For me, those days are full of sports memories.
I grew up in Hackensack, New Jersey, a city frequently featured in popular culture. Examples include the first Superman movie (it was the target of Lex Luthor’s second missile), Billy Joel’s Movin’ Out, and Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman.
Courtesy Bergen Record
But to those of us who grew up in this suburb of New York City, only eight miles from the George Washington Bridge, it was our ethnically homogenous hometown.
For me, those days are full of sports memories. I played organized baseball in Hackensack from age seven. Basketball (the focus here) was a different story. I didn’t touch a basketball until sixth grade, nor did I play organized basketball until Hackensack Junior High, where I made the eighth-grade team.
Competing with classmates for a spot on our basketball teams was a blessing and a curse. Hackensack has a great basketball history, and our school, at that time (1968-1971 were my high school years), had a student body of about 2,200. So, there were a lot of good basketball players before and after, including many homeowners who were drafted into the NBA.
I was the starting point guard for our eighth-grade team, but as the years progressed, I never made it past junior varsity and didn’t play regularly there. I was too small (not short, but skinny) and too slow to protect the basketball well from pesky defenders, a necessity for a point guard. But I still have some good basketball memories.
Hackensack High (photo courtesy Hackensack Public Schools)
Our eighth-grade team was playing St. Mary’s, an excellent team, on our home court. The game was close throughout. In the first half’s closing seconds, I had the ball 25 feet from the basket, but nobody was open. With time about to expire, I heaved up a shot, which would have been good for three points today (there were no three-pointers back then), and swished it!
That would be important because we were down by one point in the game’s closing seconds with just a few seconds left. We were inbounding the ball under our basket. We usually ran a play where one of our players would start at the top of the key and curl to the basket to receive the inbound pass for a possible layup. But our coach realized the other team would be packing the paint, so he had Gary Myles, an outstanding athlete who would go on to star for our varsity, curl further out, about twelve feet from the basket, to the baseline. He received the inbound pass and nailed a jump shot to win the game as time expired. I then realized my basket’s importance at the end of the first half.
One thing I learned to do was shoot free throws. We always shot 25 free throws at the end of practice, and I remember once making 23. That helped me in a game against Westwood, another talented team. The game was close throughout. I scored 15 points, seven of them on the nine free throws I attempted, and we won the nail-biter 39-37. (Yes, I can still remember the score 57 years later!)
Mike Fratello in 1982 (photo courtesy of Montclair State University)
My free throws helped out the junior varsity team in another way. Mike Fratello is a Hackensack alum who helped coach our team then. You may recognize his name because Fratello went on to coach the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks, Cleveland Cavaliers, and Memphis Grizzlies. After every practice, we ran a drill known as “suicides,’ where players set up on the baseline and then sprinted to the following lines, returning to the baseline after each touch — the nearest free throw line, halfway line, furthest free throw line, opposite baseline. We ran as many suicides as the coach deemed fit.
After one practice, Coach Fratello issued a challenge. He would shoot five free throws. We needed to select a player to shoot five free throws. If that player sank more free throws than the coach, we would not have to run suicides that day. The team selected me. Coach Fratello made four out of five free throws. I sank all five. No suicides!
We had a sophomore and junior varsity team, and I was the starting point guard on the sophomore squad. One game we played was at Englewood, a predominantly black high school. Hackensack also had a large black student population. My dad attended the game, and, afterwards, he said, “Did you realize you were the only white guy on the court?” I hadn’t even noticed, which is a tribute to how my parents raised me. My mom and dad were color blind and accepting of everyone. But my dad couldn’t help but notice that day. I am glad I grew up among students of many ethnicities in Hackensack.
As I said, there were not too many happy basketball memories for me, as the competition seemed to grow bigger and faster, and I didn’t.
But I did have one more memorable basketball moment at Hackensack High. My senior year I formed an intramural team. We played at 7 AM before school started. It was a challenge to get my guys to show up that early! There were six teams in the league. The top four would make the playoffs. We lost our first two games but won the next three to qualify for the playoffs. We won our first-round game, then in the championship game faced the team that had beaten us badly during the season’s first game.
Fortunately, we had five guys show up – a junior named Lou and seniors Danny Peragine, Bob Sedlack, Isaiah Keeling, and me. We won 24-10. Danny started us off with a bomb of a jump shot. I used my basketball knowledge, drawing a charge to negate a layup and running two fast breaks where (as I had been taught), stopped at the foul line, looked for an open cutter, and, seeing none, canned both jump shots. I was especially pleased that our varsity coach, Jim Kay, was in attendance.
The next time you see Hackensack in popular culture, think of us!
