Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

Sports

Gators coach, a Long Island native, nears a third title

ARLINGTON, Texas — The clearest memories are these: Kevin Quigley on his bicycle, legs pumping, barely on the right side of 11 o’clock, racing home from some party in Rockville Centre, another Long Island kid trying to make it home before curfew.

Usually this meant passing the house of his oldest friend and longest teammate, and Quigley knew what he would see because his friend, Billy Donovan, hadn’t been at the party with him. Because he was never at the party with him.

“Because,” Quigley says, “he was always in the driveway, working on his game.”

He laughs.

“Always.”

The lights would be on, the only ones on the block. The thud-thud-thud of basketball hitting concrete would be the only sound in the neighborhood other than the swish of the ball splashing through the net. And there were a few times the neighbors would call the Donovan house, ask if maybe the kid could pick up the drills in the morning.

“They’d ask politely,” Quigley says. “And, sometimes, not so politely.”

Quigley, now an investment manager, and Donovan began playing in the same Rockville Centre rec league when they were 8 years old. The first time they met, they were on different teams, and Quigley’s won 12-10. Quigley scored all 12 points for his club. Donovan scored all 10 for his.

“And a rivalry was born,” Quigley says.

So was a friendship. Two years later they teamed up for the St. Agnes CYO, and by the time Quigley was furiously pedaling past the Donovan home, they’d moved on to St. Agnes High, where they were coached by one of the forever names of Long Island basketball, Frank Morris.

More than 30 years later, Quigley will spend Saturday morning playing golf in a club event near his home in Hope Sound, Fla., and then he and a couple dozen friends will gather in the men’s grille just past six o’clock to watch Donovan’s Florida Gators play Connecticut in the first of two national semifinal games at AT&T Stadium.

“Of course back then, nobody could predict or project that Bill would be as successful as he’s become,” Quigley says of his pal, who will be seeking a third national championship this weekend, which would put him in some rarefied air with some remarkable names; only Jim Calhoun, Bob Knight, Mike Krzyzewski, Adolph Rupp and John Wooden have won as many as three titles.

“But you had to know he was going to do well at whatever it was he decided to do because he was always incredibly determined, and focused. And that was especially true when it came to basketball.”

There is a mythology that has grown in recent years, that Donovan was a laissez-faire player at Providence before Rick Pitino showed up and taught him the value of hard work. That’s not only unfair to Donovan’s father, Bill, who played at Boston College and from the jump instilled the work ethic that always has defined his son — but it also undersells Donovan’s own motivation.

There was the driveway, sure, but there were also hundreds of nights spent under the lights at Hickey Park, off Sunrise Highway. There was a playground in Hempstead where he and Quigley would occasionally venture dubbed “Termiteville” where they would meet their St. Agnes teammates Frank Williams (who played at Fordham) and Bernard Woodside (who played in the Final Four for LSU).

You’d better bring your “A” game to Termiteville, especially if you’d been dropped off from the leafier suburbs. Donovan loved it. He’d play all day, sometimes wind up shoved into the fences after a steal and a layup, to which Williams would often administer some playground justice.

“Nobody,” he would warn the regulars, “[expletive] with my point guard.”

Pitino didn’t know his name yet; it was Donovan who made himself into a terrific player, the engine on St. Agnes teams basketball folks on the Island still talk about even though the school’s been closed since 1987, a basketball laboratory that under Morris had already produced Brian Mahoney, Frank Alagia, A.J. Wynder, the Molloy brothers and the Cluess brothers.

“It was amazing,” said Quigley, who played college ball at Pace and who, along with Williams, Woodside and Mark DeBarros, rounded out the starting five that won the ’83 Catholic League. “I was the better ballplayer when we were in CYO, but by the time we got to high school he passed me and was in the fast lane and he stayed there. It was amazing to see the results he got from all his hard work.”

He laughed.

“It’s still amazing to watch,” he says.

And Quigley will watch again, just past 6 o’clock, and when he sees Donovan working the sidelines, he’ll remember the beacons of light on so many late nights in Rockville Centre, nights the neighbors thought would never end — and Billy Donovan hoped never would.