In the moment, though, when the fans giddily counted down the final 10 seconds, and then that final buzzer sounded and the scoreboard read Haverford 87, Gallaudet 82, it was pure pandemonium. After nearly two years, the Streak was over. From the portable bleachers a torrent of crazed, whooping students engulfed the team. It was the first time in anyone’s memory that Haverford kids had rushed the court. Hooks, sweaty and ecstatic, bounded up and down, fist-pumping and yelping, while, nearby, the cameras rolled. In the locker room someone pulled out two bottles of champagne and sprayed like crazy, speckling the walls with foam and dumping alcohol on the heads of Jer and Joey. The TV cameramen were kind enough to ask their bosses to describe it on-air as “sparkling cider.”
Even though it was a school night, the players stayed up, celebrating, watching themselves on the 11:00 p.m. news, and then again on the late-night broadcast.
The next morning, a story in the Philadelphia Inquirer detailed the game. “It was beginning to get a little heavy,” Hooks said of the Streak. “I think any human being, you tend to question yourself.”
For its part, the Bi-College News featured a photo of the scoreboard with one word above it: “FINALLY.” In the accompanying story the author likened Haverford fans, players, and coaches to released hostages. “If one game can turn a program around,” Hooks told the paper, “I think this is the one.”
John Wooden’s pyramid of success promises that if you value process over outcome, then outcome will take care of itself. But what if the outcome doesn’t take care of itself? What if you still lose? How are you supposed to feel then?
It is a snowy afternoon in December 2013, and David Hooks greets a visitor outside the main office of West Nottingham Academy, a small boarding school in the rural nowhereland halfway between Baltimore and Philadelphia. He is the school’s athletic director, college counselor, and boys’ basketball coach, and on this day he is wearing jeans and, in spite of the weather, a tan short-sleeved polo shirt. There is a coffee stain on the right breast. Hooks is, as always, enthusiastic. He leads a guest up to a small second-floor office stuffed with the paraphernalia of a peripatetic coaching life: photos and banners and books. Occasionally his phone chirps out the SportsCenter jingle. He apologizes for delaying the appointment. While bringing home a Christmas tree during a blizzard, Hooks lost control of his pickup truck and plowed into a telephone pole. He spent the morning getting the car fixed.
Now, a cup of coffee in hand, he begins to talk Haverford. In the end he did turn the program around, though it got worse before it got better. After beating Gallaudet, Haverford embarked on a grueling Northeast road swing against Williams and Middlebury. More classic Hooks-ian moments followed. Like the time he took the team to the Basketball Hall of Fame and injured Duffy while mock-contesting his jump shot, sidelining the player for a month. And the time, on a team trip to the mall before a game, that Hooks broke his ankle trying to take a shortcut down a grassy slope, requiring emergency surgery.
Finally, Hooks’s recruiting efforts paid off. He enticed two legit prospects, Chris Guiton and Jamal Elliott, to come to Haverford. The team’s record went from 5-19 during the Streak-busting season to 5-19, 11-15, and, in 1995–96, 16-13 and a postseason berth. “Playoff Fever Hits Haverford Tonight,” declared the Daily News.
Unfortunately, Hooks wasn’t there to experience it. Nine months earlier, he’d left for a volunteer assistant job at Penn, leading local papers to suggest that he was either pushed out or was asked to resign. Today on the Haverford website the history of the basketball program jumps from 1983 all the way to the sentence, “The program awakened after a sluggish decade in 1995–96.” There is no mention of David Hooks or the Streak.
After Penn, where he worked under Fran Dunphy and endeared himself to players, he worked at a country day school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, at a small high school in Maryland, and one in New Orleans. The years went by. His two children, Kristen and Jordan, went from preschool to middle school and beyond. Hoops, his beloved golden retriever, passed away. He got divorced. He got a new golden, Beauregard. He remarried. He’s still coaching, still passionate about it.
