Ten years ago, coach Phil Martelli and his Saint Joseph’s Hawks were the hottest story in college basketball. Led by the dynamic guard tandem of Jameer Nelson and Delonte West, the Hawks won their first 27 games before losing to Xavier in the Atlantic 10 tournament.
An entourage of reporters, from the Northeast and nationally, tracked every move by that team from the tiny Jesuit college from Philadelphia. From Boston to Amherst, through the Big Five games of Phildelphia, all the way to the final regular season road game in Kingston, R.I., the pressure kept building as observers wondered when the first loss would come.
If the job as host of The Tonight Show had come open that year, Martelli might have been a candidate. To college basketball scribes, he was their Jimmy Fallon.
Despite that early exit from the conference tournament, the Hawks earned a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament and marched to the East Regional final before a heartbreaking, season ending 64-62 loss to Oklahoma State. An epic journey by an unforgettable team ended when Nelson, the national player of the year with the giant “All Eyes on Me” tattoo, missed a shot at the buzzer.
“They will remember this team at Saint Joe’s for a long time,” CBS analyst Billy Packer said after the game.
This past Sunday, as Martelli boarded a bus in Brooklyn, fresh off winning the 2014 Atlantic 10 tournament and earning an automatic bid to another NCAA, those 10-year-old memories warmed his basketball soul once again.
“Seven of the 12 guys from the ’03-’04 team sent me a text: ‘Please congratulate the A-10 champs. They accomplished something that we didn’t,’ ” Martelli told reporters during a conference call Monday. “I wanted our players to understand how humble you must be to accept that type of congratulations.”
As the buzzer sounded to put the final stamp on a 65-61 victory over Virginia Commonwealth Sunday and send the Hawks back to the NCAA tournament, Martelli could not contain his emotions. He wiped away tears as he hugged his players, his assistant coaches and his family members.
The team that faces No. 7 seed Connecticut Thursday night in Buffalo has carved out another special spot in Martelli’s heart. The Hawks opened the season with victories over Vermont and Marist, then lost to Creighton 83-79 and LSU 82-65. In December. consecutive Big Five losses to Temple and Villanova (98-68) dropped Saint Joseph’s to 4-4. And after an 11-3 start in the Atlantic 10 regular season, Saint Joseph’s entered its conference tournament on a two-game losing streak.
“Luck played a role,” Martelli said of chain of events that led to the tournament championship. “And I think the other thing is my oldest guys have been driven since last April or May to leave a mark. And the qualifying mark to leave was the NCAA tournament.”
Martelli and his Hawks have been through a lot the past 12 months. They entered 2012-13 as the preseason favorite to win the Atlantic 10. They were crushed in the non-conference season by Doug McDermott and Creighton. They blew a late lead against Villanova and lost a game where most of the spotlight fell on forward Halil Kanacevic for flipping his middle finger at the Villanova home crowd. Martelli said his team never recovered from that. The Hawks finished 18-14, tied for eighth in the conference at 8-8 and then lost in the first round of the NIT to St. John’s.
And then, in the span of just a few weeks after that game, Martelli’s sister and sister-in-law both died. His sister’s heart simply stopped beating. She was 53. His sister-in-law had pancreatic cancer, entered a hospice and died at 52. His mother fell and broke her hip. And his son, caught as part of the Mike Rice scandal, resigned as an assistant coach at Rutgers after a practice tape reportedly showed Jimmy Martelli shoving a player.
“The breath’s taken out of you – bang, bang, bang, bang,” Martelli told writer Mike Jensen in a May 2013 story that appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer. “I feel like I’ve been invited by God to play cards, but he’s only given me three cards.”
Martelli said the character of the players on this team helped him get through it all. There was a movement among alumni and boosters to remove Martelli as coach. But the players, who had their equilibrium rocked to the core, stood by him.
“They allowed me to rally,” Martelli said. “We were down and out with two deaths and the situation with my son at Rutgers. These players just kept answering the bell last April and May and June.”
The other half of his survival equation, Martelli said, has been his grandchildren. The two young children of Phil Jr. and Meghan have been living in his house. Phil Jr. is an assistant coach at Delaware (the Colonial champs who are also in the NCAA tournament). The former Meghan Phelps is from Bristol and played on the Eastern Connecticut team that reached the Division III national championship game in 2003.
“Those two little kids, without knowing what they were doing, just their enjoyment of life, helped my wife and I get to the other side, so to speak,” Martelli said. “I don’t want to be too dramatic, but we got to the other side of a rocky trail.”
The oldest of the two grandchildren, also named Philip, is four years old. He has become a regular at press conferences with Grandpa this season. Sunday, during the VCU game, he became a rock star, got maximum exposure during the telecast of the game, went viral on YouTube and has become the unofficial mascot of the Big Dance before it even starts.
Standing just a couple of rows behind his grandfather during the game, it became obvious he has some of the same personality traits. He does a classic impersonation of Coach Martelli, complete with jacket and tie, pocket square, folded arms, pacing, hands on chin, a grease board for drawing up plays and all the other antics.
“I didn’t really know about it [during the season],” Martelli said. “This weekend was the first time I saw the whole routine.”
Martelli follows his own set of rituals before a game, from the way he gets dressed, to keeping prayers in certain pockets, to not carrying cash around on game days.
“I sound like Rain Man,” Martelli said.
“He does the same exact thing. Last week he was laying out his clothes to go to Brooklyn. He had a shirt and tie. He calls me Tug. He says, Tug, do you think that this is an appropriate tie? Who, at 4 years old, uses the word appropriate?”
Well, the grandson of Phil Martelli does. We know that now. And we can see how much the 4-year-old has helped Grandpa in such a difficult time. That, along with assistant coaches who examined every detail of the program after last season to turn things around, and players who had their coach’s back, have gotten the 59-year-old coach through this year when God dealt him a short hand.
Now, it’s back to the national stage as the No. 10 seed in the East. If the Hawks can get past UConn Thursday, it might set up a Philly rematch with Villanova – in Buffalo. If the Hawks lose, they go home feeling a lot better than they did last year at this time.
The pressure isn’t quite the same as 2004. But Martelli knows 10 years from now, he will still have strong feelings for his 2014 team. And if he could offer one piece of advice to Wichita State, the No. 1 seed in the Midwest with the 34-0 record, it would be to relish those feelings that only a team can understand.
“To me it’s about managing,” Martelli said. “It has little to do with coaching. And they went through the frenzy last year of making the Final Four. But to me, it’s about managing the players’ time. They have a responsibility, or an opportunity, to be sons, to be boyfriends, to be buddies with people on campus. And in order for them to do that, you’ve got to manage what you say yes to and what you don’t. And to remember at the end of the day, it’s about basketball. You and I both know, lose a game and 18 hours later [the fans] won’t even remember Wichita State.”
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