Varsity Basketball practice had been in progress for two weeks when I reported for duty after the Thanksgiving weekend. I had some basketball-specific conditioning and catching up to do. I was looking forward to claiming my position as a starting guard. On the 1964-65 team, Frank Rossi and I had been the starting guards. We played a 2-3 offense that I liked. I usually got the job of guarding the opposing team’s best outside shooter. The defensive expertise that Coach O'Neill imparted to me had stayed with me.
Frank was our leading scorer along with Ray (Giuls) Giuliano, a forward who in one game during that 64-65 season scored 36 points, He was also named to the All (Plainfield) Area first team by the Courier-News along with Mike Grosso and Leon Mischenko. They call them power forwards now and indeed, he was powerful. He was 6’-2” and could outmuscle most anybody, except for Grosso at Bridgewater-Raritan, who at 6’-8” was the best player in Central if not all of New Jersey that year. Ray and I double-teamed him in our last game of the ’64-’65 season and he killed us. That year his team won the Group IV state championship and he averaged an astronomical 30 points and 30 rebounds a game.. A few years later, Grosso was the starting center for the University of Louisville. He is ranked among their top all-time scorers and built a successful career in advertising and broadcasting in Louisville after being drafted by the ABA and NBA. He played for the Pittsburgh Condors and the Carolina Cougars in the ABA. He was inducted in the University of Louisville Athletic Hall of Fame in 1994.
One summer evening after the 64-65 season, Giuls and I were double-dating (our girlfriends were close friends) at a drive-in and ran into Grosso who was drunk but very friendly. He did not apologize for destroying us on the court a few months earlier.
Frank (Ros) Rossi was the best athlete in the class of 1966. He was 6’-1”, 185 lbs, with long muscular legs, broad shoulders and a striking red flat-top haircut. He had a long Italian nose and his upper lip came to point and jutted out in the middle. In his first three years in high school he had played only baseball and basketball, but in his senior year he tried out for the football team. He had wanted to play tight end but at one point Coach Yohn put him at defensive tackle where he excelled. That must have irritated Ray Kovonuk, the varsity basketball coach. Frank excelled on both offense and defense but at mid-season suffered an ankle injury which, given our failure to win many games, convinced him to quit and begin training for basketball while he recovered. I suspect his father, Joe Rossi, who raised him to become a professional baseball player in the image of Joe DiMaggio, determined that football might derail his professional baseball career, which looked to be a certainty.
Frank had an older brother named Fred who had been a star football, basketball and baseball player at WHRHS in the class of 1960. He later excelled in baseball at Delta State College in Mississippi. He could have been an identical twin of Frank except he had brown hair. I played with them both in the summers of ’67 and ’68 In the Plainfield Twilight League when I was home from college. We were on a semi-pro team sponsored by Dreier’s, a sporting goods store then located on Front Street in Plainfield. Fred was the oldest of the Rossi’s six children. Frank was the fourth born. Fred held the record for the most points in a basketball game until it was broken by Larry Reid in the 62-’63 season with 31 points and then again by Ray Giuliano in ’64-’65 with 36 points.
The Rossi family was a large and close-knit Italian family. Their father, Joseph, was one of 12 children raised by Ferdinand and Catherine Rossi. Which meant the children had many cousins, several of whom played or socialized with us in the Watchung Hills area. Among them Dominick (Doc) Ferraro, Luis DeFillipis, Glenn and Charlie Rossi, and Larry and Kathy Esoldi. The youngest of the 12 children, Vincent Rossi, nicknamed Chamber, had been signed by the Yankees in 1949 and played minor league baseball. He frequently came and supported his nephews as they competed in sports for Watchung Hills. His obituary says, “He was a father-like figure to his nieces and nephews and will be missed by all.” I remember him fondly. His job at the post office in Stirling gave him time to come out and support our teams.
