by Dan Doyle
In the off-season, Edna handled the books for Jim’s lucrative basketball camp. In August of each year the couple would make a trip abroad, one of the many perks Jim had in his contract with a sneaker company. Jim would conduct youth clinics and Edna would explore the local surroundings, some of which were an art historian’s dream. Her life was good, if not entirely fulfilled.
Edna liked to celebrate her birthday by going out for dinner and then taking in a movie. After raising a glass to her thirty-fourth on a cold November night, she said, “Jim, let’s skip the movie and have some dessert and coffee. I need to speak with you. This birthday has got me thinking.”
“Fine,” said Jim. “You instead of a movie is an easy choice. So what’s on that beautiful mind of yours?”
Edna smiled, but her voice was firm. “Children,” she said. “I met with Dr. Lahey the other day. He said there’s nothing medically left to do beyond all the testing we’ve already done. So I think we should adopt.”
The word “consider” had set the tone of their previous talks about adopting. Now she was resolved. Jim was surprised with this new direction but open to moving forward.
“It’s quite a process and I’d like to be involved. The season will be over in four months. Can we begin the paperwork in March?”
“Yes,” Edna beamed. “I love you, Jim Keating.”
Three months later, Jim’s secretary interrupted a coach’s meeting. “Edna’s on the phone, Coach.”
“Could you tell her I’ll call her right back?”
“I told her you were in a meeting. She said she just needs a minute.”
Jim picked up the phone. “Hi, love. What’s up?”
“Jim,” said Edna, “you’re not going to believe this. Dr. Lahey just called. I’m pregnant. I’m pregnant!”
Jim’s throat constricted and his eyes filled up. He swiveled his chair around, and with his back to the assistant coaches, he whispered, “This is so great, Edna. We’re going to make it. This time we’re going to make it.”
Sarah Jane Keating was born nine months later. The next seven years were the happiest of their lives. They had a daughter straight from heaven, and Jim’s St. Thomas teams made seven straight post-season appearances. But then, in 1969, Jim made his ill-fated decision to accept the job with the Detroit Pistons. The decision forced the Keatings to move from their comfortable environs and begin a nomadic lifestyle that robbed Sarah of some of her childhood stability and Edna of her happy life in Philadelphia.
Though Sarah adjusted well to Detroit, Edna never quite settled into the community as she had in Philadelphia. Jim was on the road much more often and was working hard adapting to a radically different routine, including the much longer NBA season. But when he took the job with the Memphis Tams, and despite some early misgivings, Edna quickly grew fond of Memphis, with its pleasant climate and friendly neighbors. The southern city also provided Sarah with an abundant source of good friends and some semblance of roots. Both mother and daughter were happy in their new home.
Then in the summer of ‘76 the Tams, along with the fledgling ABA, went under. Jim had not yet heard from the pro team in Spain when he was offered a well-paying sales job with a Memphis liquor distributorship. He knew that the right thing to do would be to accept the job, get off the merry-go-round, and nourish his daughter’s roots. But he was a coach, not a salesman, and he was driven to recapture that early and increasingly elusive success, which had rocketed from his grip. He thought as all coaches thought after a termination: The job in Spain could help get me back to where I once was.
For the first time in their marriage, Edna dug in and commandeered a course that seemed to her the best of several uninviting options.
“We both know Sarah shouldn’t move again—she likes it here, she has some great teachers, and she’s made good friends. And yes, Jim, I also know you’re a coach, not a beer salesman.”
Jim simply nodded.
“So let’s enroll Sarah at St. Anne’s Academy. It’s both a day and a boarding school. I’ll stay here at the house in Memphis, and for most of the year Sarah will be a day student. I’ll visit you two or three times in Spain. When necessary, the nuns will let her board during those periods. Then, in March or April, whenever your season is over, you come home and be with us.”
Despite the conviction with which Edna spoke, her voice faltered at the thought of such family disruption.
Feeling both relief and guilt, Jim hugged her and said, “We’ll make it work, Edna.”
Coach Jim Keating signed a four-year contract at $45,000 a year with Barcelona in the Spanish Division I League. He insisted on four years because Barcelona had not made the play-offs for the last three and he wanted ample time to build his team.
Edna went with Jim to Spain for two weeks to help him get settled. She needed to assure herself that her husband would be treated in a way that would begin to compensate for their disconnected lives.
Jim and Edna Keating found a robust and regal welcome awaiting them in Barcelona. At the time, American coaches were in great demand in Europe, and Jim was the first former NBA or ABA head coach to join the Spanish ranks.
Barcelona was fascinating—a beautiful, vibrant city with more museums than Worcester had bars. Edna was treated to a quick tour of two, but hadn’t managed to get to the Picasso Museum in the heart of the old city because Catalan hospitality, overwhelming and exhausting, did not allow enough time.
“The Museu Picasso is a delicacy that deserves a full day. Save this special un placer for your next visit,” was the advice of Andrea Lopéz, wife of the wealthiest of the three team owners. Andrea was an aficionada and rumor had it that the family owned a small collection of art treasures.
