Talking Carril

The news of the passing of former Tiger men's basketball coach Pete Carril Monday morning predictably spread quickly throughout the Princeton community and the basketball world in general.

Shortly after the news broke, there was tribute after tribute on Twitter. 

It was a Who's Who really. Jay Wright. Dick Vitale. Fran Fraschilla. John Calipari. Phil Martelli. Even New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy.

Even Carril's biggest rival, Penn, felt the sting of his death. The Quakers' men's basketball account tweeted out tributes from current head coach Steve Donahue and former head coach Bob Weinhauer. 

It was Weinhauer who coached Penn to the 1979 Final Four. In that season, Penn beat Princeton in both meetings – both time by one point. 

There was also a tweet from Bruce Lefkowitz, a 1987 Penn grad and first-team All-Ivy League center. 

It was an honor to compete against Coach Carril. He was a true legend of the game. Nothing was more grueling than “Princeton Week” when had to defend the Princeton offense for the whole practice. Much respect may his memory be a blessing . @IvyHoopsOnline https://t.co/nSmXnASNsb

— BRUCE LEFKOWITZ (@bruce_lefkowitz) August 15, 2022

That's a wonderful thing to say about your biggest rival. TB would guess that Lefkowitz speaks for pretty much all of the players who had to go against Carril's teams. 

By the middle of the day yesterday, TigerBlog had heard from a ton of people who wanted to talk about Coach. They all expressed their sadness at his loss, and they all wanted to share their own experiences with him. Most of those stories were funny ones, but they all had poignant undertones.

And they pretty much across the board ended the same way: It's hard to believe he's gone. 

If you read TB's piece yesterday and reached out, he appreciates it greatly. If you haven't read it, it is HERE.

There was a lot to read about Coach Carril yesterday. If you click HERE, you can find links to a few of those stories on the bottom. 

Not shockingly, Alexander Wolff, the longtime Sports Illustrated writer and Princeton alum, wrote a great story that centered around Princeton's 1975 win at Virginia, the one that helped propel the team into the NIT, which the Tigers would win. 

That was the game where Carril was the only coach on the trip, and he ended up getting ejected. TB wrote about that game last month.

Wolff's story dives to a much greater depth that TB's entry did. You can read it HERE.

This is a great part of that story:

What Carril ceaselessly urged his players to do was play smart. “That game was the most beautiful display of knowledge I’ve ever seen,” Carril would later say of that February night, delivering himself of that rarest of things, a compliment. “The fellas played so smart, it was unreal.”

The best story that TB read, though, was the one by Sean Gregory, a former player of Carril's who graduated in 1998 along with current head coach Mitch Henderson and who now writes for Time Magazine. Gregory — "Bones," Carril called him because he was, as the coach said, "skin and bones" — was able to do something that nobody else was, and that was to weave his own experiences of playing for Carril into what he wrote. Plus, he's also a great writer.

You can read his story HERE.

This is something that Gregory said about his coach's advice before he arrived on campus to try to gain weight:

“Yo, Sean, here’s what you need to do to get bigger: drink a six-pack of beer and eat a ham sandwich, before bed, every night. Got that kid?”

You definitely want to read the whole story. In fact, you want to read them all.

Each time TB read another one and read the quotes from Carril, he could hear his voice in his head. Carril had a unique voice, one that the great sportswriter from the Philadelphia Daily News, Stan Hochman, once described as "the gravelly voice of a thousand cigars."

TB isn't the only one to still hear his voice. He talked to a few people yesterday who mentioned the same thing.

In addition to reading the pieces that were written yesterday, TB also went back to his own 2007 feature that he wrote on Carril, after his 10 years with the Kings. That story is HERE.

TB will leave you today with how that story ended:

Ultimately, in the end, he is a very simple man, and the more the world around him grew complex, the simpler he became. Make shots. Guard your guy. Be honest with people. And above all, work hard. No shortcuts. It's the tradeoff for not having to work 40 years for Bethlehem Steel.

It's that simple.

And no where is it more obvious than when he talks about the game that has been such a huge part of his life.

“Princeton offense?” he shrugs. “Whatever that is. You can translate it in one sentence.

“What it means is sharing the ball. That's it, right?”

And with that, his 76-year-old self pushes its way out of the chair in which he has spent most of the last hour. And then he's out the door and down the hall. Again, you can hear the voice as it echoes.

It seems to linger long after he's off, much as Pete Carril himself will linger forever at Princeton University, in a way that can never be matched.