Friday, February 20, 2015

A00008 - Jack Curran, Legendary Archbishop Molloy Basketball Coach


Jack Curran, a Mentor in Two Sports, Dies at 82



Robert Caplin for The New York Times
Curran in 2008. He coached basketball and baseball over 55 years at Archbishop Molloy High School in Queens.

By 
Published: March 14, 2013
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Jack Curran, who coached generations of baseball and basketball players for 55 years at Archbishop Molloy High School in Queens, winning more than 2,600 games, certainly among the most victories that any scholastic coach anywhere has compiled, died late Wednesday or early Thursday at his home in Rye, N.Y. He was 82.

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Vic DeLucia/The New York Times
Curran with Kenny Anderson in 1986. Anderson was among a handful of Curran’s players who went on to play in the N.B.A.
His death was confirmed by Richard Karsten, president of Molloy. Curran had lung and kidney problems, and had broken a kneecap in a fall in February.
“But we were expecting him back in a few weeks, in time to coach the baseball season,” Karsten said.
In 1958, Curran was living in West Springfield, Mass., and working as a building supplies salesman when one morning, over coffee in a diner, he read in a newspaper that St. John’s University, his alma mater, had hired Lou Carnesecca as an assistant basketball coach. Carnesecca had been the baseball and basketball coach at Molloy; Curran applied for the newly vacant jobs, was hired and held onto the positions for 55 years.
Molloy was a powerhouse under his leadership. His teams won 22 Catholic school New York City championships, 5 in basketball and 17 in baseball. Four times — in 1969, 1973, 1974 and 1987 — Molloy won both in the same year.
Curran coached Brian Winters, Kenny Smith, Kenny Anderson and Kevin Joyce, all of whom played in the N.B.A. The current Mets outfielder Mike Baxter played baseball at Molloy for Curran.
Over all, Curran’s record was 972-437 as a basketball coach and 1,708-523 as a baseball coach, the school said.
“He won everything except World War III,” Carnesecca, who spent 24 seasons as the head coach at St. John’s, said about Curran in a 2008 interview in The New York Times. “No one in the country has Jack’s record in both sports, no one.”
Curran, who never married, leaves no immediate survivors. His place of birth could not be confirmed. The school said he was born on Sept. 6, 1930, the son of a New York City police officer, Thomas Curran, and his wife, Helen, who worked for a time in the police commissioner’s office. They lived in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, the school said, but moved to the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx, where Jack grew up.
He graduated from All Hallows High School in the Bronx and went on to St. John’s, where he studied English and pitched for the baseball team. For three years he played minor league baseball, pitching for teams in the Brooklyn Dodgers and Philadelphia Phillies organizations.
As a coach, Curran was known for emphasizing fundamentals, for maintaining discipline and for setting the performance bar at an extraordinarily high level for both his players and the officials — he could be tough on the referees and the umpires.
“Yes, but he was rarely profane or abusive,” said Tom Konchalski, a friend and a widely acknowledged expert on scholastic basketball in New York City. “In 55 years he only had four or five technicals. But yeah, all the top coaches, you try to win the game, so you ride the refs.”
In baseball, Curran was true to his playing roots, stressing pitching, defense and smart play. In basketball, he was more adaptive to the skills of his players.
“When he had his best teams, in the late ’60s, early ’70s, they were running, pressing teams,” Konchalski said. “He liked to pressure, push the ball up the floor. Later on he went to more set plays, and played more zone, because he didn’t think he had the players.”
He was also known for his strong Roman Catholic faith and for generous deeds away from the playing field. In 1969, he turned down an opportunity to take the basketball head coaching job at Boston College because his mother was dying and he was caring for her.
“He was the most selfless man I knew,” the Mets’ Baxter, who played for Curran from 2000 to 2002, told The Associated Press on Thursday. “He was so faithful and he just cared so much about the kids on his team, both on and off the court and the field. It really separated him; whether you were playing for him as a junior or senior or whether you were in college or looking for jobs, he would make sure to help you anyway he could. That never stopped to the last day.”


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Sunday, February 15, 2015

A00007 - Viola Liuzzo, Slain Civil Rights Activist

*Viola Liuzzo, a Unitarian Universalist civil rights activist, was killed.

