Princeton Coach Pete Carril Says His Day Is Past

As usual, he sees what others refuse to.

As usual, he refuses to deceive himself.

As usual, he is the first to speak out, bluntly, unsparingly.

"I'm always telling the kids that they have to look in the mirror," he said in that gruff, rasping voice. "Well, I should, too."

And what he saw looking back at him, he did not like.

"I'm a little too rough, a little too severe for the type of kid that comes to Princeton today," he said. "My coaching has slipped. The kids deserve better. My assistants are helping me more than they should have to. You must know when you've had your day in the sun."

He paused and drew on a long, well-chewed cigar, and then he allowed himself one tiny moment of wistfulness.

"I look at those guys, Pitino and Calapari, guys at the top of their game, I don't coach like them anymore. . . .

"But I used to once. . . ."

Mentor and educator

Even the most hardened among us had to turn discreetly away. Every eye suddenly developed a mysterious leak.

Pete Carril, a genuine legend and an authentic genius in a profession filled with counterfeits and charlatans, had chosen this moment to announce his retirement as basketball coach, after 29 years at Princeton, plus a year at Lafayette and all those seasons of high-school ball at Easton and Reading.

"Forty-three years, all together," he said. "A long freaking time . . .

Yes, and all of it, every bit of it, marked with distinction. He is what the rest of them claim to be but seldom are. He is a mentor, an educator. No kid who ever played for Pete Carril didn't learn something that would stand him in good stead all the way to the grave.

Pete Carril, the rumpled little bantam, is the best basketball coach this side of Bobby Knight. If Einstein had coached basketball, he would have looked exactly like Pete Carril, frizzled and frazzled, agonizing over the human condition but always able to see through the fog and the smoke and find the right formula, the perfect equation.

Pete Carril coaches Dinosaur Ball. Out of necessity. Princeton doesn't get many players whose game is performed above the rim. They are the earth-bound, slow of foot but quick of wit, so they learn to spread the floor and milk the clock and spurn all shots except the open three-pointer and the backdoor layup, and they play dogged defense. More than anything else, they understand the geometry of basketball; they understand that all five have to be responsible for each other.

And about every other March a Carril team winds up in the NCAA tournament and all the big boys pray very hard: Please, oh please, don't make me play "him."

John Thompson of Georgetown: "I've seen enough of Princeton to last me three lifetimes."

Jim Boeheim of Syracuse: "You never want to play Princeton. "Ever!"

John Chaney of Temple: "I'll play anyone, any place, any time. Well, except Princeton, of course. I may be crazy but I'm not stupid."

It's because Carril and his Dinosaur Ball confuse them and baffle them and frustrate them. Princeton won't let you run, won't let you turn loose your superior firepower. Oh, the big boys almost always end up winning, but usually by a panting, desperate point, and only after they have had the liver scared out of them.

Pete Carril's special genius was in finding the best in someone but allowing them to discover it for themselves. Invariably he would give you that absent-minded professor act, crafting a long, meandering dialogue filled with digressions, and then suddenly he would look up and ask for help in getting out of this morass he has created for himself: "What is the point I'm getting at here?"

And you will pipe up with the answer, eagerly, and you will be so proud at your discovery that you will not notice this gruff, rumpled runt, this Obi-Wan Kenobi of Old Nassau, smiling to himself, pleased. The difference between him and the pretenders is, his pleasure is not for himself but for you. And isn't that the very essence of education?

One of the most relevant things I ever heard uttered by a coach came out of Pete Carril's mouth six Februarys ago. He said: "This is a tough school. Kids ask me how they can compete with the quality of student here. I tell them, don't. You compete with yourself. It's what you do versus what you could do that counts. Life or basketball, it's all the same."

Well, he is 65 now and he said he has noticed the little things that are beyond his control, the little things that never used to bother him - the capriciousness of a ball spinning tantalizingly out of the basket - they infuriate him now.

He said he is short on patience and he said he is embarrassed when he blows his stack at a player.

"They need somebody to boost them," he said. "They need support."

And he looked at his precious cigar, the kind his doctors have nagged at him to quit, and he added:

"They don't need somebody like me."

It was the first time he's been wrong in a long, long time.