BY THOMAS ZAMBITO DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Sunday, March 06, 2005
He'd hold the ball out there for what seemed like two or three seconds, taunting me to block it and then - flick - he'd drop another jumper on my head.
Back then, in the late 1970s, Chris was the point guard on our St. Thomas Aquinas elementary school team and just a few inches taller than me. A later growth spurt got him to 6-7.
I was a backup point guard who could dribble a little and chase down loose balls but that was about it. My, uh, growth spurt, got me to about 5-4. When we embrace after not seeing one another for more than 20 years, I catch him just above the belt.
Behind his desk is a photo of his four kids - three boys and a girl - and a multi-colored tie drawn by one of them.
Our parents have died. We both were there when our fathers took their last breaths and when our children came into the world. Death and life.
He's made more money in one year than I expect to in a lifetime. My mother used to joke that when that Mullin boy signs his first million-dollar contract she was going to call and tell him he had to pay for the garage panel he kicked in while trying to dunk on our backyard hoop. She never did but told the story every time his name came up.
"I pulled down your rim, didn't I?," he remembers. "Did I run?"
We are raising our kids in places far different from the one where we grew up - the mostly middle class, mostly Irish and Italian-Catholic sections of Flatlands and Marine Park. He does his best to hold his tongue when his kids start to complain about life in an East Bay suburb but sometimes he slips and his kids will mock him.
"Dad, you grew up in Brooklyn," one of the boys said a few weeks ago. "I grew up in Danville. I'm a spoiled brat."
The Mullins were the best of the Irish-Catholic basketball families in our neighborhood, some with starting fives living under one roof. The Boyles, the Marcottes, the O'Briens, the O'Reillys, the Dunleavys. Dunleavy's father - the Los Angeles Clippers' head coach of the same name - and his uncle starred at Brooklyn's Nazareth High School. The house on Troy Avenue was a magnet for neighborhood kids who came to test themselves against the Mullin boys on the hoop at the end of the driveway. All four - Roddy, Chris, John and Terence - would score college basketball scholarships.
Mullin's mother Eileen took care of the water breaks. "It was never 'who are these screaming kids in my backyard?' It was 'who wants lemonade, who wants to stay for a barbecue?'" says Joe Smith, a childhood friend and a sergeant in the NYPD.
It all started there.
"Part of me goes there every day," Mullin says. "Part of my mind goes there, back to Troy Avenue, to my parents, to what I learned there."
Our formal basketball education took place a few blocks away at St. Thomas on a slippery green tile floor, taught by coaches who crammed six or eight of us into tiny cars for away games. It was a time before car pools, soccer moms and meddlesome parents.
"It was drive the kid up to the gym and leave him with the coach," remembers Jack Alesi, our eighth grade coach and the varsity coach at our alma mater, Xaverian High School. "It was the way it was then."
Chris' father Rod worked as a customs inspector at Kennedy Airport, often toiling through the night. Now, in between trade talks, Mullin arranges car pools and picks up his kids. "You feeling a little better?" Mullin asks his son, who's picked up the phone. "What do you think you got?"
Former St. John's coach Lou Carnesecca was on to Mullin as early as fifth or sixth grade. Carnesecca walked into the St. Thomas gym while we were practicing and called Chris by his first name. We were floored. "We had the early book on him," Carnesecca says. "You knew he was going to be something special."
As he got older, the neighborhood game was no longer a challenge. Chris went off to Foster Park or the Riverside Church league where he went against the best players in the city. The rest of us stayed behind.
