This Coach Stalks Overdogs

By Paul A. Witteman

The gnome of Old Nassau is aggrieved. A student named Matthew Eastwick has thrown an errant pass, bouncing a basketball off another student's ankle. Knowing that Eastwick had scored perfect 800s on his College Board entrance tests merely compounds the gravity of this sin in the gnome's considered opinion. He dances past the offender, arms flapping, and plants the lance. "Eastie, Eastie," he rasps, in a voice that is part James Cagney, part Peter Lorre, part Bethlehem, Pa., "didja get someone else to take your College Boards for ya? Didja?" Eastwick stands transfixed, while his tormentor teeters (Could this be?) on the edge of tears. Then Peter J. (Pete) Carril, all 5 ft. 6 1/2 in. of him, winks and permits himself a tiny, sly smile. Eastwick will think twice about attempting that kind of pass again. Carril is sure of that, at least as sure as you can ever be of the intentions of a sophomore.

Carril, 59, knows these things because he has been conducting this particular seminar at Princeton University for 23 years. For lack of a description in the course guide, let's title it Advanced Principles of Human Movement in a Confined and Well-Defended Space. His students call it varsity basketball; his opponents think of it as water torture. No one anywhere teaches the course more skillfully. Says Princeton Dean of Admissions Fred Hargadon: "If we were in Japan, Pete would be designated a Living National Treasure." Instead, Carril may have to settle for merely being the best college basketball coach in America. Year after year, he molds a succession of students whose collective athletic skills would not elicit a raised eyebrow from pro scouts into cohesive units that play a disciplined, cerebral game and regularly confound Top 20 opponents. Yet, until one evening last March when his team nervelessly took top-seeded Georgetown to the limit, losing 50-49, Carril was a household name only in the 609 area code. This week, better known but still wearing the same tatty blue pullover sweater, Carril sends his team into battle again in the opening round of the NCAA tournament. No matter whom the team plays, Princeton will once more be the decided underdog. Take pity on the overdogs.

Not that his fellow coaches need any warning about Carril. After the Georgetown game, John Thompson graciously admitted that he had been outcoached. Jim Boeheim of Syracuse wants to avoid that possibility entirely. + "You never want to play Princeton -- never," he has said. After Princeton scared the bejabbers out of mighty Michigan State, losing earlier this season by two points, Jud Heathcote sang the same tune. "We don't want to play them anymore." Jim Valvano, the coach at North Carolina State, says playing a Carril team is like going to the dentist: very painful. Carril accepts the backhanded compliments as reluctant praise, although he says, "These guys must study one-liners at night."

Carril's one-liners sometimes run to several sentences and relate to the verities, as he sees them, of his sport. And life. To wit, basketball is a game most artfully performed by poor boys growing up on mean, urban streets. "The ability to rebound is inversely proportional to the distance one grew up from the railroad tracks," he likes to say. Since the best rebounders and shooters from inner-city schools are in demand at institutions that offer athletic scholarships, which Princeton does not, and rarely meet Princeton's rigorous admissions requirements anyway, Carril must cast his lines elsewhere. This leads to a corollary Carrilism that says the shrewd coach must never recruit players from schools whose names include the words country, day or Friends. "Ecole," he says. "Don't forget ecole." Players who are products of the kind of affluence such names suggest are never tough enough when the game is on the line. "You can't win with three-car-garage guys," Carril insists. "With two-car-garage guys, you got a chance." Says Kit Mueller, a student of economics who is the anchor of this year's team: "We've got a one- door garage with a divider in it, so I guess I'm O.K."

Carril grew up as a no-car-garage guy in a $21-a-month apartment hard by Quinn's Coal Yard in the hills of eastern Pennsylvania. His father, an immigrant from Castile, Spain, spent long days, weeks and years shoveling coal into an open-hearth furnace run by Bethlehem Steel. What Pete remembers most clearly about this Depression-era environment was the ethnic bonding prevalent among the Spanish, Polish and Italian inhabitants. "We always had food to eat," he says. "Families stuck together." The absence of material possessions was an advantage, Carril believes. "It made us innovative, creative," he says. Sometimes there were no ball fields and few balls, which led Carril and his contemporaries to improvise games. One involved dodging thrown rubber balls in a narrow culvert. It was not for the slow of foot.

More organized sports pointed the direction away from the furnaces. Too puny for his first love, football, Carril discovered hoops in the seventh grade. "It was the game I could play," he says. And how. Pete was a dervish guard at Liberty High School, leading the team to consecutive 24-3 records. That earned him a place at nearby Lafayette College, where a raffish free spirit named Willem van Breda Kolff came to coach and inherited Pete, then in his senior year. "I had my preconceived notions," says van Breda Kolff of his sawed-off, would-be star. "He threw up some weird shots." But van Breda Kolff, a former player in the National Basketball Association, recognized talent. "Pete was very, very quick," he says. And deceptive. Years later, when Princeton graduate Bill Bradley was a young player with the New York Knickerbockers, he came to Carril for mano-a-mano pointers. Carril, who had not coached Bradley in college, was then in his late 30s; Bradley was in his prime. "He was not bad at making you think he was going to take the shot, when what he was really going to do was drive past you," says Bradley. "I was a player," says Pete.