Viola Fauver Gregg Liuzzo (April 11, 1925 – March 25, 1965) was a Unitarian Universalist civil rights activist from Michigan. In March 1965, Liuzzo, then a housewife and mother of five with a history of local activism, heeded the call of Martin Luther King, Jr. and traveled from Detroit, Michigan to Selma, Alabama, in the wake of the Bloody Sunday attempt at marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Liuzzo participated in the successful Selma to Montgomery marches and helped with coordination and logistics. Driving back from a trip shuttling fellow activists to the Montgomery airport, she was shot by members of the Ku Klux Klan. She was 39 years old.
One of the four Klansmen in the car from which the shots were fired was Federal Bureau of Investigation  (FBI) informant Gary Rowe. Rowe testified against the shooters and was moved and given an assumed name by the FBI. The FBI later leaked what were purported to be salacious details about Liuzzo which were never proved or substantiated in any way.
Liuzzo's name is today inscribed on the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. 

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A00006 - James Reeb, Fallen Hero of the Selma Marches

*James Reeb, a Unitarian Universalist minister, pastor, and civil rights activist, died from head injuries suffered .from being severely beaten while participating in the Selma Voting Rights Movement.
James Reeb (January 1, 1927 – March 11, 1965) was an American Unitarian Universalist minister and a pastor and civil rights activist in Washington, D.C. While participating in the Selma Voting Rights marches in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, he was beaten severely by white segregationists and died of head injuries two days later in the hospital. He was 38 years old.
Reeb was born on January 1, 1927 in Wichita, Kansas, to Mae (Fox) and Harry Reeb.  He was raised in Kansas and Casper, Wyoming.  He graduated from St. Olaf College and attended Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, New Jersey and ordained a Presbyterian ministers after graduation. 
A member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Reeb came to Selma to join protests for African American voting rights following the attack by state troopers and sheriff's deputies on nonviolent demonstrators on March 7, 1965. After eating dinner at an integrated restaurant March 9, Reeb and two other Unitarian ministers Reverend Clark Olsen and Reverend Orloff Miller, were attacked and beaten by white men armed with clubs. Several hours elapsed before Reeb was admitted to a Birmingham hospital where doctors performed brain surgery. While Reeb was on his way to the hospital in Birmingham, Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed a press conference lamenting the ‘‘cowardly’’ attack and asking all to pray for his protection. Reeb died two days later. His death resulted in a national outcry against the activities of white racists in the Deep South.
Reeb’s death provoked mourning throughout the country, and tens of thousands held vigils in his honor. President Johnson called Reeb’s widow and father to express his condolences, and on March 15  he invoked Reeb’s memory when he delivered a draft of the Voting Rights Act to Congress. 
In April 1965, three white men were indicted for Reeb’s murder; they were acquitted that December. The Voting Rights Act was passed on August 6, 1965.
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Tuesday, February 10, 2015

