And in the three years since, he had lived and died with the job. He worked long hours, running practice during the day and then driving his silver Chevy Corsica across eastern Pennsylvania at night, a cold cup of coffee next to him, searching for recruits who might be persuaded—somehow, some way—to come to Haverford. Sometime after 1:00 a.m., he’d collapse into bed. In his free time he prepared binders for the players that included pages upon pages of drills and crazy-hard plyometric programs as well as inspirational clippings: everything from John Wooden’s pyramid of success to passages from Dante to a poem that encouraged players to “show us all the colors of your rainbow.”

  On nights the team played, and of course lost, Hooks went home a wreck. He’d pour a big bowl of sugary cereal and sit down on his living room floor with his golden retriever, Hoops, whom the players had bought for him. Deep into the night, the two would watch college basketball on ESPN, so Hooks could see the game the way it was meant to be played.

  He never gave up hope, though. And now, on Monday, December 2, 1991, he was certain the end of the Streak was at hand. Haverford was playing at Philadelphia Pharmacy, a college that is exactly what it sounds like: a school for aspiring pharmacists. It was an eminently winnable game. Anticipating history, a couple of Philadelphia TV stations sent reporters. Their trucks idled outside. A crowd of 150 showed up.

  Hooks knew he needed a special speech for such a night. So he gathered the team in the locker room before the game and mustered his best fire and brimstone. He talked about destiny and desire. For once the players were with him. They drummed their feet. It was time! Soon Hooks was in a frenzy, sweating and jumping around, and he built to a climax. “Okay!” he roared. “I want you boys to run out there like caged snowbirds and kill them!”

  With that Hooks sprinted out of the locker room toward the court. The players stared at each other. They were supposed to run out after him. But an important question hung in the air. “What,” Russ asked, “is a caged snowbird?”

  Philly Pharmacy won 75–62. The Streak had hit 40.

  Everyone on the team, save the freshmen, knew what that meant: it was going to come down to Gallaudet.

  Founded in 1864, Gallaudet College is located in Washington, D.C., on a picturesque 99-acre campus. An esteemed academic institution, it boasted an enrollment of 1,800 and a rich athletic history. The school was, without question, the premier basketball program in the United States for the deaf.

  Hooks took the Philly Pharmacy loss harder than anyone else. The long hours and the stress of the Streak were beginning to affect his marriage, and the media commentary was wearing on him. Worse, the schedule only got harder in the weeks ahead. If the Fords didn’t beat Gallaudet, which came into the game 0-4, the 47-game record loomed.

  There was only one thing to do. On Monday, two days before the game, Hooks gathered the players at practice and announced that he would be focusing on a specific defense. It was called the “run-and-jump trap.” When an opposing point guard brought the ball upcourt, Hooks explained, the primary defender would force him to the sideline. As that happened, a defender on the opposite side of the floor would leave his man, sprint across the width of the court, and trap the ball-handler from behind.

  Most of the time it was a risky defense, the kind that could be thwarted by something as simple as communication. All an offensive teammate had to do, after all, was shout out, “Double coming!” and the ball-handler could avoid the trap. Provided, of course, the ball-handler could hear his teammates.

  Game day dawned cool on Wednesday, December 2. By the 7:30 p.m. tip time, the temperature was 36 degrees. Fans streamed into the Fieldhouse, bundled in long coats and hats. There was, for the first time in a while, a real buzz. Attendance was listed at “capacity”—more than 1,000 people. And this time there were even more TV cameras. Everyone expected a win.

  The Fords were nervous; a number had taken multiple finals earlier in the day. PA announcer Thad Levine, a sophomore baseball player who was close with the guys on the team, rolled his syllables. “WELLLLCOME TO THE QUAAAAAKERDOME!!!”

  Levine announced the starting lineups. For Haverford, that meant Jer, Russ, Duffy, Joey, and Big Tim. Meanwhile Gallaudet’s star was point guard Anthony Jones. Though only five-eight, Jones was built like a linebacker. A year earlier, he’d finished among the top 10 Division III scorers.

  High up, on the lift behind the stands, Haverford freshman jayvee guard Tom Mulhern ran the video camera. He could feel the hope in the stands but also the dread; if the Fords couldn’t beat Gallaudet, the streak might never end.

  For once Haverford raced out to a lead. Midway through the first half, Hooks went for the kill, deploying the run-and-jump and telling the Fords to drop back into a 2-3 zone instead of man-to-man. It worked just as you might imagine—chaos in the Gallaudet backcourt, Haverford layups—and the Fords took an unprecedented 27–12 lead. In the portable bleachers the students went nuts. Haverford was the kind of school where people supported their friends, and the stands were packed with dormmates and girlfriends of the players, teachers, and lacrosse players. Then again, since this was Haverford, some of them had brought their textbooks.

  Just when it looked like the game might turn into a rout, Jones heated up. A pull-up three. Another three. Gallaudet was also adjusting to the run-and-jump; after all, this was the school that invented the football huddle so other teams wouldn’t steal its signs. By halftime Haverford’s lead was cut to seven. Jones already had 18.

  The Fords sprinted off the floor and up the stairs to their tiny, fire-engine-red locker room. There Hooks paced and shouted and sweated. The run-and-jump was working, but not well enough. Jones was killing them. Greenie could see a mixture of desperation and wild hope in his coach’s eyes. An
d, in that moment, even though Greenie was no longer in the rotation—the downside to all the new talent was that gritty, skinny sixth men were shunted far down the bench—he realized that he wanted this win for Hooks as much as for himself and the team. This guy, Greenie thought, needs this.

  As the second half began, Lila watched from the scorer’s table. By now she knew the players. She knew how hard some of them took the losses. And she continued to be amazed by how they never turned on each other or threw in the towel. What losing team doesn’t suffer from bad chemistry? She wasn’t supposed to cheer—usually she just muttered under her breath—but on this night it was hard not to.

  Only, as the minutes ticked by, there was little to cheer about. First Gallaudet closed the gap. Then it took the lead. Lila felt her stomach sink. Not again.

  At least Haverford stayed within striking range. Duffy drained a couple of long threes. Reserve guard Brett Kolpan harassed Jones on D, then swished a big three himself. Amazingly, Haverford held the lead with less than a minute to go.

  Naturally, the Gallaudet center sank two free throws. Overtime.

  This time there would be no miracle heave, no dramatic finish. Later that night, as he slumped in a chair at nearby Gator’s Pub, slugging back a beer, Hooks would think back on that overtime period. How his boys had sunk 12 of 16 free throws. How Kolpan had somehow shut down Jones. How Jeremy, the prodigal son, had led the way with 18 points overall, followed by Duffy with 17. Hooks would have to stop himself from crying right there in the bar. “It was almost like the gods of Basketball had had enough of this,” he would say years later, “and they were ready to cover the basket just enough times to help us win.”