PirateCrew: Seton Hall Pirates Football & Basketball Recruiting
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This is the final installment of my conversation with friend and longtime Asbury Park Press beat writer Jerry Carino. We wrap it up by discussing NIL (Name, Image, Likeness), why some veteran coaches have retired, the cathartic nature of the 2021 NCAA Tournament, and Jerry’s other and very successful part of his journalistic life with the APP.
J.P. Pelzman: It was nice to have an unbeaten team in the NCAA final. It would have been fun if Gonzaga could’ve finished it off, but how nice was it to finally have the (NCAA) Tournament?
Jerry Carino: It was great. It's a piece of Americana. You and I have joked about it for 17 years, what Tootie said on Selection Sunday in 2004 and we’ve been joking about it ever since. (John “Tootie” Allen, then a junior, said after Seton Hall made it for the first time in 10 years that “The NCAA Tournament is one of the greatest things in our country and in our society.”)
We joked about it on Twitter (after the Baylor-Gonzaga final) and here comes John Allen out of nowhere (on Twitter) to nod his head in agreement. It was awesome.
JPP: He was right all along.
JC: It was totally true. It felt so empty last year, on top of all the tragedy.
JPP: Yeah, I'm not minimizing how terrible everything else was. Neither one of us is.
JC: Of course not. But let’s face it, it was the only major sport that had to cancel a championship. Every pro sport got their playoffs in.
JPP: Eventually.
JC: College football got its season in. They held The Masters in the fall.
JPP: They finished the Triple Crown in the fall.
JC: Yeah, they moved the Kentucky Derby (on the calendar).
JPP: You’re right, that’s the only major one (in the U.S.) that they didn’t get in.
JC: And it stinks for college basketball fans and it sucks for Seton Hall because Seton Hall had a generational team, like Dayton and San Diego State, so it really stunk for them.
But despite that, regardless of the fact Seton Hall wasn’t in it, it was still great to have the event back. And it was a good tournament. There were a lot of upsets. There was one all-time classic game (UCLA-Gonzaga) and it was fun. It was great. It was like a balm on a difficult year.
JPP: It was nice having the tournament back, of course, but losing last year’s, and the what-ifs. Those always will sting, won’t they? As you said, Seton Hall had a potential Final Four team, a three seed.
JC: Yes, even making it this year wouldn’t have changed it because this team wasn’t going to the Final Four. For my generation the what-if is always the Western Kentucky game (the second-round loss in 1993).
JPP: So instead of COVID, it’s Luther Wright and a lot of Skittles. I didn’t know that part of the story until just a few years ago.
(Supposedly, Luther Wright was ineffective in that infamous 1993 loss because he was crashing from a sugar high after eating too many Skittles the night before.)
JC: Jerry Walker or somebody told me that. That’s the what-if of my generation and 2020 will be the what-if of this Seton Hall generation.
JPP: Do you think the Lon Krugers and the Roy Williamses suddenly retiring is not just because of the pandemic, but because of the changing landscape?
JC: I think both. The year was hard on everybody, and the fact that you’re going to have to rebuild your roster every year is just something these guys don’t want to have to deal with and I don’t blame them at their age. So yeah, there’s no question. And with the NIL, we haven’t even talked about it but that’s part of it too.
One coach said to me, the NIL seems good in theory, right. It seems like a decent compromise between universities paying players’ salaries, which is a terrible idea
JPP: Right.
These universities are (cash)-strapped enough already. If Karl Marx is going to show up and pull the money out of coaches’ pockets and give it to players, that’s different. But we live in a capitalistic society., that’s not going to happen. So what would happen is they would raise tuition on other students and cut other sports to pay players.
So that’s not going to happen. But the compromise between doing that and doing nothing and with all the pressure to compensate athletes is, the first question recruits are going to ask is how much can you get me in terms of endorsement deals. What's my slice of the pie going to be? That’s going to be a factor in recruiting now.
That’s something coaches don’t want to deal with. Guys like Lon Kruger and Roy Williams don’t want to deal with that. They don’t want to have to negotiate what these guys’ endorsement deals are going to be in addition to having half the team walk out the door after one year. They don’t want to deal with that. I don’t blame them for that.
JPP: (Laughing) They'd have to negotiate with the used-car dealership up the block or whatever.
JC: We're at a crossroads of what it means to be a student-athlete, especially in a revenue sport. These are big changes. Some of them are good, some of them are perilous, but I don’t blame them for not wanting to turn everything upside down from the way they’ve done things.
JPP: I wanted to ask you, how long have you been doing the human-interest features in addition to your sports coverage? Some of them are really, really incredible. I mean they’re all good, but wow, I mean, the stories you tell are amazing.
JC: Seven years, I started doing them in 2014, coming up on seven years. It's been great. It's added to my longevity (as a writer). I've enjoyed it immensely. It's very rewarding to help people or to shine a light on somebody’s plight that inspires somebody else or makes people feel that they’re not alone.
Some of the stuff is really fascinating, the historical stuff that I get to do. I like it a lot. It's a great supplement for me, as opposed to doing sports all the time.
It also adds perspective. It helps me look for better angles, better ways to cover the teams. For example, when I wrote about Myles Johnson of Rutgers and how he was interning at IBM, I interviewed his boss, it was a different perspective.
For a story about Kevin Willard, I tracked down Herb Pope and he talked about how much Kevin has done for him and his life after prison. Those are perspective stories that maybe I wouldn’t have thought about if I didn’t do the human-interest stories.
JPP: How else has it affected you?
JC: I do think it’s enhanced my work covering sports and it’s also been a nice balance. I do think it will add longevity to my career, I really do because it’s difficult. This business can really grind you down. It's a nice spice, a nice variety for me. Thanks for asking about it.
JPP: Is there one particular favorite, or two, over the years that really meant a lot to you?
JC: I did one several years ago on a man with severe cerebral palsy who was a customer service rep at a Home Depot in Neptune right next to the newsroom and I spent an hour with him and he was awesome. He was so knowledgeable and friendly and everybody loved him and the feedback I got from it was just tremendous.
People from all walks of life who went into that Home Depot and really had been amazed by him and inspired by him wrote to me about it and it’s one of those things I think about whenever I'm tired or down for whatever reason I think about it. Kevin Woolley is his name. I think about what he did and how positive he was.
It was just a good life lesson for me. Sometimes these stories are good life lessons for me too. And I hear from him every once on a while too, which is great. I always tell people, reach out to me anytime. And they do sometimes, which is really rewarding.
Editor's note. Click here to read (and support) Jerry's human interest and sports stories.