Dreier’s was the oldest continuously-run sporting goods store in New Jersey. I always shopped there for Hillerich and Bradsby Louisville Slugger bats, Spot Bilt cleats, and Rawlings gloves. Later it moved to the Blue Star Shopping Center in Watchung, where it closed in 1998 when the mall owner refused to renew or re-negotiate the lease. Dreier's Sporting Goods had been in existence for 129 years. The semi-pro team was coached by Don Kohler. More on him and the team later.
In the 1960s, it was common for the best athletes to compete in more than one sport and often three during the school year. This was before specialization and weight-lifting (because of professionalization, which includes college scholarships) came to dominate sports and sports training. For growing athletes it was believed advantageous to be in training throughout the year in a variety of sports. Muscle mass was not viewed as necessarily helpful in developing an all-around athlete, although there were those, especially in football, who did lift weights and benefitted from it. We were in it more for the fun. The drudgery of weight-lifting and maniacal training came later.
What playing three sports did for me was keep me (and others) in shape and off the streets after school. It kept me growing throughout my high school years, while inducing in me a healthy appetite for food which further facilitated growth in size, strength and endurance. Each sport causes you to exercise and shape different muscle groups, thus developing your whole body more equally. I avoided weight training in my athletic life and I do not regret it. Apart from the drudgery of it I felt I played positions that would not benefit from it and in fact it might diminish my flexibility and, for want of a better word, looseness. Today it’s apparent that too much muscle mass causes more strains, pulls, cramps and tears than is necessary. I am still of the school that says let each sport develop the muscles that it requires in a young athlete and no more. The exception is aerobic and isometric training which i believe increases endurance and strength without appreciably adding muscle mass. Full disclosure: I am not an expert.
The basketball schedule at WHRHS for the 1965-66 season in my senior year began two weeks after Thanksgiving. The week before Christmas in our third game we played Governor Livingston High (Berkeley Heights) at home. The gymnasium was full because the alumni were again home from college and Berkeley Heights was one of our rivals given its close proximity to WHRHS. At Watchung Borough School we had played against some of their athletes in grade school. The score was close all game with the lead going back and forth. With 8 second left in the game we were ahead 48-46. Berkeley Heights had a man at the foul line in a one-and-one situation. He made the first shot. Then disaster struck. He purposely missed the second, which gave his teammate a chance to grab the rebound and score. It gave them a 49-48 lead. We called time out. Coach Kovonuk designed a play where our center would set a pick for Frank who would receive the inbound pass from forward Russ Harden, dribble up the court and take the final shot. Five seconds would give us just enough time to execute the play.
Berkeley Heights was having none of that and double-teamed Frank, who had scored 19 points in the game. We were running out of time to inbound the pass, so I ran toward Russ and he passed it to me, I turned and dribbled up the right sideline. A few feet past mid-court with only a second or two left, I launched a 35-foot running set shot and swished it at the buzzer. We won by a point. A loud roar went up and I was mobbed by the students who were sitting at courtside.
Because of that last-second shot and my touchdown on Thanksgiving I had a month during that holiday season when I was the wonder boy of Watchung Hills. I enjoyed it while it lasted, which wasn’t long.
Even small town fame is fleeting. It’s a good thing too, because you will soon be humbled one way or another in sports (and life). In such a situation, an athlete needs to concentrate on what he can do in the next game and forget past exploits. I learned later in playing sports in college that you play to win within the confines of a team. You play for recognition but mostly from your teammates in the locker room. That’s where the gratification is most sincere, understood and appreciated.
Vince Lombardi said, “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing,”— hyperbole to be sure, but winning is certainly more pleasurable than losing. The only way to win is through precision teamwork and grinding practice wherein talent is honed. Lombardi was the master of the grinding practice. Packer offensive guard Jerry Kramer In his book Instant Replay describes Lombardi’s strategy to declare the start of a “big push” in pre-season training and then, after two weeks of demanding and exhausting workouts, he would announce the beginning of second “big push,” which turned out to be more punishing than the first. To win you have to endure strenuous workouts that make the actual games seem easy.