On this afternoon he leads the West Nottingham team through a practice. Most of the boys are international students. Some don’t appear to know all the rules of basketball. Hooks isn’t dissuaded. He runs them through “foot fire” drills, exhorting them as loudly as ever.
At 57, Hooks still has big dreams. He says he’d like to be a Division I coach someday; maybe he could do what Brad Stevens did at Butler. He remains driven by the chance to mold young men’s lives, by seeing the Danny Greenstones of the world make the most of their talent.
Talk to those who knew Hooks, and they aren’t surprised. Kevin Small, the Haverford assistant, went on to become the head coach at Ursinus. He calls Hooks “a dying breed.” He says, “So many coaches are out for themselves, and self-promoting. [Hooks] really cared about the team. He was Sisyphus. He was always pushing a rock up a hill. It always rolled back on him. But, God bless the guy, he was always ready for pushing it back up again.”
Or as Nick, the reserve point guard, puts it: “I’ve never been around someone who had such a passion and such great enthusiasm for something he was so ill-suited to do.”
Now, in Maryland in a musty athletic office after practice, Hooks tries to explain his life’s philosophy. He refers to the poem “The Bridge Builder,” about an old man who lays down a bridge for those yet to come. Finally, he tells an anecdote.
The night before, he says, he and his wife sat down to watch the movie Armageddon for “like the 20th time.” His wife didn’t understand why he wanted to see it yet again. “The reason I watch this over and over is because I want to be on that spaceship,” Hooks told her. “I want to be those guys saving the world.”
She didn’t get it. “But why would you want to leave your family back on earth?” she asked.
“Well,” Hooks said, “earth wouldn’t be here unless I went.”
You want a story? You should write about the Streak.
This fall will mark the 25th anniversary of the season the Streak began. In the years since, the Fords have been pushed further into the history books. In the mid-’90s Rutgers-Camden lost 117 consecutive games. Forty no longer seems so bad.
The players remain united by the Streak, however, and on a weekend this January they gathered back at Haverford, arriving from all over the country: Chicago, Texas, California, D.C., Boston, Indiana. There are lawyers, doctors, and professors. One works at the Brookings Institution, another in the State Department. An unusually high number went into sports. Joey is a successful high school coach in Highstown, New Jersey. Russ Coward led the girls’ team at Westford Academy, near Boston, to the state finals this year. Dave Danzig, a reserve on the Streak teams, became an assistant in Germany, coaching the Würzburg Buckets, Dirk Nowitzki’s old team. Jeremy founded the SportsChallenge Leadership Academy, an educational nonprofit in D.C. Feds is a lawyer who occasionally represents baseball players. Recently he and Thad, who is now the assistant GM of the Texas Rangers, worked on a deal for relief pitcher Chris Ray.
Over the weekend the players ate gooey cheesesteaks at Bella’s and drank cheap beers in the wooden booths at Roaches & O’Brien, where apparently smoking is not only still legal but also encouraged. And on Saturday afternoon they sat in Haverford’s new state-of-the-art gym as the Fords (1-6 in conference play) hosted Dickinson College in front of 150 or so fans. In a familiar scenario, Dickinson trotted out three rotations players taller than Haverford’s lone “big” man, six-foot-five senior Brett Cohen. The Fords? They started three guards under six feet. After digging an early hole, Haverford clawed back and had a final shot to tie the game in regulation. Cohen’s three went in, then out, just like Joey’s once did against Vassar.
A quarter-century later, the players have processed the Streak in different ways. Some, like big Tim and Russ, use the story as an icebreaker. It’s a tale they know will get a laugh, one th
at both reflects well on them (Hey, I played college basketball) yet is self-deprecating (and boy did we stink).
Others still grapple with the experience. Even this far down the road, Gabe’s still disappointed. Disappointed that the team lost. That he never had even a .500 record in college. That he became a better player after college. He’s not alone. Like Jeremy, Gabe went on to play pro ball, in Wales. Duffy still plays in high-level tournaments and leagues in the Bay Area. The Fords wonder if this was an unintended consequence of the experience—if they keep playing today because they are forever trying to prove themselves.
