Rage. Peter Golenbock
have to do something eventually.
With only thirty seconds left in the game, Wilby changed to a man-to-man, and at that point we went to our man-to-man offense. The ball was again passed to me; I made a layup, and was fouled. When I made the free throw, we led by five, and it was enough to seal what was an incredible, improbable victory. The joy I felt was unrestrained.
The upset of Wilby was a sterling victory, and I was fiercely proud of my role in it.
After the game ended, the thrill of victory lingered. The sportswriters went to talk to a smiling Coach Sullivan. Sullivan took the credit for our holding the ball; I couldn’t believe it.
The storyline should have led with how senior guard Bill Denehy’s brilliant strategy had won the game against Wilby, but instead Coach Sullivan hogged the glory. His lack of morality angered me so, and my joy was dimmed considerably.
As we were boarding the bus to go back to Middletown, I was one of the last players to get on. I was still aglow with the thrill of the upset when Coach Sullivan pulled me aside and said to me angrily, “Listen, I’m the coach. Don’t you ever pull that shit again.”
Didn’t we just win the game? I thought to myself.
In my rage over what he said, I was also thinking something else: My cleverness was what earned my team an improbable victory over a team we had no right to beat, and this lying son of a bitch refused to acknowledge my role in it.
Coach Sullivan and I had never had much of a rapport, and we never would.
My senior year at Woodrow Wilson we had three players who were six foot three or taller, and we won the conference basketball championship. We should have won state, too. The ego and pigheadedness of our coach kept us from going all the way.
The first time we played rival Middletown High School, we won by twenty points. Middletown High was a much faster team. Before our second meeting I went to Coach Sullivan and said to him, “Listen, we’re a big, bullish team. That’s why when we play small teams, we kill them, because they can’t run with us and they aren’t as strong as we are. Middletown is a small team, and the next time we play them, instead of playing our usual offense, why don’t we bully them?”
Coach Sullivan, once an excellent finesse player in his own right, wasn’t comfortable playing rough, and he wasn’t about to play the game that way. “I’m the coach,” he told me. “I know you went to basketball camp for a couple of years and you think you know basketball, but I’m the coach, and we’re going to play it the way I set it up.”
I bit my lip and held my tongue. In the rematch against Middletown, we did it his way; they held the ball, and they beat us. Middletown went on to win the state championship, a championship that could have been ours, if not for Coach Sullivan.
A new conference MVP award was inaugurated that year, and after our loss to Middletown in the conference championship, they held a ceremony. The award was presented to Middletown High School’s Bill Brown, who had eighteen rebounds and twenty points.
Before the announcement of the winner, players from both teams lined up on the court, and I was standing there stewing about the fact we had lost when I heard Brown’s name announced as the MVP. I walked off the court in a blind rage and made a beeline for our locker room.
Spectators whispered that I had left because I hadn’t won the award, but that wasn’t it at all. I couldn’t have cared less about the award. I walked off the court because I was so fucking pissed off that we had lost a game that we should have won. Jim Sullivan didn’t do anything to help us win, we lost, and that pissed me off royally.
That week Sullivan called me and the other two captains of the Woodrow Wilson High basketball team into his office.
“We want to send a letter to Middletown wishing them luck in the tournament,” he said.
To his face I told him, “They’re our biggest rivals, and I didn’t feel we played them to the best of our capabilities, and I refuse to sign it.” He talked about sportsmanship. “It has nothing to do with sportsmanship,” I said. “It has everything to do with winning.” And I walked out.
My anger was so great that I also refused to go to the end-of-season party with my teammates. A couple of friends brought a case of beer. We walked into the woods and got drunk.
I told my two buddies how fucking pissed off I was that we had done nothing to change the offense. I told them exactly what we could have done to win the game. Yes, I had gone to Bob Pettit’s basketball camp for two years and I had learned a lot. But was that any reason for Sullivan not to listen to me? I will never forgive Coach Sullivan for as long as I live.
I didn’t play college basketball, despite my size and talent, because I wanted to go to St. Bonaventure University to play both basketball and baseball. But during my senior year, St. Bonaventure announced it was dropping baseball from its curriculum.
I had had dreams of playing college basketball, but after St. Bonaventure dropped baseball, I decided to concentrate on becoming a professional baseball player. Sounds silly, but that’s how kids think sometimes. Baseball was starting to be fun, and after going from wild and inconsistent to domineering on the pitcher’s mound, I wanted to see what the pros had to offer.
After the money offers to play baseball started to come in, I thought, Why am I going to go to school? To get a job? I can start a job right now and start making some money.
When baseball season rolled around my senior year, I approached the game with more maturity. For reasons I will never understand, I abandoned the easy three-quarter motion Bots Nekola had taught me. Maybe it was too easy. Maybe I felt I wasn’t working hard enough. Maybe I was self-destructive. I can’t honestly say why. But I returned to my overpowering overhand fastball, and my senior year I was a force to be reckoned with.
Woodrow Wilson needed to beat Middletown to get to the state finals. I pitched fourteen innings, striking out twenty-six batters in that game. On that day, in my mind, I asked myself who else was in my class as a pitcher. Christy Mathewson, Bob Feller, and Sandy Koufax came to mind.
In the Connecticut State Tournament we won our first two games, and then I threw a one-hitter against Northwest Regional High School, led by pitcher John Lamb, who would later play for the Pittsburgh Pirates, and we won the game 3–0. I could have had a no-hitter, but our shortstop fielded the ball and slipped as he made the throw.
That game was played on a Wednesday, and the final game of the tournament against Seymour High School was to be played on a Saturday. It didn’t occur to me that I wasn’t going to pitch, but our coach, Gene Pehota, announced that John Hudak would start the game.
Pehota explained to the local reporter, “Bill has a chance to play professional baseball, and he just pitched eleven innings, and we don’t want him to hurt his arm.”
Just about every player on the team and many of their parents went to Coach Pehota and told him his reasoning was bullshit.
“We’re playing for the state championship,” they told him. “You can’t do that.”
Nevertheless, Coach Pehota stuck to his guns. But it rained on game day, the game was postponed until the next Monday, and I was named the starter.
Seymour High was located somewhere in the Naugatuck Valley, about fifty miles away. We had never played them before. I only knew about one player they had, a fine outfielder and left-handed pitcher named Milt Cochrane. I struck out the first ten batters I faced. Once I did that, it was just a question of whether we were going to score. Seymour didn’t have a chance. We walked away champions of all the Class B high schools in Connecticut.
After the game we drove the bus past rival Middletown High blasting the horn, and we kept blasting it all the way down Main Street. No one expected us to be in the championship game in the first place. My great disappointment is that, to this day, our team has never gotten the acclaim that the 1964 Middletown High School basketball team got when they won it all. There was no parade and no celebration. Our team isn’t even