Mike Battle, who played for the New York Jets in the Joe Namath era, once said, “They pay me to practice. On Sundays I play for free.” As a lifelong amateur, I never got paid to practice or play. Rather, it was the opposite: In playing for free, I had to pay the price of grinding practices and several injuries to play the games for free. It was worth it. It was always rewarding.
i went into my senior basketball season of 1965-66 feeling entitled as I was a returning letterman and starting guard in the previous season. In one game against Bound Brook the year before with the score tied in overtime, I stole a pass from their guards who were freezing the ball because they wanted the last shot. After intercepting the pass I drove down the court and laid it in for the win. On defense that year I held some of the best players in central Jersey to well below their scoring average in several games. My role was that of a playmaking defensive guard. On occasion i scored more than ten points and even managed 17 in one game, but that was not my job. It was the job of Frank Rossi and Ray Giuliano and to a lesser degree the others including Lou Falzarano, Norm Hewitt, Bob Skladany, Irv Zander and Joey Ezro.
I had high expectations as a senior. But a new player named Bob Schmidt, a slender but strong sapling, had transferred in from another school. Irv Zander who had come up with me from freshman to JV to Varsity and had substituted for me on occasion in the previous year was also in the mix. I had competition and I didn’t handle it well. In practice games I began to resent when Coach would substitute players in for me. Didn’t he understand that I needed the repetitions and conditioning?
I had played with Irv and another tall guard/forward named Joey Ezro on the freshman team and the junior varsity team in the 62-63 and 63-64 seasons. In our freshman year we were 13-6 and in our sophomore year we were 14-4. (Frank Rossi was always a level ahead of us. He had played junior varsity in our freshman year and was on the varsity in our sophomore year.)
Joey Ezro and I became close friends in those years. In our winning sophomore season, we had a new junior varsity coach named Bob O’Neill who, although he coached only one season at WHRHS was unquestionably was the best coach I ever had. He taught us his system of suffocating defense. We learned that scoring was the point of basketball of course, but if you can prevent your opponents from scoring you demoralize them thus making it easier for you to score. O’Neill was from Massachusetts, had graduated from Springfield College and was earned a master’s degree at Saint Bonaventure in New York state. He was an enthusiastic fan of the Boston Celtics and their system which allowed them the win the NBA championship every year from 1959 through 1966.
In 1963-64 Coach O'Neill was 35 years old, apparently divorced, often disheveled and always smelled of cigarette smoke.Keeping up appearances was not a priority for him. Like John Tierney, he was a Korean War veteran. Smoking seemed part of the job description for men who served in the military during the war years. While I was growing up I can’t recall any veterans of World War II or the Korean War who were not smokers, my father included. Of course, several of us on the team were smokers also. Joey Ezro smoked Lucky Strikes and I smoked Marlboros. One of the games we played with school authorities was to see if you could smoke in the lavatories without getting caught.
O’Neill’s coaching clothes which he changed into after his social studies classes and before practice were rarely laundered. For most of the season there was an unpleasant smell about him, a combination of tobacco smoke and body odor. He had a sweatshirt cut off at the elbows with underarms that were stained with perspiration and grime.
Later photo of O’Neill at Longwood H. S. in the same grimy sweatshirt.
He didn’t shave on a daily basis. He may have been having marital problems and was perhaps drinking too much, Eventually I found pictures of him after he left WHRHS and he looked much healthier and happier. He married (or remarried) two decades after coaching us while he was coaching high school basketball at Longwood High School on Long Island.
He was masterful coach, both strategically and psychologically. He was consumed by basketball, had obviously played a lot of it at Springfield College and was probably on the winning side more often than not. As a student of the game he had studied an influential book called Cincinnati Power Basketball by University of Cincinnati coach Ed Jucker who won two national championships and nearly a third from 1961 to 1963. Coach O’Neill borrowed from Jucker’s defensive philosophy and made it his own.