Then there is Greenie. As planned, his brother, Mike, became a renowned economics professor: he served as the chief economist for Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors in the first year of the president’s administration. Greenie? He moved to Chicago and became a history teacher, one who’s won awards. Five years ago he published his first novel. In it there’s a familiar scene involving a basketball team in a game against a school for the deaf. Two years ago that novel was optioned by the actor Ed Burns. Greenie is working on a screenplay. Like many writers, he has turned tragedy into material.
Viewed from one perspective, many of the former Fords are spending their lives trying to right old wrongs. That would explain the disproportionate number of basketball coaches among them, each now training kids the way they wish they’d been trained. And Jeremy, the captain of that team—the one who cared the most—is an evangelist for effective leadership in sports. It’s as if he’s determined to stamp this out.
One thing’s for sure: the Streak still bonds them. They remain remarkably close. Seven of Jeremy’s nine groomsmen came from the Haverford basketball program. The others see teammates regularly. Last year five Fords gathered in California for the 50th wedding anniversary of Duffy’s parents. That’s not common. Those of us who didn’t experience such sports camaraderie marvel at it. Two years after Greenie’s father passed away, his mother died suddenly. Though he remains close with his brother, he says the Haverford basketball team became like a surrogate family.
Thad, the old PA announcer, brings up this point on Saturday night, as the group talks over beers. “At other schools, they were improving on themselves as basketball players, but were we gaining on them in life?” he asks. “Are they sitting somewhere, talking about how terrible they were? I don’t think it was mutually exclusive—we certainly could have won and still had these relationships. And maybe we should have invested more in the sport. But at what expense?”
He pauses. “I don’t know the answer to that,” he says. “But I know we spent a hell of a lot of time investing in each other. We didn’t fall short of that by one iota. No one beat us at that.”
Some things change. Some never do.
On the Saturday morning of the reunion weekend, the Haverford Streak crew gathered at the shiny new campus gym to play some ball. They took the court in ankle braces, rubbing balky knees and slicking their hair back over bald spots—Greenie and Nick and Duffy and Gabe and others. They moved slowly and complained loudly.
Soon a group of recent college players came in, young and tall and springy. The numbers were right. A game of four-on-four was arranged, the young guns versus the Haverford vets. Once again, the Fords took the court together.
You can probably guess what happened.
That’s right, they won.
TOMMY TOMLINSON
Precious Memories
FROM ESPN THE MAGAZINE
CHAPEL HILL, N.C.—Dean Smith doesn’t watch the games anymore. The motion on the screen is too hard to follow. Now he thumbs through golf magazines and picture books. Most of the books are about North Carolina basketball. They seem to make him happy. He turns the pages past photo after photo of himself. Nobody knows if he knows who he is.
Music seems to make him happy too. About a year and a half ago, a friend named Billy Barnes came over to the house to play guitar and sing a few songs. Barnes played old Baptist hymns and barbershop quartet tunes—Daisy Daisy, give me your answer true. Music he knew Dean liked. But nothing seemed to get through. Dean was getting restless. Barnes asked if he could play one more song.
After every basketball game, win or lose, the UNC band plays the alma mater and fight song. The Carolina people stand and sing. Barnes knew Dean had heard the song thousands of times. He started to play.
Dean jumped to his feet. He waved at his wife, Linnea, to stand with him. He put his hand over his heart and sang from memory:
Hark the sound of Tar Heel voices
Ringing clear and true.
Singing Carolina’s praises,
Shouting N-C-U.
Hail to the brightest star of all
Clear its radiance shine
Carolina priceless gem,
Receive all praises thine.
I’m a Tar Heel born, I’m a Tar Heel bred,
and when I die I’m a Tar Heel dead!
So it’s rah-rah Car’lina-lina, rah-rah Car’lina-lina,
rah-rah Carolina, rah, rah, rah!
“It was just pure joy. That uninhibited joy in the music,” Linnea says. “It’s one of those moments that you know there’s more there, or momentarily there, than sometimes you’re aware of.”
