PirateCrew: Seton Hall Pirates Football & Basketball Recruiting
The definitive source for all PirateCrew news.
By JP Pelzman
John Paquette, then the Seton Hall sports information director, was getting ready to check out of the team’s hotel in Santa Monica, Calif. in March 1989 to head to the Final Four along with the team, when he received a call from the switchboard operator.
“He said, ‘I hear you guys are checking out,’” Paquette recalled in an interview with PirateCrew.com. “Yeah, we are. And he says, ‘good, because I'm tired of ringing your room.’”
Fast forward 31 years later and Paquette still handles plenty of requests effortlessly in his longtime job as associate commissioner for sports media relations for the Big East Conference. But he’ll never forget how fast and furious the attention came for those three weeks in 1989 when a private Catholic school from New Jersey put itself on the college basketball map.
Going back to that story, and to its backstory, Paquette noted that the operator “said it good-naturedly, but that shows you the volume of the attention we were getting. And we were getting a lot of attention because we were new. We hadn’t been to the Final Four before.”
Then coach P.J. Carlesimo, for whom Paquette already had worked under as sports information at Wagner before stints in between at Saint Peter’s and the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference before becoming the Seton Hall SID from 1986-90, had decided to sequester the Pirates in Santa Monica for a few days in between winning the West Regional in Denver on Saturday, March 25 and moving on to Seattle for that fateful Final Four.
“We had to be in Seattle by Wednesday,” Paquette said, “and we decided not to go home. It didn’t make sense to everybody. So, we had to find a place to go for a couple of days.”
Paquette informed the beat writers traveling with the team where they were going, but didn’t reveal it to the general public.
But even before the days of social media and the internet, people found out anyway.
“And this is 1989,” Paquette says, “when there are hardly any cellphones. I'm the sports information director, and I don’t have a cellphone. So people start finding us and all I do is stay in my room for three days because the phone won’t stop ringing and I'm getting calls from media from all over the place, including Al McGuire, who was doing an NBC Final Four show. For me personally, that was kind of cool.”
That’s because Paquette got his bachelor’s degree at Marquette, where he graduated in 1978 and thus covered the legendary McGuire, as a member of the campus radio station, when McGuire won his only NCAA title in 1978.
He was about to come close to witnessing another title, but more on that later. The run to Seattle was the culmination of a torturous climb that might never have happened in today’s win-now world of 24/7 social media in which instant results often are demanded of coaches.
Carlesimo, who took over the Pirates for the 1982-83 season, didn’t post a winning record until his fifth season in South Orange and didn’t guide the Pirates to the NCAA tournament until 1988, when Seton Hall made its first-ever appearance. Led by senior star Mark Bryant, the Pirates beat UTEP before losing to Arizona at legendary Pauley Pavilion on the UCLA campus.
“You'd have to wonder that,” Paquette said when asked if Carlesimo could have been fired before then if he were coaching now.
However, he is quick to point out that then-athletic director Larry Keating always was in Carlesimo’s corner.
Still, Paquette said, “That's certainly a fair question in today’s world. It was a struggle the first few years. The other Big East teams were way ahead of Seton Hall for the most part. You see it all over in today’s world where coaches are around for a couple of years and if you don’t look really good at the end of a couple of years, you’re gone.”
In terms of working with Carlesimo at Seton Hall, Paquette said, “He was great. He was always certainly cordial with the media and willing to do interviews. He understood where Seton Hall was at the time and that we needed to promote ourselves.
“He always had classy things to say. Yes, we got to the Final Four in ’89, but leading up to that, it was tough. P.J. was supposedly under fire, but it was always grace under pressure. He always took the heat, never blamed players for anything, was willing to bring all the criticism onto himself. He was great. You never had to worry about him when he was doing interviews.
As for 1989, “we were good,” Paquette says, “we were a 3 seed. A lot of people called us a Cinderella, which bothered the players. The players didn’t like being called a Cinderella team because we went into the tournament ranked 11th in the country. We were legitimately good.”
True. The Pirates came to Seattle 30-6 and, during the regular season, won both the Great Alaska Shootout and the Sugar Bowl tournament, in which they beat Virginia, which lost the Southeast Regional final to eventual national titlist Michigan.
The Pirates kept the momentum going by rallying from an 18-point deficit to beat Duke in the national semifinals.
Then, of course, came the heartbreak. There is no need to recap it here. Just say the names. Gerald Greene. Rumeal Robinson. And of course, John Clougherty, a name that will live in Seton Hall infamy.
But Paquette says of the immediate aftermath, “It was impressive. You just lost the national championship game by one point in overtime on what was, at least from Seton Hall’s perspective, a controversial call at the end. And the players were great.”
He remembers, from his courtside seat, hearing some of them say, “No one can take away what we accomplished.”
Paquette added, “I don’t remember tears (from the players). Actually, I thought P.J. was more emotional than the team. But yeah, in the post-game, press conferences, there was no talk about the officiating. It really was an unbelievable year and an underrated championship game. It was a great game.”
One year later, he left South Orange for Providence, R.I., then the home of the Big East Conference.
“I knew all the people at the Big East,” he recalled, “and honestly, Seton Hall’s run to the Final four probably helped me because I dealt more with the national media and had more experience with the quote, Big East media, so their success was probably a point in my favor when I was looking into the job. And I already knew Dave Gavitt, Mike Tranghese, Tom McElroy, Chris Plonsky and Linda Bruno,” the people in charge at the conference.
“It was great for me to get that opportunity,” Paquette said. “I was going in, working with people I already knew. And Seton Hall was very supportive of me going for the job and I'm sure they put in good words for me.”
Still, he’ll never forget those three weeks in 1989.
“It was a great time,” he said.
Unless, of course, you were a certain hotel switchboard operator in Santa Monica.