O’Neill grated on a few people at WHRHS and one of them was varsity Coach Ray Kovonuk. O’Neill thought himself a better coach than Kovonuk and not so subtly made that clear to him. At one point Kovonuk had suggested to him that a scrimmage between the varsity and the junior varsity would be beneficial to both teams. Coach O’Neill welcomed the chance and immediately started preparing us for it. A few days later we played them and outscored them before Coach Kovonuk put a stop to it after 15 minutes. O’Neill didn’t show it, but we knew he was very pleased. He didn’t hide his dislike for Kovonuk. He occasionally made sarcastic remarks about the head coach during our practices.
Coach O'Neil looking good at WHRHS, 1964
As in the cases of Coach Tierney and Coach Yohn, I lost track of Robert O’Neill since 1964. He disappeared the following year and no one seemed to know what became of him. In the fall of 2025, I looked him up online. I found a man named Robert O’Neil’s obituary but I wasn’t sure it was him. There were no photos. This Robert O’Neill had died in 2005 of cancer. He had been the head coach at Longwood High in Middle Island, Long Island for 30 years starting in 1965, so the timing was right for this person to be the Coach O’Neill I knew at WHRHS. Here is his obituary:
Robert O'Neill Obituary
O'NEILL-Robert of Mastic Beach, born on November 14, 1928 passed away on December 3, 2005 after a spirited battle with esophageal cancer. Already a ten plus year survivor of colon cancer, this Navy veteran from the Korean War made his mark on the world as both a teacher and basketball coach at Longwood High School in Middle Island for over thirty years. Known by many as Bob-o or Coach, Robert personified the role of varsity athletic coach and mentor to young men. Whether he was barking at the referees or executing his "mongrel" defense on the opponent, Bob's passion for the sport of basketball echoed throughout the locker rooms of high school gymnasiums. During his coaching career at Longwood, Bob-o amassed more than 300 lifetime wins and won a league championship in the 1986-87 season. In the classroom, as social studies and psychology teacher, Mr. O'Neill made sure none of his students left Longwood without understanding the principle of being a "have" versus a "have-not." His sharp wit, lively class discussions, and ability to take any side to an issue always made his class popular amongst the student body before he retired in 1995. Married for over twenty years, Robert is survived by his wife, sister, stepson, daughter, beloved animals, and all those whose lives he touched. He was an avid golfer throughout most of his life, and a pretty good poker player from what he told us although he could have been bluffing.
And yet I wasn’t sure it was him. There are many Robert O’Neills in this world, the most famous one being the man who killed Osama bin Laden. But hours later I found a photo on Facebook that confirmed it was him. He was attending a summer basketball camp in 1967 in New Hampshire with several NBA pros and coaches. When I zoomed in on the face, it was clearly him. He was standing next to NBA player and Coach Lenny Wilkins. Other NBA personalities in the photo were Jerry Lucas, Cliff Hagen, and Larry Costello. With Coach O’Neill and the four NBA stars were seven current Longwood players from the team that would begin their season in a few months. Six of the seven were young black men. It was no surprise to me that Coach O’Neill had somehow gotten his players to a basketball camp in the middle of summer with four NBA luminaries to instruct them and that he was there with them. All four of the instructors at that camp are in the NBA Hall of Fame. Lenny Wilkens is currently ranked third among NBA coaches with the most wins. It made me wonder who paid for it all.