Too small for the pros by maybe 4 in. in van Breda Kolff's opinion, Carril embarked on a career as a high school government teacher and basketball coach. He won early and often. In 1966 he applied for the coaching job at Lehigh and got it by default. One year later, as van Breda Kolff was completing a five- year-long coaching tour de force at Princeton, he recommended Carril to succeed him. The incumbent thought his protege would be a hard sell. "Pete is not in Princeton's image," says van Breda Kolff. "He is not gray flannels and herringbone suits."

So much for the importance of image. But Carril actually did try, taking up orange-and-black bow ties at one point. That is Armond Hill's first memory of him, when Hill was a senior at Bishop Ford High School in Brooklyn. (Carrilism: Always recruit at schools whose names begin with Bishop or Monsignor.) "I saw this short guy with a bow tie and a big cigar lying down in the bleachers," Hill recalls. "After the game he came down and told me everything I did wrong and that he could make me a better player. It was that, more than the mystique of Princeton. I wanted to play for this guy." So he did, becoming the last great player Carril molded and then sent on to the N.B.A. Today Hill is surely the only alumnus of the N.B.A. who is a curator of an art museum.

Carril did not make it easy for Hill, or anybody else, for that matter. "He can be absolutely brutal sometimes," says Hill, wincing even now. "He would yell 'See this. See that' at me," recalls Hill, who became one of the great floor leaders in the pros, dictating the flow of the game. "In the beginning, I didn't see anything."

Exactly what Carril sees on the 94-ft. by 50-ft. stage on which his players perform is a subject of some conjecture. U.S. Senator Bill Bradley is willing to try to define it. "He sees the game conceptually. He sees the whole game and the whole court, and he sees it in the context of the entire season." The writer John McPhee puts it in a different context. "Pete has a matador's view of basketball. It is a ritual, an art, a series of set pieces, one following the other like a series of slides." Yet George Leftwich, a gifted offensive player at Villanova, currently a college coach, is occasionally puzzled. He has asked his son George Jr., a starting guard on this year's Princeton team, to explain the intricacies of Carril's system. "He gives me the typical college kid's answer. 'Dad, you'd never understand.' " The possibilities can be paralyzing to opponents. Says Dartmouth coach Paul Cormier: "If we're not careful, we end up spending the half time wondering what adjustments he is going to make, instead of planning our own adjustments."

What Carril endeavors to do is teach his players the fundamentals of movement, passing and shooting. Carril exhibits, says Bradley, "clarity of thought about what he wants. Then he wills things to happen. His teams don't play jerkily. They flow. He lures the other team into the flow that he has organized, and then it is in fundamentally unfamiliar territory." In the process, Carril will take whatever options the opposing defense gives him, deflecting his attack away from the other team's strengths.

Sociology professor and longtime Carril observer Marvin Bressler sees more than strategy. He sees a framework of philosophy behind it. "Pete is a consequential man with all these quirks. He is the only man who can talk like a 19th century moralist and not embarrass me." Carril can fan himself into instant fury over the hypocrisy of a player who invokes the name of God before a game, then insults the integrity of the officials by pretending to be the victim of a foul once on the court. "If I'm ever refereeing a game and that happens," he says, "I'm going to run right over and step on the guy." With Carril there is only one way to win: the old-fashioned way. Says Bressler: "He really believes that winning is the confirmation of character and virtue."

In an era when the talk of college basketball is dominated by the tawdry and venal, reliance on the rock of moral principle seems almost as anachronistic as the smothering defense Princeton plays. Allegations of point shaving, reports of doctored transcripts, illegal payoffs to players and graduation rates that should shame college presidents abound. Television and the money it provides to broadcast games have corroded the soul of the sport. Each of the 64 teams to earn a bid to the NCAA tournament receives a payment of around $286,000. If a team makes it to the Final Four, the payout is a whopping $1,146,000 more. Some coaches wear $300 shoes and earn six-figure incomes. The temptation to cut moral corners in pursuit of the pot at the end of the rainbow is immense. Carril wants none of that. When someone asked him if he was disappointed by the number of fans attending Princeton games, he said he'd love to see more fannies in the seats. "But there are a lot of All-Americas over in the library, and there is nobody there cheering them on." Says William Bowen, the former president of Princeton, now head of the Mellon Foundation: "He is a healthy antidote for everything that is wrong in college athletics. He understands the place of the athlete in the university."

This has not diminished Carril's insatiable desire to win. He keeps a projector and game films both in his office and at home. Without fail, he will yell at a player on the screen to slide, say, two steps to his left or his man is going to drive past him for a basket. Then he yells at the image of the player for his failure to respond to his command. "The really funny thing," says Kit Mueller, who has attended many such sessions in the course of his education, "is that he will rewind the film, run it again and again, and yell the same thing each time."

Carril is back stalking the court during practice, driving home the lessons, once again imposing his will. Suddenly, a player drives to the basket, sweeping past a passive defender. Now Carril is in full cry. "Are you a Quaker?" He sputters. "Didja sign a nonaggression pact when you enrolled here?" The players have heard this one before, but it has the desired effect. The next time a player cuts to the hoop he is mugged by the defender. Carril smiles his tiny smile. Shortly thereafter, he dismisses class.