As Edna prepared to return to Memphis, the couple felt satisfied with the position. But as Jim escorted his wife to the airport, the sober reality of their first prolonged separation struck a forceful blow.
At the terminal, Jim squeezed Edna tightly. “I chose this life,” he said from the pit of his stomach. “There’s so much to say, but . . . I can’t be looking back.”
Yet as Edna’s plane taxied across the runway, Father Cohane’s wise warning reverberated in his mind.
My fear is that you’re going to get on the coaching merry-go-round, bouncing around from one place to another. This is no good for your family.
7
(1977-1982)
Barcelona improved its record in each of the first two years of Jim Keating’s leadership. Then, in years three and four, the team made the league play-offs. Jim successfully locked into place proven US tactics, such as his long reliance on switching defenses—including the match-up—as well as the fast break and a passing game offense with innumerable options, strategies not previously encountered by rival Spanish coaches. “American Coach Employs Winning Maneuvers” applauded El Mundo Deportivo, the major daily sports newspaper. And although his team was eliminated by Real Madrid in the semi-final round in both his third and fourth seasons, “Barca” ownership recognized Jim’s tactical expertise. There was a feeling of optimism about the club’s direction; its future had begun to take shape. Jim was rewarded with a four-year extension and a raise.
As planned, Edna made three visits each year: two over long weekends and an extended visit with Sarah during the February vacation. These would turn out to be some of the most joyous times of their lives. Edna had a facility with languages and gained a fluency that impressed friends and shopkeepers alike. Sarah lacked Edna’s command of Spanish, especially her mastery of the Catalan accent, but she, too, delighted everyone with her willingness to try rather than depend on Edna. Sarah shared her mother’s intense interest in Spanish culture and kept pace with her parents through all the museums and tourist attractions. On one trip, they spent Edna’s long-awaited full day at the Museu Picasso, where the family enjoyed contemplating paintings from Picasso’s blue period. Yet another afternoon was spent at Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia. Edna was pleased with her husband’s developing int
erest in art.
Of course, there was a flip side. When the trips ended, the separation saddened all three.
Although he fought off waves of loneliness during the long periods away from home, Jim came to enjoy the comfortable Catalonian climate, and he embraced the slower pace of having only two games per week. On his off-days, he directed a good deal of his energies toward invigorating the club’s feeder system, which had been badly neglected prior to his arrival. He was also invited to join the steering committee that would explore the feasibility of Barcelona someday hosting the Summer Olympics. Jim’s assignment was simple: Spread the word that Barcelona would be an ideal Olympic host among his friends in the international basketball community. Let people know that the country is basketball mad!
In his various meetings with the team directors, Jim emphasized a crucial difference between the American and Spanish league systems.
“In the States, college basketball acts like a farm league for the pros—it’s ready-made. But here you’ve got no college competition. So, if you want to be competitive over the long haul, we must pay attention to our junior program. We’ve got to find good players around Spain, sign ‘em, move ‘em to Barcelona, and run ‘em through the junior program. No different from what the great European soccer clubs do, Real Madrid and Manchester United as cases in point. I’ve also learned that the Real Madrid basketball club will soon be following the lead of its soccer club. If we’re going to catch up to them in basketball, we need to be doing the same thing.”
As he worked to build the foundation for a prosperous future for his club, Jim also followed Edna’s advice and used some of his free time to learn more about Barcelona, to explore other regions of Spain, and to study the country’s remarkable history. Jim’s interest in history began with the books passed out to soldiers in the Pacific and continued with Dr. George Fetter, who made the subject come alive for him at St. Thomas. Jim was a physical education major, but ended up with more credits in history than in phys ed. Within a month of his arrival in Spain, he discovered the Universitat de Barcelona Library stocked with Spanish history books translated into English. Jim found that his Irish roots piqued an interest in the Spanish Armada, particularly stories of Spanish crew members being driven ashore in Ireland and their ensuing slaughter by the English. He also found himself enjoying Spanish novels, especially Cervantes’s Don Quixote.
Along with his reading and research, in a comfortable Spanish-built Chrysler 180 provided by the team Jim made trips to places such as the Mezquita in Cordobà, a cathedral built in the eighth century with nearly a thousand columns extending farther than his sturdy eyes could see. Jim traveled alone. He’d made some friends, but no one he wanted to share his thoughts with on this type of trip.
Early one morning, he embarked on a long journey to the Costa da Morte, the coast of death, located at the northwest tip of Spain. After a comfortable stopover in Haro, where he had a nice luncheon and a glass of Tempranillo, he reached his destination in early evening, just in time to see the sun set over the Atlantic Ocean, the same sun that sky watchers before Columbus thought was setting at the end of the world.
Up to this point in his life, Jim had devoted himself to the pursuit of athletic excellence; he had only engaged in cultural activities at Edna’s insistence. But to his surprise, he found himself absorbed in an avocation that was purely cerebral with no physical ties. My intellectual light has finally been turned on, he thought. His level of interest in Spanish history and culture—and the rate at which he found himself learning it—caused him to ponder how his life might have changed had he, as a student, found academic discovery to be as irresistible as his passion for basketball. Now motivated to sharpen his mind in whatever way possible, he took Edna’s advice and set a goal of becoming proficient in Italian.