Coach O'Neill and Lenny Wilkens, 1967
Scott Walker
July 8, 2018
Great Coach, Teacher and Motivator. He gave me the confidence to not only excel on the basketball court but in everything I wanted to do in life. My condolences to his family on his loss. Thanks for sharing such a superb man with all of us! Class 83'
Janet LaFlair Flanders, Class of 66
January 2, 2006
I'll try not to be sappy about this because I know Bob didn't do sappy. What he did do was save my life more then once. He was and will always be a unique human being with the capacity to care more deeply then most. He would pop in and out of my life but always when I needed him. There is nothing I could give back to compensate him but he never wanted compensation. He was just one of those rare individuals whose unselfish caring provided him with pleasure. He will be missed and always loved. No doubt he is very involved in a poker game with God now but I know he will still find the time to watch over us and keep us on the straight and narrow. Thanks Bob...for all of it.
Jennifer Plate
December 29, 2005
I am so saddened to hear of this great loss of Longwood history. If you read this, LJ and Steve-o, you both were source of joy and happiness to Bob-o. His daily tales of your lives together were a testiment [sic] to this. I only hope you both knew it. I am sorry for your loss. You are an angel now Mr. O'Neill. Your teachings will stay with me forever. Class of 92.
Joan Henault [Bob O’Neill’s sister was fourteen years younger than he.]
December 13, 2005
The Bob-O was my brother, he was the best. Thru thick and thin he was always there when i needed him. He kept me on my toes, he loved to get me going, but always with a smile. I loved to listen to his stories, he had so many.I learned a lot from him, he had such a memory. I met so many of his students and players and was so awed by the legacy that he left behind. It is so nice to know that he touched so many people and made such a difference. Thank you all for your thoughts ,stories and comments. It helps him to live on for all of us.
Karen Humphrey-Johnson
December 12, 2005
Bob-O was my beloved uncle and he will be missed dearly. I have many fond memories of him and enjoyed sharing our love for the Boston Red Sox and hearing his countless stories about our family. I could go on for days but will jsut say that I think of him often and know he is with us in spirit.
Allen Ransom
December 9, 2005
My heart goes out to the family. Coach O'Neill made a big impact on my life. I remember playing football for the ninth grade team at Longwood and we were playing against the middle school and I put a hit on a player and Coach O'Neill came up to me after the game and "said son do you play basketball"? I responded back with no. The next thing I know I am trying to play basketball on the ninth grade team, I was terrible. I was a project of Coach Reany and Coach O'Neill. I was terrible but they worked with me. . . . I would fake an injury to avoid handling the ball and Coach would light into me about having some heart. One day I decided to talk back to Coach O'Neill and he put me in check real fast. I never got to play on the Varisty [sic] because of the no sports in 79. But I went on to join the Air Force and played base team ball and turned out to be a good player because of Coach O'Neill. Coach is in Heaven now and telling God on how to run the 1-4 set.
Kerriann Whelan Spirides
December 8, 2005
My condolences to Mr. O'Neill's family. He was a wonderful teacher and is remembered dearly by all who had his classes. He was funny and kind and always gave great advise. My favorite "Don't trust men baby". May my favorite teacher rest in peace. Class of '85.
Student 1994
December 6, 2005
Bob-O, To say that you touched many lives is an understatement. Everyone should be as lucky to know someone like you, and the ones who didn't really missed out on something special. Thank you for being the best teacher, inspiration, and friend to so many. You will be missed, but you will always be in our hearts. Till we meet again, enjoy the other side. You've earned it.
I learned more from Bob O’Neill than any other coach. He taught me to exercise my mind and not just my body in playing sports. To be aware of the totality of what was going on around me; to put a game in high-resolution focus. (Basketball can be a blur sometimes.) All my other coaches through the years gave me much, but O’Neill instilled in me competitive intelligence. In sport there is the physical game of talent, technique and strategy and then the mental game. You need to train your mind and emotions to obey. If you can’t outplay an opponent, you can sometimes outsmart him. O’Neill knew how to break the game down into parts and teach young athletes how to think (always ahead) during competition. He anticipated how an opposing team would react to our offense or defense and had a ready answer. His influence on me for the four short months I was under his tutelage gave me tools to use for the rest of my life.
