WE are out. We are in the cold. We are Charlie Bucket, our noses pressed up against the candy-store window, close enough to sniff the Everlasting Gobstoppers (and see the Golden Tickets wrapped around them), but far enough away that we might as well be sitting in a silo in Iowa.
The NIT opened last night, the NCAA Tournament tomorrow, and both march merrily forward without one smidgen of representation for Greater New York.
St. John’s is home. Fordham is home. Manhattan is home. Out on the Island, Hofstra and Stony Brook are home. In Jersey, Rutgers is home and so is Seton Hall, after rejecting a bid from the new Collegiate Basketball Invitational.
Iona? LIU? Marist? St. Francis? Wagner? Army? Columbia? Home. Home. Home. Home. Home. Home. Home.
The closest thing we have to a representative anywhere in March is Rider, out of the MAAC, which played Old Dominion in a CBI first-round game last night. And even that is a stretch, because Rider’s campus in Lawrenceville, NJ, sits 58 miles from Manhattan, and only 39 miles from the Philadelphia city line.
Which may be the most appropriate bit of symbolism there is. Because right now, this year, this week, today, if you care about college basketball in the Northeast Corridor, you channel W.C, Fields.
On the whole, you’d rather be in Philadelphia.
Three weeks ago, they were singing a similar tune on the other end of the Turnpike, where college hoops is a secular religion. The idea of March Madness minus the Big Five was a source of real angst. And then St. Joseph’s beat Xavier, and Villanova beat Syracuse, and Temple went and ran the table at the Atlantic 10 Tournament in Atlantic City.
And now Philly is phlush. While our season has been flushed.
“I think it’s great that three Philadelphia teams got in,” Temple coach Fran Dunphy recently told the Philadelphia Daily News. “I think it shows the level of basketball here in Philadelphia and the Big Five.”
And emphasizes just how far ahead of the game schools in that city are, as compared to their haughtier cousins 90 miles away. The Philly schools certainly don’t work in collusion with each other, but they do tend to follow similar blueprints that have allowed them to maintain a certain level of success year after year. Consider:
Each of the Big Five schools plays precisely in the league it belongs in. St. Joe’s, Temple and La Salle anchor the A-10. Villanova has been a Big East staple for 28 years. Penn has long been the pride of the Ivies, even if it has fallen on lean times. They know who they are. They are committed to who they are.
In New York? St. John’s has neither played, recruited, nor spent like a Big East team in years, and the decay is starting to take. Hofstra, the winningest area program over the past 10 years, never should have left the America East, and if it was feeling frisky should have waited for an invite to the A-10 before settling for the Colonial, pretending its campus was on the Mason-Dixon line and not Hempstead Turnpike. And Fordham has been all over the map, bailing on the conference it rightly belongs in (the MAAC), treading water in the Patriot League for a while before taking its antiquated facilities to the A-10.
In Philadelphia, the city is the star of everything the Big Five schools do. Dunphy played at La Salle, coached at Penn, works at Temple. Phil Martelli was born in Media, Pa., 12 miles west of downtown, played at Widener (14 miles away), coached at Bishop Kenrick in the suburbs and has been at St. Joe’s for 23 years. Jay Wright grew up in Churchville, Pa., 25 miles away.
St. John’s never has recovered from Mike Jarvis’ spurning of the city. Fordham’s best player, Bryant Dunston, went to St. John’s Prep, but only one other Ram hails from within the city borders. Only Hofstra has worked the city beat consistently, and its resulting success (save for this season) is no coincidence.
“It’s a real basketball brotherhood in this city,” Martelli said this week, which is appropriate for a city whose very name means brotherly love.
Philly knows what it is. New York knows what it used to be. That’s a big difference.