Anyone reading this who's familiar with my work in the Bay Area sports media might be wondering what on earth I'm doing writing about USF basketball.
I am, after all, primarily known as a "baseball guy," having over the past decade been, at various times, the MLB Insider for Comcast SportsNet Bay Area, an A's beat writer for MLB.com, host of Giants weekend pre- and postgame shows for KNBR, and now as a co-host and Giants Insider for 95.7 FM "The Game."
So a bit of a history lesson is in order to explain my connection to -- and passion for -- USF basketball.
In short, I was raised on it. Among my earliest and most vivid childhood memories are of racing my two older brothers from the family car to the front steps of Memorial Gymnasium. Those were my "Rocky" steps as a kid, my path to glory, and inside that building was a magical world with which I was awestruck.
My father played basketball at USF (with former Dons coach and current analyst Jim Brovelli), and he was a night-school teacher there while I was growing up, so we spent a lot of time with my late grandmother -- "Grama" to everyone who knew her -- in her apartment just a few blocks from campus. She, too, had an unbreakable bond with the Dons, and Game Night was an event for all of us.
The names come flooding back. Bill Cartwright and Winford Boynes, two of the stars that bridged the gap from the Bill Russell/K.C. Jones glory days to the heydays of the late 1970s. The power-forward fountain that produced, in succession, high flyers from James Hardy to Doug Jemison to John Hegwood. Quintin Dailey, perhaps the most electrifying -- and polarizing, for obvious reasons -- talent of all.
I didn't just get to watch them, though that was thrilling enough for a young baller-in-training, decked out in whatever green-and-gold gear I could find that approximated their look. I got to know them.
My father taught many of those players, brought them to our house in Redwood City for dinner on occasion, and don't think I wasn't the cock of the walk in grade school as I regaled my classmates with tales of playing Nerf basketball in my bedroom with the likes of Cartwright, who as recently as 2000 still remembered my middle name and greeted me as "little Mikey Gordon" when we crossed paths before an NBA game in Utah while he was coaching for the Chicago Bulls.
So suffice to say that when USF self-imposed the so-called "death penalty" on the program in the wake of the Dailey controversy, it was a dark day for the Urbans. Life without Dons basketball, without standing under the rim during warmups as an unofficial ballboy, without the adolescent joy that came with sprinting back toward the family car after the game and hiding in the bushes outside the library before scaring the hell out of passers-by, just wasn't the same.
Nor was it the same when the program was brought back. By then I was a USF student myself, a freshman on the baseball team, living on the same floor in the dorms -- Gillson Hall, to be precise -- as the first great player of the restoration, Mark McCathrion. Ridiculously gifted, versatile, funny and personable, "Big Mac" was larger than life in many respects, but he and Pat Clardy and Anthony Mann and the other stars of those Version II teams were now my peers.
I played with and against them while playing hooky from baseball practice, and those informal games -- not to mention my inability to handle living on my own for the first time -- inspired me to leave USF and play basketball at a junior college in my hometown. By the time I'd returned to finish my degree (and spectacularly average baseball career), the Dons featured Scott MacDonald and Scott ????, two guys I'd recently battled in juco ball.
My only links to the Dons of my youth were longtime equipment manager Bobby Giron, who was fond of reminding me that he'd been my "baby-sitter" back in the day, and longtime trainer Wally Hayes, whose omnipresent wrestling magazines helped me while away the hours I spent on the exercise bike during my myriad rehab stints in his constantly cramped room.
(Three years after I graduated, while playing against my beloved Dons at Memorial as a member of a rag-tag exhibition team called Race Express, I suffered a concussion during an on-court collision. The first thing I saw upon regaining consciousness was Wally hovering over me. "I knew you'd end up getting hurt again," he said with a wry smile.)
Sadly, Giron and Wally no longer are with us, and while I tried to stay current with the Dons -- one particularly memorable moment came when Grama, after watching Gerald "Sky" Walker throw down a vicious dunk reminiscent of Hardy at his most savage, exclaimed, "He's gonna BREAK something!!" -- I slowly lost touch with the program, the way so many of us lose touch with old friends as we grow older.
Dons basketball is an old friend of mine, and now, thanks in large part to Rex Walters, I'm getting around to getting back in touch.
Take nothing away from Brovelli or the head coaches who followed him prior to Walters' arrival on the Hilltop. They each faced significant obstacles and each, in his own way, aided Walters' efforts at restoring Dons basketball to its former place of national prominence. And there remains plenty of work to do.
But in Walters I see and feel something I haven't felt in years. It's genuine, justified excitement -- among the student body, the alumni and the casual Bay Area basketball fan that once upon a time made regular trips up those Memorial steps and into the wonderful world of Dons hoops.
Game Night is starting to feel like an event again, and to be even a small part of it going forward will surely bring those great memories back to life. Better still, new memories will be created for a new generation of young ballers-in-training.
Just stay out of those bushes in front of the library, boys and girls. The real excitement is inside.