*******
Coach Kovonuk was more polished and debonaire than O’Neill. In addition to coaching basketball, he taught mechanical drawing and industrial arts. Until later in my senior season I always felt close to him, that he was grooming me for an important role. At the end of our freshman season he elevated Joey Ezro and me to sit on the varsity bench during the Somerset County tournament. I was thrilled. We were given Varsity uniforms and warm-up suits. The uniforms were gleaming white with gold and black trim. The numbers were deep gold lined in black. The warm-up suits were a brilliant gold color. Given his sense of style, I’m sure Coach K designed them that way.
The start of the 65-66 basketball season was the moment when it finally became clear that Joey Ezro was done with interscholastic sports. In our junior year, he had not showed up for varsity baseball the previous spring where he would have definitely been a starting pitcher. I thought he might come out for basketball as a senior, but that was not to be.
After our victory over Berkeley Heights and as my senior season progressed, my playing time was gradually reduced. I was playing point guard and basically feeding the ball to the four other players. I didn’t get to rebound much, which bothered me because I had a talent for it. Although I was only 6 feet tall I had 30 inch vertical leap. Bob Schmidt was a given a wing position on offense which was the position I coveted. Frank Rossi, our best player, was on the other wing from where he could rebound, drive and shoot from the corner. My shooting from the point position in the 1-3-1, an offense that was different from the 2-3 we had run in the 64-65 season, was erratic. Kovonuk started substituting Irv Zander for me at that position. By the end of the season I became increasingly detached as my minutes were reduced. I wasn’t miffed enough to quit, but it did affect me and my play. My enthusiasm waned.
We ended up having winning season at 11-9, but we lost a few games to teams that were not our equal. It was not an improvement on the previous season. We were eliminated in the first round of the state tournament. Our record was disappointing given the talent on the team. The only teams that were better than we were were South Plainfield with Wally Cirafesi and Bridgewater with the remnants of the team that Mike Grosso had led. One of the two games we lost against South Plainfield went into overtime. We split our pair of games with too many teams that I felt were not our equal, including Berkeley Heights, Bound Brook and North Plainfield.
Whose fault was our disappointing season? Obviously it was Coach Kovonuk’s, but I have to take some of the blame. My attitude was not as good as it should have been although outwardly most people probably didn’t notice it. I was doing my job, but not with enthusiasm. I was still the starter, but my minutes were being reduced. I didn’t up my game to meet the challenge.
And yet, I may be overly critical of myself. When forty years later my father sent me all the clippings from my days playing interscholastic and intercollegiate sports there were a couple from our 1965-66 basketball season and from the Courier News. One describes the victory over Berkeley Heights with this headline: “Eaton Scores On Long Shot” and captures the drama of that game. The other describes a victory over Metuchen High and is headlined, “Watchung Cage Squad Scores Win.” Here is the text of the column edited for brevity:
Metuchen— Doug Eaton and Frank Rossi sparked a rally in the last four minutes yesterday to carry Watchung Hills to a 69-58 victory over Metuchen. Watchung held a slim 54-53 lead with four minutes left when Eaton drove in for a layup. Rossi hit on a jump shot and . . .
The Warriors clinched the victory in the final minute when Eaton swished a pair of fouls and Rossi put in a pair of field goals. . .
My initial thought on reading this was, “Maybe I wasn’t so bad after all.” But the truth is I probably was at best mediocre, albeit with periodic bursts of effectiveness. The only reason my father kept those particular clippings was because I had been recognized for playing well. In my defense, I think Coach K did prefer to have me in there if the game was close in the fourth quarter. I had proven myself to be a clutch player. Another truth is that Metuchen was one of the weaker teams we played. They had won only one game when we played them that time. Later in the year they came to our place and beat us by one point 71-70. I struggled in that game to contain their best scorer.
