Three coaches in Final Four reminder of Jews’ rich ties to city game

All basketball eyes are focused on San Antonio until Monday night’s NCAA ceremony and rightly so. History has already been made in that three of the four head coaches — Auburn’s Bruce Pearl, Duke’s Jon Scheyer (my youngest son, Luke, is a fourth-year manager for the Blue Devils) and Todd Golden of Florida — were bar mitzvahed. Their respective work ethics are second to none, and they are as imperfect as all of us. Hallelujah! Mazel tov! They are Jewish, brought up to celebrate Purim, Passover and Chanukah, yet their “religion” may as well be called “hoopism,” consistent with the 100-plus-year Jewish addiction and attachment to this glorious game.

There is Black Pride, Gay Pride, Hispanic Pride, MAGA Pride, and there’s always been Jewish Pride — you were exposed to being “different,” a minority, an outsider from an early age. You were taught about the Holocaust, the most loathsome acts of inhumanity in a deeply troubled world.

You were expected to be respectful to elders, to women, to teachers, and that “education” was your ticket to the “American Dream.” So you learned to strive, work, read; “be a doctor,” the mother whined; “a lawyer,” the father shouted; a teacher; “be happy, bubala,” said the grandma. Cause here comes the whisper embedded in your head: “Most of them hate us.”

Ah, but here’s a ball, an equalizer, a means to assimilate. Here is the bottom ladder of a fire escape, a half-moon backboard on Mosholu Parkway, a Settlement Home on the Lower East Side built by the architects of the turn-of-the-century honest Progressive Movement. Take this roundball, child, use your rolled-up dirty sock bouncing off the bent hanger as a rim on your closed bedroom door dunking over your younger sibling, imitating the play-by-play voice of Marty Glickman or Marv Albert. That ball grew into the Voit. The fire escape ladder into backboards and rims, friends and competitors and teams, rules, coaches good and bad, into love, obsession, is there any difference at the start?