WHEN the buzzer finally groaned, the players gathered at midcourt for a giddy group hug, bouncing up and down, unable to contain themselves. Soon they were joined by segments of the student section, as a sweet old chant began to bounce off the walls of Madison Square Garden.
“We are … ST. JOHN’S!”
The official turnstile count would insist there were only 5,084 people sprinkled throughout the Garden, but at that moment you would have sworn they were crammed into the upper deck like sardines. You would have sworn it was a full Garden that saw St. John’s knock off the 18th-ranked Pittsburgh Panthers.
“We own the Garden,” a smiling St. John’s center named Lamont Hamilton would say later. “It’s our house.”
Apart from the mad mosh pit gathering in the middle of the gym, a 39-year-old man carefully straightened his suit jacket, stole one final glimpse at the scoreboard, walked slowly and straight-faced toward the other bench. Norm Roberts decided to greet his first Big East victory as a grown-up should, as a professional should. No dances. No jitterbugs. No outlandish displays.
“Nice game, Coach,” he said to Jamie Dixon, the Pitt coach.
“Congratulations, Coach,” Dixon said.
This is what Norm Roberts has brought to St. John’s in the first 14 games of his career. He brings decorum. He brings dignity. He brings to Utopia Parkway a utopian sense of team before self, of player before coach. It is a welcome change of pace from what went on here before, what would have been even if the Red Storm hadn’t won a single game.
Only, a funny thing has happened. The Red Storm are 7-7 after last night’s splendid 65-62 victory, one more win than they collected all of last year. They’ve beaten a couple of ACC teams, and were competitive in their first three Big East games. Roberts said he was happy with his team’s resolve, unhappy with its inability to steal these winnable games.
Last night, it finally did. The Red Storm got a terrific game from Showtime Hill, 26 points worth of guts against Pitt’s Carl Krauser, including the three free throws that won the game. They got 18 points of grit out of Hamilton. And they got the big play they craved out of Dexter Gray, who’d missed a huge free throw at Notre Dame last weekend, who this time converted the old-fashioned three-point play that tied the game late.
The players earned that midcourt celebration.
So did the coach. He just chose to act the way Jim Brown always said you should act if you score a touchdown: like he’d been there before. Roberts has the audacity to believe his team shouldn’t be measured against the pitiably low bar set by Mike Jarvis and Alex Evans, by the Delta House attitude that permeated last year’s study in basketball disgust.
He demands that of his players, and of himself. It was their victory, their time to celebrate. It was his time to disappear.
“I want our guys to understand what they’re capable of achieving here with this team,” Roberts said. “I want them to play well and act accordingly. They’ve made me proud every day to be their coach. Not just tonight.”
He has made himself plenty proud, too. It was appropriate that Pitt should be the opponent this night, since it was a blowout loss to the Panthers 11 months ago that preceded that fateful trip to a strip club. From that corridor of darkness, Roberts has cajoled an undermanned team back to respectability. The Red Storm have no postseason hopes, courtesy of the Jarvis Administration’s mangling of basic NCAA ethics. No matter. They play hard anyway.
They play hard for this coach, the perfect coach at the perfect time for St. John’s. While former fair-haired boy John Calipari keeps losing players to bad books and bad behavior, the man St. John’s hired instead keeps winning advocates. Last night, they made 5,000 of those believers sound like 20,000. Soon enough, those seats will be filled.
Soon enough, the players will be able to act the way their coach did last night. Like they’ve been here before.