Blue-collar Coach In A Button-down League

Carril was born in Bethlehem, Pa. on July 10, 1930, and lived for the first 20 years of his life at the corner of Third Street, directly across from the Bethlehem Steel works where his father found a job after immigrating. The family's day-to-day existence was rather grim, but Carril recalls how grateful his parents were to have a weekly paycheck during the Depression and how much fun he had down at the Bethlehem Boys' Club.

It became Carril's second home. He acquired his great love for pool by hustling games there after school, and he played on the club baseball team with Chuck Bednarik, a neighborhood hero who later became a football Hall of Famer with the Philadelphia Eagles. Dues were 50� a year, and young Pete could sometimes make that much on a summer afternoon selling watermelon to the workmen at the Bethlehem drop forge. In those days there was no fence to keep passersby off the factory grounds; but one was erected in 1941, a time, Carril recalls, when he looked out his window one day and saw National Guard tanks rolling up to quell the violence caused by the national steel strike.

"In that part of Pennsylvania people lead especially isolated lives," says Carril. "I can remember taking a 10-mile bus ride to Easton for a high school basketball game and thinking I was going overseas. Nobody ever leaves that area. There is a statue of a bugler on top of a building in the center of Easton that, according to local legend, keeps calling to those who have strayed until they return. I'm not sure that bugler is ever going to get me, but when I took the coaching job at Princeton, my wife's parents sent us two huge flower pots full of soil. They didn't trust New Jersey dirt."

Neither Carril's players nor the Tigers' opponents will believe this, but in high school he was a 5'7" run-and-gun guard whose coach believed that a good team should take 100 shots a night. Princeton averaged 46 shots a game last season. Back then, Carril says, he shot enough to make his teammates mad. He was a smart, quick player who made a small man's All-America team when he was a senior at Lafayette College.

Carril's first college coaching job was stickier than the one he has at Princeton, because the school was located in his hometown. The Lehigh varsity was 4-17 the year before he arrived, and the freshman team was worse. Carril put those same players through the wringer and somehow came out with an 11-12 team that pulled several upsets. Still, Lehigh is Lehigh, and under normal circumstances Carril's small-time heroics merely would have qualified him for another year there. But that spring Carril's old college coach, Butch van Breda Kolff, having taken Princeton to the threshold of an NCAA title with Bradley, was leaving to coach the Los Angeles Lakers.

"I know a guy who is the best coach in the world," van Breda Kolff told the Princeton athletic committee. "But you'll never hire him, because he doesn't fit the Ivy League image. He's balding. He's got floppy ears. He doesn't dress Ivy. He's just plain Petey Carril."

Van Breda Kolff was no button-down type himself. He violated the canons of sartorial good taste by wearing cut-off sweat pants on the Princeton golf course, and he was a chain smoker of cigars—a nasty habit he picked up from Carril during an evening of player-coach beer drinking at Lafayette. But van Breda Kolffs record—four Ivy titles in five years—proved that neatness was not essential to winning at Princeton. When the committee got a glimpse of Carril, they rightly assumed he was simply a sawed-off version of VBK.

Carril's first Princeton team won 20 games, tied for the 1967-68 Ivy title and managed to keep its poise during a string of nine consecutive road games—something that was to become a scheduling trend. What makes Carril's 190-81 record during 10� years at Princeton even more remarkable is that the Tigers have averaged 15 away games per season. Many of those matchups have been with powerful non-conference opponents, who, not surprisingly, have a combined record of 57-73 against Princeton.

Carril's next team won the Ivy championship outright. Then in a game that is still talked about by basketball buffs, the Tigers came within a whisker of knocking off UCLA at Pauley Pavilion in the finals of the 1969 Bruin Classic. It took a 12-foot jumper by Sidney Wicks with :03 left to play to give the eventual NCAA champions a 76-75 victory. In 1971-72 Princeton bombed North Carolina 89-73 when the Tar Heels, with Bob McAdoo and Bobby Jones, were on the way to finishing third in the NCAAs. The next season Florida State, with four starters back from a second-place NCAA team, fell by a 61-59 score. The list of David and Goliath encounters goes on and on, including the Tigers' victories over Holy Cross, South Carolina, Oregon and Providence on their way to the 1975 NIT championship. Alabama was victimized 61-59 during the 1975-76 season. And last year Notre Dame, ranked second in the country at the time, was embarrassed by a 76-62 score.

Predictably, these achievements have produced a great deal of admiration for Carril among his colleagues, and his reputation has also spread to the pros, to which two of his players—Petrie and Taylor—came so well prepared that they were Rookies of the Year. John Killilea, the former Boston Celtic assistant coach who is now with the Milwaukee Bucks, remembers being in Los Angeles and watching Princeton work out before its '69 meeting with UCLA. "I listened while Carril went over his game plan," says Killilea, "and that night Princeton played practically a perfect game. They did everything the way Carril outlined it and lost on a physical feat by Wicks. It's the best example of following a game plan I've ever seen."