Blue-collar Coach In A Button-down League

Chuck Daly, for years Carril's rival at Penn and now an assistant coach with the Philadelphia 76ers, once gave a pep talk to his Quaker team in which he said, "We have to play our hearts out to win this game. Princeton is a tough team. And they're better coached."

Praise, even when it comes from his peers, does not sit well with Carril. He is too preoccupied with his Princeton-is-like-no-place-else malaise to take solace in old victories or pats on the back. He feels no kinship with the majority of coaches in the country, who can offer players full athletic scholarships worth thousands of dollars a year, while the Ivy League hands out aid only according to need. This has sentenced him to some depressing evenings in places like Mansfield, Pa., listening to Tom McMillen's mother tell him, "We have been tremendously impressed with Princeton but, tell me, why don't you give scholarships? It doesn't seem fair for us to have to pay all that money when Tommy can get a scholarship somewhere else."

Ah, the irony. McMillen, destined to be a Rhodes scholar, was unwilling to pay to play at Princeton and ended up at Maryland. Ron Haigler, who made Carril's life miserable as a player at Penn, wanted to go to Princeton and could have qualified for a lot of aid, but found it was the only Ivy League school that would not accept him.

The admissions department has been known as Heartbreak Hotel to Carril ever since 1970, when he learned that Jan van Breda Kolff, a good student and the son of the former coach, was not going to be accepted at Princeton. The incident set off a bitter feud such as had not taken place since Hamilton and Burr, a Princeton alumnus, shot it out above the Palisades in 1804. Van Breda Kolff's college board scores were borderline by Princeton's standards, but he went on to become a B student at Vanderbilt and was named Southeastern Conference Player of the Year as a senior. Carril has never gotten over the van Breda Kolff case, and his resultant cynicism seems to have affected his relationships with people he used to be close to.

"I consider Pete to be a friend of mine," says Brown Coach Gerry Alaimo, who played pinochle with Carril before Princeton-Brown games until Pete suddenly announced he was not playing anymore. "But there are things I don't like about him. I think he intimidates officials. I don't know if it's because of his size—he is a little squirt—or his reputation. But he gets away with a lot."

Which he does, sometimes. But ref baiter or not, Carril's reputation suffers mostly because until this year he never belonged to the National Association of Basketball Coaches. This means that during those lively sessions in the crowded hotel lobbies at the NCAA finals he has never been kidded by his fellows about such matters as his treatment of officials. The coaches' meetings are always held at the tournament, but Carril prefers to stay home and watch the games on TV.

"I am tough to referee a game for," Carril admitted recently, while puffing on what was left of an El Producto and checking out the paint that was peeling off the ceiling of his den. "I want them to be totally fair. I don't want them to influence the game in the least. You have to remember that with our players we have to do so many little things to be successful. If we are off by just this much, many of our close wins would turn into close losses. That's why I don't have time to worry about being friends with coaches. Too many of them want to talk about how your wife and family are before the game, and then 10 minutes later we're trying to knock each other's heads off. I say forget about the buddy-buddy stuff until after the season. Then maybe we'll go over to Andy's Tavern and have a beer together."

Andy's is the little place across the tracks where Carril goes to unwind and avoid what he calls "the intelligentsia—those who don't want to see us get too big." When Joe Fasanella, the proprietor, was alive, he rode herd on anybody who came in and pestered Carril about basketball while the coach was trying to eat pizza or play cards. If Uncle Joe got wind of an importunate questioner, he would ring a large bell behind the bar, and the intruder either shut up or was escorted to the street. If Carril was going to be out late on a recruiting trip, Fasanella had a midnight snack waiting for him when he got back to town. After losing to Kentucky in last year's NCAA tournament and staying up all night celebrating the end of the season with his players, Carril walked into Andy's at 7 a.m. and Joe forthwith served up cognac and scrambled eggs.

When Fasanella died in September, Carril was crushed. At the wake he pressed a small package into Joe's hands. Wrapped around it was a note that read, "Wherever you're going you might be able to use these." Inside the slip of paper was a pinochle deck.

Fasanella, a blue-collar guy who ran the dumpiest bar in town, was typical of Carril's friends. Andy's is not merely an escape for Carril; it is more a way of life to him than Princeton University is. The rest of his cronies include Red Trani, a stonemason who takes a nap in Carril's office every morning while he runs game films (who wouldn't be put to sleep by those?); Georgie Boccanfuso, the Princeton athletic maintenance supervisor, who reputedly keeps $900 in cash in the trunk of his car, $500 in half-dollars in his refrigerator and an undisclosed number of coins buried in his backyard; and Marv Bressler, who is head of the sociology department at Princeton but is excluded from Carril's list of intelligentsia because "he isn't pompous." Bressler says, "Pete is the last Calvinist. His teams win because it's his will against the players'. And he is tougher."