A00005 - Richard McBrien, Dissenting Catholic Theologian

Rev. Richard McBrien, Dissenting Catholic Theologian, Dies at 78

By 
The Rev. Richard McBrien in his office at Notre Dame in 2006. Father McBrien wrote 25 books and a long-running column. Peter Thompson for The New York Times
The Rev. Richard P. McBrien, a theologian and professor at Notre Dame who unflinchingly challenged orthodoxy in the Roman Catholic Church for five decades and popularized and perpetuated the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, died on Sunday at his home in Farmington, Conn. He was 78.
The University of Notre Dame, which announced his death, said he had a rare brain disorder. He retired in 2013 and had recently returned to Connecticut, where he was born and raised.
“No Catholic theologian in the United States has made a larger contribution to the reception of Vatican II than Richard McBrien did,” the Rev. Charles E. Curran, a professor of human values at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said in an interview on Tuesday.
After he was ordained in 1962, Father McBrien, the son of an Irish-American police officer and an Italian-American nurse, wrote 25 books and a nationally syndicated weekly column. He became the chairman of the theology department at Notre Dame, president of the Catholic Theological Society of America and a consultant during the making of the 2006 movie “The Da Vinci Code.”
“At his peak in the 1980s and ’90s,” The National Catholic Reporter said in its obituary, “it is arguable that McBrien had a higher media profile than anyone in the Catholic Church other than Pope John Paul II. He was the ideal interview: knowledgeable, able to express complex ideas in digestible sound bites, and utterly unafraid of controversy.”
That fearlessness manifested itself in his outspoken support for the ordination of women as priests, the repeal of obligatory celibacy and the acceptance of birth control; his defiance of the papal doctrine of infallibility; and his willingness to publicly confront the crisis of pedophilia in the priesthood. (He called for the resignation of Cardinal Bernard F. Law of Boston shortly after it was revealed in 2001 that he had kept abusive priests working in parishes. Cardinal Law stepped down in December 2002.)
In 1984, in collaboration with the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, Notre Dame’s president, Father McBrien invited Gov. Mario M. Cuomo of New York to speak at Notre Dame to reconcile his personal convictions as a Roman Catholic with what he saw as his public responsibility in a pluralistic society to uphold access to abortion.
That extraordinary address by Mr. Cuomo, who died this month, came after his public debate with the new archbishop of New York, John J. O’Connor, who said he did not see “how a Catholic in good conscience can vote for a candidate who explicitly supports abortion” — a circle that included Mr. Cuomo and Geraldine A. Ferraro, that year’s Democratic nominee for vice president.
Father McBrien told The National Catholic Reporter in 2012: “If there are any reasons for the bad patch the church is now going through, it is the appointments to the hierarchy and the promotions within made by John Paul and Benedict. By and large, they have all been conservative. That’s why so many Catholics have left the church, are on extended vacations, or are demoralized or discouraged.”
Richard Peter McBrien was born on Aug. 19, 1936, and grew up in West Hartford, Conn. He earned a bachelor’s degree from St. Thomas Seminary in Bloomfield, Conn., and a master’s from St. John Seminary in Brighton, Mass.
His first assignment as a priest was at Our Lady of Victory Church in New Haven. He obtained a doctorate at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, where he was captivated by the work of the French Dominican theologian Yves Congar.
Father McBrien taught at the Pope John XXIII National Seminary in Weston, Mass., and Boston College, and in 1975 was named the first visiting fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. In 1980, he was recruited by Father Hesburgh to serve as chairman of Notre Dame’s theology department, ostensibly to fortify its Catholic character. Father McBrien had no illusions about the symbolism of his new position.
“At other universities, if they are less Catholic than they should be, it doesn’t have the same effect,” he said. “If Notre Dame went secular, it would be like turning St. Patrick’s Cathedral into a restaurant.”
But he differed with doctrinarians over the definition of a theologian, contrasting it with the catechist, whose role is to present the unalloyed fundamentals of Catholic belief.
“The theologian’s job,” he said, “is one of critically reflecting on that tradition or raising questions about it, even challenging it, and that’s how doctrines evolve and move forward.”
He was chairman until 1991, then president of the faculty senate, and remained a professor until his retirement. He is survived by his brother, Harry, and his sister, Dorothy Heffernan.
Father McBrien was never formally rebuked for his forthrightness, but since the 1990s, a number of diocesan newspapers had dropped his column. The Committee on Doctrine of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops,reviewing his book “Catholicism” in 1996, complained that it made “inaccurate or at least misleading” statements that allowed or stimulated readers “to make a choice” about the virgin birth of Jesus, homosexuality, women’s ordination and other doctrines.
Father McBrien had anticipated that criticism. “There is only one Christian faith,” he wrote, “but there have been literally thousands of beliefs held and transmitted at one time or another” — some of which endured, while others “have receded beyond the range of vision or even of collective memory.”
He also wrote “The Church and Politics,” “Lives of the Popes” and “Lives of the Saints,” among other books, and was general editor of The Encyclopedia of Catholicism.
Father McBrien maintained that the church, grounded as it was in egalitarianism, would do better to beatify regular holy folk with whom most Catholics could identify.
“Saints are examples rather than miracle workers or intercessors,” he said. “They are signs of what it means to be human in the fullest and best sense of the word. Which is also why the church has been wrong to have canonized so many priests and nuns rather than married lay people who lived ordinary lives in extraordinary ways, rejoicing in their children and grandchildren and doing good for so many others.”