I researched Coach Kovonuk online and was pleased to learn that he later become a very successful, respected long-tenured coach in Central New Jersey. If you win 200 games you are a good coach. He achieved that. He was one of the early practitioners of the four-corner freeze, a tactic in which a team would not try and score and would simply pass the ball around outside the shooting perimeter to draw the defense out. As an eight grader, I first saw Coach K use it when WHRHS played a strong, heavily favored Somerville team. It was executed brilliantly and WHRHS ended up winning a very low scoring game against a team with a superior record. The editors of the 1962 yearbook were so thrilled by the win they included a copy of the Courier News coverage and the box score of the game in that yearbook.
Coach Kovonuk had a distinguished career coaching at WHRHS. They won the Somerset County championship the following year. Unfortunately that was followed by two terrible losing seasons, which caused him to switch to coaching a small private school in Plainfield know as Wardlaw-Hartridge. This was the same school my father went to except when he attended it was not co-ed nor was Hartridge, the private girls school in Plainfield. At one point the two schools were joined together. Coach K did well at Wardlaw-Hartridge and won two state championships in the private school division.
Coach Kovonuk ended up with 200 career wins and Coach O’Neill had 300. O’Neill probably never was aware of that, but it would have pleased him to know it.
In all sports and with all teams you can’t expect to have a stellar record in every season. I happened to be on one of Ray Kovonuk’s teams at WHRHS that did not live up to expectations, although we had a winning season. Football and basketball were both disappointments to me in that school year, my senior year. The 1965 football team was even less successful than the basketball team. But the 1966 baseball team made up for all that disappointment.
*******
Joey Ezro was also having difficulties in his life, which intersected with mine on a near daily basis until he failed to come out for baseball in our junior year, 1965. I was anticipating being awarded the starting shortstop position on the baseball team. I thought Joey was looking forward to pitching and perhaps playing fist base as a left-hander. We had just finished basketball. We had two good starting pitchers in Pete Scott and Norm Hewitt, but Joey would have seen action and possibly dominated as a pitcher and first baseman.
Joey and I had been on the basketball and baseball teams in our freshman and sophomore years. We played freshman basketball and then junior varsity baseball as freshman, and junior varsity in both sports when we were sophomores. He was as natural an athlete as you could find. In basketball he had a smooth, soft flat jump shot that always seemed to go in. He was quick but never looked like he was in a hurry. His body was always under control. In baseball he was a side-arm pitcher with a sweeping curveball and a sneaky-fast, tailing fastball. He grew to 6’-2” and may have been taller in the end, which for him was only a few years away.
He came from a large family like many of us in the immediate post-war period. But his family was more working class than most in the Watchung Hills area. Many students came from families whose parents were professionals. The Ezros had five children and Joey was their second born. He was widely viewed as one of the most intelligent and talented people in our class. But he didn’t like school and was one of the earliest to enlist in the nascent youth rebellion at the time. in his yearbook photo, which was compiled as our senior year began, they describe him as a “non-conformist,” a well-used cliche in 1966 but accurate in his case. While most of us still had crew cuts or haircuts of traditional length, he had a Beatle haircut with bangs down to his eyebrows
To illustrate how good a basketball player Joey was I recall this: On February 15th, 1964, the varsity and Junior varsity coached by
O’Neill traveled to Somerville to play their two squads. The varsity
squandered a lead and was outscored by Somerville by 11 points in the
fourth quarter in losing 55-46. Kovonuk’s freeze backfired on him and
the team. By contrast, we on the junior varsity beat their junior
varsity by 18 points with Joey scoring 25 points, which might have been a
record for a junior varsity player. I remember being in awe of his
performance that day. I said to him during the game, "You can't miss!" And he said, "Yup." After the game I told him, "You took over that game." He said, "Yup."