This is what she hopes for now. A moment of joy. A moment of connection. A moment when Dean Smith is still there.
Why do we care about sports to begin with? Why do we watch? Maybe this: to connect. In the arena, or in a sports bar, or maybe just alone on your couch, you watch your favorite team and you plug into something bigger than yourself. It’s a hedge against the coldness of the world. Heaven is other people.
For 36 years as the Tar Heels’ head coach, Dean Smith built a family. He created a shared identity for the legions of UNC fans who still buy the tickets and wear the T-shirts and paint their dens Carolina blue. His teams won 20 or more games for 27 years in a row. But more than that, they won with a selfless style. Dean’s most lasting invention was his simplest: when you make a basket, you point to the player who threw the pass. He taught his team, and those who watched, that everyone is connected.
Inside the big Carolina family, he built a smaller family—the players and coaches and staffers who came to see him as a teacher, a guru, a role model, a surrogate dad. They asked his advice on everything from sneaker contracts to marriages. He called on their birthdays and got tickets for their in-laws. He built lifelong bonds.
But for the past seven years, maybe more, dementia has drawn the curtains closed on Dean Smith’s mind. Now he is 83 and almost no light gets out. He has gone from forgetting names to not recognizing faces to often looking at his friends and loved ones with empty stares.
Here is the special cruelty of it: the connector has become disconnected. The man who held the family together has broken off and drifted away. He is a ghost in clothes, dimmed by a disease that has no cure. Even the people closest to him sometimes slip into the past tense: Coach Smith was. They can’t help it. They honor him with what amounts to an open-ended eulogy. At the same time, they keep looking for a crack in the curtains. They do what people do when faced with the longest good-bye. They do the best they can.
Three times a week, a caregiver wheels Dean Smith into the Dean Smith Center. He still has a little office in the arena built in his name. Linnea thinks the routine is good for him. Linda Woods, his administrative assistant since 1977, answers his calls and checks his mail. She writes back I’m sorry to autograph seekers. Woods is retired except for Dean. When he’s there, she’s there. Dean often eats lunch at the office. He loved the double BLTs from down the road at Merritt’s Store & Grill. But these days he eats soft things in small pieces. On the good days, he feeds himself.
When he coached, his office was a disaster: “I had files,” Woods says, “and he had piles.” Now it’s mostly the golf magazines and the picture books. Woods turns the pages with him. You played that course with your friends, she’ll say. Or: Look at all that dark hair you had on your head.
> She never asks if he remembers.
Dementia steals memory, and here’s another twist of the knife: Dean’s memory might have been the most impressive thing about him. It was astonishing, like a magic trick. Dave Hanners, who played and coached under Dean, was going through old game films one morning in 1989—Dean had decided to send his former players tapes of their best games as gifts. Hanners was watching a game against Notre Dame when Dean walked by and glanced at the screen. A few seconds later, he said: Watch this next play. Yogi Poteet is going to get a backdoor pass from Billy Cunningham and score. Next time down, they switch places. Yogi’s going to throw the pass and Billy will score. They watched together, and it played out exactly as Dean said.
When did you watch this film last? Hanners said.
Oh, I guess when we looked at it the day after the game, Dean said.
The game was from 1963.
No one knows what’s still in there. Does he remember the numbers: 879 wins as UNC’s head coach, 13 ACC tournament championships, 11 Final Fours, two national titles, an Olympic gold medal–winning team? Does he remember the moments: Michael Jordan’s jumper to beat Georgetown; Michigan’s Chris Webber calling a time-out he didn’t have; those heartbroken students pressed against the windows when he announced his retirement in 1997? Does he remember the players: Jordan and James Worthy and Sam Perkins and Brad Daugherty and Kenny Smith and Bob McAdoo and Phil Ford and Walter Davis and Bobby Jones and Larry Brown? Does he remember coming back from eight down with 17 seconds left against Duke?
The Best American Sports Writing 2015 Page 17