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A00004 - Dean Smith, Legendary College Basketball Coach and Champion of Racial Equality


Coach Dean Smith, Champion of College Basketball and of Racial Equality, Dies at 83

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Dean Smith, the North Carolina basketball coach, after the Tar Heels defeated Georgetown for the N.C.A.A. championship in 1982. Pete Leabo/Associated Press


Dean Smith, who built the University of North Carolina men’s basketball team into a perennial national power in his 36 years at Chapel Hill and became one of the game’s most respected figures for qualities that transcended the court, died on Saturday in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 83.
The university announced his death. His family said in 2010 that he had a progressive neurological disorder that affected his memory.
Smith had 879 victories, fourth most among major college men’s basketball coaches, and his teams won two national championships.
But it was his values — his fight against racial discrimination when segregation was still prevalent in the South and his insistence that his players prepare themselves for a future beyond the game — that earned him an especially enduring stature.


President Obama awarded Smith the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, in November 2013, citing his “courage in helping to change our country” through his progressive views on race relations.


Michael Jordan and Smith at a ceremony in 2007 that honored the championship North Carolina teams of 1957 and 1982. Ellen Ozier/Reuters

In a statement released after Smith’s death, Mr. Obama said, “Coach Smith showed us something that I’ve seen again and again on the court — that basketball can tell us a lot more about who you are than a jump shot alone ever could.”
Michael Jordan, perhaps basketball’s greatest player, was among a host of all-Americans who played for Smith. Jordan issued a statement on Twitter saying that Smith was “more than a coach — he was a mentor, my teacher, my second father,” who had taught him not only about basketball but also about “the game of life.”
Like most successful coaches, Smith, a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame and a four-time national coach of the year, was adept at diagraming plays on a blackboard. But unlike many, he ran a program that was never accused of N.C.A.A. violations, and about 97 percent of his players graduated.
And for all the future N.B.A. stars he turned out, he emphasized unselfish team play, encouraging a shooter who made a basket to point to the teammate who got the assist.
Smith, drawing on a moral code implanted by his parents in Depression-era Kansas, broke racial barriers in a changing South. While still an assistant at North Carolina, Smith integrated a popular restaurant in Chapel Hill where the basketball team, all white at the time, often ate, accompanying a visiting black theology student for a meal there.
And he recruited Charlie Scott, an outstanding high school forward from New York City, who became the first black basketball star in the Atlantic Coast Conference, in the late 1960s, and an N.B.A. All-Star with the Phoenix Suns.
“My father said, ‘Value each human being,’ ” Smith recalled in “A Coach’s Life” (1999), written with John Kilgo and Sally Jenkins. “Racial justice wasn’t preached around the house, but there was a fundamental understanding that you treated each person with dignity.”


Smith after North Carolina’s 1993 N.C.A.A. title.Rich Clarkson Associates

North Carolina-Duke became a classic basketball rivalry, but for all its frenzy, Smith’s rival on the sidelines, Blue Devils Coach Mike Krzyzewski, was an admirer.
“I can’t think of a time I’ve ever heard him blame or degrade one of his own players, and in return his kids are fiercely loyal to him,” Krzyzewski told Sports Illustrated in 2005, adding: “He had a style that no one’s ever going to copy. To be that smart, to be that psychologically aware, that good with X’s and O’s — with that system, and to always take the high road — that just isn’t going to happen again.”
Krzyzewski said in a statement Sunday, “His greatest gift was his unique ability to teach what it takes to become a good man.”
Dean Edwards Smith was born on Feb. 28, 1931, in Emporia, Kan., where his father, Alfred, was a teacher and the high school basketball coach, and his mother, Vesta, also taught.
Smith’s parents instilled a sense of racial tolerance in him, in a highly segregated state, long before the modern civil rights movement. His father put a black player, Paul Terry, on his 1933-34 team, which won the state championship, although Terry was barred from playing in the state tournament by Kansas sports officials.
When Smith was 15, his family moved to Topeka. He played basketball, football and baseball in high school and received an academic scholarship to the University of Kansas.
Smith was a 5-foot-10-inch substitute guard on the Kansas team coached by Phog Allen that won the 1952 N.C.A.A. championship, and he became immersed in a basketball heritage that stretched to James Naismith, the inventor of the game, who had coached Allen at Kansas.