The 1966 WHRHS yearbook had senior photos and profiles that were gathered early in school year before Joey had decided to quit high school and sports altogether. Joey's photo and profile were therefore included even though he did not graduate, His profile states that he played “Basketball 1, 2, 3, 4; Baseball 1,2,4” wherein the numbers represent each of the four years of high school. It was accurate in the sense that he had missed baseball in his junior year, but inaccurate in predicting he would play basketball and baseball in his senior year. It tells me that as school started he had planned to attend school and play basketball and baseball in this senior year, but he never came out for either, which saddened and perplexed me given his great talent and my friendship with him. He had played basketball as a junior and I have a memory of us trying to guard Leon Mintschenko, a 5’-10” guard from Somerville who destroyed us one game by hitting 12 of 14 shots and ended up scoring 32. When I couldn’t stop him, Coach Kovonuk put Joey in to guard him, since he was taller than me. We both had the maddening experience of getting a hand on a ball he shot and then having it go in anyway. That was by far the most points I ever allowed an opponent.
I suspect now that Joey came to conclude before I did that Coach Kovonuk was not nearly the coach Bob O’Neill had been. He played only occasionally in his junior year while I was playing regularly. He did not expect Kovonuk would use his talents the way O’Neill did. Maybe that caused him to leave school and sports shortly after we started the school year. It occurs to me now that i might have beat him out for the position he coveted.
A copy of the 1963 yearbook shows Joey in the Varsity baseball team picture as a freshman. It also shows freshmen Frank Rossi, Irv Zander and I in the team photo of the junior varsity. And yet, I don’t think that is how the season played out. I think Joey pitched exclusively for the junior varsity as a freshman. I remember him pitching regularly for us. If he had pitched for the varsity I would have recalled it because he would have been the only freshman to do that during our time there. He might have thrown a few innings for the senior squad but I doubt it and found no evidence of it in box scores in the Courier News. It's likely that the photos were taken before the season started and that the rosters were not fully set. Regardless, the fact that he is in the team photo of the varsity as a freshman shows how high a regard baseball coach Frank Matullo had for his abilities. Joey would have loved playing for Matullo, and yet of his own choosing he never did
Why did Joey quit interscholastic sports? I always suspect he hated the regimentation of school and rebelled. He felt much of the school work required was of no use to him. We were all drinking a lot on weekends, but I’m sure he was also drinking week days since he didn’t have to go to school or get up early. He couldn’t play basketball or baseball if he was no longer a student. It's debatable whether he He would have made a noticeable difference on the record of our basketball team, but I know for certain he would have had a dramatic impact on our 1966 baseball team. He was that good. If he had played I believe we would have won the state championship. We almost did win it without him.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but Joey and I came from two utterly different milieux. Or perhaps I was aware of it but didn’t fully understand how great the difference was. The great advantage of a public high school is that it reduces the importance of social standing. But the differences in privilege and upbringing still exist. It’s easier for people of moderate or advanced means to raise children than people who struggle with lower incomes. I visited Joey’s house one time and met his mother. They were a low income family and she was different than the mothers of my other friends who were decidedly more stylish and attractive. She may have been poorly educated. It was a small house on a back street in Stirling and decidedly more crowded than our ten-bedroom house because the family had seven members. Joey had three brothers— one older, two younger— who were less gifted than he was. And he had a younger sister.
I come from limited privilege, but it was privilege nonetheless. My family was large and although my father never made much money, we had grandparents who helped us. My paternal grandparents virtually gave us the house we lived in. My mother’s father, Dr. Charles Potter of Washington, N. J. at times provided the lion’s share of income for our family. He owned a modern, glass-fronted lake house in northwestern N. J, where we vacationed for two months every summer. Joey spent most of his summers in Stirling, a town with a large population of Italian immigrants or their descendants who had moved there from New York City, Newark and other cities in the New York Metropolitan area. I suppose he visited the Jersey shore on occasion like we all did, but I doubt he ever had a real vacation. I don’t believe he ever had the money to buy a car in his short life.
I did get to play baseball with Joey one last time in the summer of 1965 before our senior year began. It was in the Elks Junior Baseball League in Plainfield. More on that later.
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