“It would be a nice complement to your Spanish, which is already very good,” she had said.
Jim would achieve the goal in less than a year.
Jim also enjoyed the long spring and summer vacations, free from recruiting responsibilities and full of opportunities to broaden his relationship with his daughter. He wanted— and needed—to take advantage of these opportunities, and he took Sarah to any event in Memphis she was able to attend with him. Sarah enjoyed her dad’s company and tried to accommodate his new demands on her time. But as both knew well, teenage girls (especially those as bright and beautiful as Jim Keating’s daughter was turning out to be) had other priorities.
Sarah was popular with a wide circle of friends, but not part of any clique. Like Jim, she was tall, nearly six feet, and fit due to a daily regimen that alternated between swimming and weight training. She had also inherited her dad’s blonde hair, which she wore long, halfway down her back. Her sea blue eyes set off small, delicate facial features reminiscent of Edna’s. And even though her friends—both male and female—desired her company, she enjoyed being with her dad and always looked forward to their weekly father-daughter night out.
But while their outings brought them closer, they did not, in Jim’s mind, make up for a career on the bench that had relegated him to a substitute’s role in Sarah’s upbringing.
In his fifth season in Spain, he found out, as he had in his Detroit hitch, that success in the form of making the play-offs brought higher expectations. Jim’s Spanish players, reliable in the first four years, drifted to the slower side of their careers. Both a point guard and a small forward, each of whom relied on quickness, lost a half-step to age. A similar fade in skills took hold of one of the two Americans that the league allowed each team to employ.
Barcelona failed to make the play-offs and the owners, supportive of Jim but, in the end, Machiavellian men of commerce, could see that the feeder system he was crafting was still several years away from any yield. They decided to sell the team to a wealthy Spanish family with a coddled twenty-seven-year-old son in need of a new pastime.
The heir was handed the task of running the team just after he had finished driving one of the family businesses into the Mediterranean. Jim immediately pegged him as a pampered dilettante. Always known as a coach who could get along with management, he was presented with a situation to challenge that record.
Their first confrontation was over a thirty-four-year-old American player who had faltered badly in the recently concluded season.
“We need to bring in a new player. I know the guy has a year left on his contract, but we’re going to have to eat it,” Jim stated without equivocation.
“He’s been with this team for seven years and is a favorite of the fans. Furthermore, my family will not throw $150,000 out a porthole merely on a coach’s say-so,” countered the new boss, Alberto Blanco.
Jim seethed, not so much about Blanco’s disrespect, but about his reckless lack of reasoning.
“We make the play-offs and it’s a guarantee of $500,000, plus more if we advance. We need a top-flight American to do that,” Jim dissented. But Blanco wasn’t listening.
All the calamities that Jim Keating came to dread soon arrived with blunt force. The American Keating wanted to release was indeed ineffective—more so than even the coach had guessed—and the team plunged to below .500.
“American Coach Fired by Blanco” roared the headline in the Barcelona Times with six games to go in Jim Keating’s sixth season.
The Spanish media zealously sided with the coach, pointing to his excellent work when good players were available. They defended his innovative overhauling of the junior program and criticized his exclusion by the greenhorn general manager in the decision-making process. The media also pointed to Jim’s community involvement, including his respected contribution to the Barcelona Summer Olympics Steering Committee. But as Jim knew so well, a coach’s success at the professional level is bound like an umbilical cord to the competence of management.
From player injuries to administrative meddling, the season was the most difficult of Jim’s career, and the jaw-breaking firing shattered his confidence. Soon after his
dismissal, he free-fell into a dark thicket of despair.
Edna greeted her mauled matador at the Memphis airport and tenderly nursed him through his period of lost will. But then, only three months after his return, she discovered the lump in her breast. A hurried mammogram revealed the bad news: It was malignant. So Jim Keating tried to put his own anguish on hold to pinch-hit for his partner. There were days when he wondered if he would ever again see a shaft of life’s light.
Thirty months later—an excruciating vigil for both of them—Edna’s condition had deteriorated badly. Jim was still without a job and tunneling deep into whatever modest savings he had left when word came that New Jersey State, located just twenty miles from Philadelphia and the battleground of Jim’s early era of prosperity, was preparing to jump from Division II to Division I. Old friend Father Cohane lobbied with his presidential counterpart at New Jersey State, and several weeks after State’s arching shot at big-time bas-ketball was made public, travel-weary Jim Keating was given a three-year contract to lead this “enterprise.”
At the press conference called to announce Jim’s appointment, New Jersey State President Vincent Mahon exulted: “We’ve hired Jim with the expectation that he’ll perform the same miracles that he did at St. Thomas. We’re very pleased that he has returned to his own backyard, where so many potential recruits grew up hearing about the Jim Keating legend. We fully expect to be a national contender in three or four years.”
But on January 14, 1987, less than two years after that imprudent proclamation, the school issued a terse press release announcing that Jim Keating had been fired. What the press release did not report, the media did.
In a copyrighted story in the Philadelphia Enquirer that quickly made its way over the wires and onto national television and talk radio, three players stated that Jim Keating was racially insensitive.