Smith with guard Jimmy Black after North Carolina won the N.C.A.A. title in 1982. Jordan made the winning shot. Associated Press

After stints as an assistant coach at Kansas and the Air Force Academy, Smith was hired in 1958 as an assistant to Frank McGuire, who had taken North Carolina to an undefeated season and an N.C.A.A. championship in 1957 with a triple-overtime victory over Smith’s alma mater, Kansas, and Wilt Chamberlain. When McGuire became the Philadelphia Warriors’ coach in 1961, Smith succeeded him.
Smith was only 30 years old, he had never been a collegiate head coach, and he inherited a program that was serving a year’s N.C.A.A. probation for recruiting violations.
Smith’s first North Carolina team went 8-9. In January 1965, he was hanged in effigy on campus after the Tar Heels were routed on the road by Wake Forest. But he began to attract talented players, and in the late 1960s his teams went to the N.C.A.A. tournament’s Final Four three consecutive times.


Smith’s first N.C.A.A. championship came in 1982 when Jordan, a freshman at the time, sank the winning basket in a 63-62 victory over Georgetown. His second N.C.A.A. title came in 1993 with a 77-71 triumph over Michigan. His Tar Heels also won the 1971 National Invitation Tournament.
Smith’s teams won 13 A.C.C. tournaments and appeared in 11 Final Fours. He had 27 consecutive 20-victory seasons and coached the United States gold medal team at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., in 1983.
Smith’s 879 victories at North Carolina were an N.C.A.A. Division I record when he retired in October 1997, having eclipsed Adolph Rupp’s 876 victories at Kentucky. Among men’s coaches, only Krzyzewski, Jim Boeheim of Syracuse and Bob Knight, who has retired, have won more games.
Smith popularized the Four Corners, a spread offense in which the point guard does most of the ball-handling, with the other players remaining for a time at the edges of the frontcourt. He used that offense to slow things down when he was ahead late in the game or simply to assert control earlier. But he prided himself on being flexible, using an up-tempo offense as well, and his teams pressured opponents with tenacious defense.


In the 1991 Final Four, Kansas, coached by Roy Williams, left, played North Carolina, coached by Smith. Williams, who was a longtime assistant coach under Smith before coaching at Kansas, returned to North Carolina as head coach in 2003. Bob Jordan/Associated Press

“My basketball philosophy boils down to six words,” Smith said in “The Carolina Way” (2004), written with Gerald D. Bell and John Kilgo. “Play hard; play together; play smart.”
Smith regularly attended Baptist church services and said Christianity provided him with a moral code. He once signed a petition against the death penalty, and in “A Coach’s Life” he wrote: “What do you call the worst human beings you know? Human beings loved by the Creator!”
Many of Smith’s players became basketball coaches or executives, including Jordan, Larry Brown, Billy Cunningham, George Karl, Mitch Kupchak and Doug Moe.
Smith outlined his strategy in “Basketball: Multiple Offense and Defense” (1981).
He retired with a career record of 879-254 and was succeeded by his longtime assistant Bill Guthridge. The North Carolina basketball arena is the Dean E. Smith Center.

Smith is survived by his wife, Linnea, and their daughters, Kristen and Kelly; his daughters Sharon and Sandy, and a son, Scott, from his marriage to his first wife, Ann, which ended in divorce; a sister, Joan Ewing; seven grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
Smith considered himself essentially a teacher.
Matt Doherty, a forward for Smith’s 1982 N.C.A.A. champions and later the head coach at North Carolina, told Sports Illustrated: “In a team meeting once, we were going over a trapping defense, and he referred to ‘the farthest point down the court.’ Then he stopped and said: ‘You know why I said “farthest,” not “furthest”? Because far — F-A-R — deals with distance.’ That’s an English lesson I got with the basketball team, and I’ve never forgotten it.”
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