Somebody said Jack Curran should have been a priest, and somebody else said, he was.
This old-fashioned man, who coached basketball and baseball, and lived his faith, passed on Thursday at 82. The obits all said he never married, that he passed up college coaching jobs so he could take care of his mother, and how he pitched batting practice for Molloy into his late ‘70’s. “How’s your arm?” I would ask when I called for some old-fashioned city wisdom. “Not bad,” he would say. He blew out the arm in the minor leagues, which pushed him into coaching two sports for nearly six decades. A few hours after Curran passed, I received an email from a reader I did not know. Write something about Coach, it asked. Of course, I did not need to write a word. Three of my favorite writers at the Times have captured him perfectly: Vincent Mallozzi on Curran’s 50th anniversary: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/08/sports/ncaabasketball/08curran.html Dan Barry: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/10/nyregion/father-basketball-long-into-overtime-after-45-years-coach-still-teaches-layups.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm And Bruce Weber, in the obituary: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/15/sports/jack-curran-a-mentor-in-two-sports-dies-at-82.html?_r=0 So nobody needs me. But as a son of the city, I can remember him as a scrawny, big-eared red-headed sub with the good St. John’s basketball teams, intense, observant. I can remember my brother Peter, later a landmark basketball columnist in this town, playing both sports for Curran. As a younger reporter, I thought Curran was a bit single-minded, and probably so did his players. The older we got, the wiser he became. Funny how that works. In recent years, I went to Curran for wisdom, for opinion, for honesty. He knew what he knew. When area baseball coaches went along with the aluminum-bat lobby, Curran put together anecdotal impressions of youngsters being skulled by line drives that never should have traveled that fast. He lobbied his school to vote against the bats. It was the right thing to do, and he did it. This is what I wrote: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/14/sports/baseball/14vecsey.html He was proud of graduates like Jim Larranaga who went on to coach George Mason in the Final Four: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9403E7D71530F933A05750C0A9609C8B63 I must add, he agitated for every break, the way the John Woodens and Dean Smiths did. A friend who played for a Queens public school recalled how annoying Curran could be, pestering the refs and the umpires. But his players were well-taught, my friend added, and they were tough. Dan Barry noted the yin/yang of Jack Curran’s quotidian life, Mass, commuting across the bridge, coaching everybody, even kids on the opposing bench. Barry wrote how Curran balanced “his daily aggressive commands – ‘Box out!’ -- with that saying of St. Francis of Assisi he carries: ‘Preach the Gospel every day and when necessary, use words.’” Jack Curran kept that saying folded in his wallet. When people compared him to a priest, even in these complicated times, it was meant as an old-fashioned compliment. Comments about Jack Curran are welcome here.
Big Al
3/16/2013 05:18:00 am
Coach Curran was a true classic, a giant, like my Coach at Martin Van Buren, the great Marv Kessler. They were very different as people, yet in an odd way, very alike. They lived for coaching kids the right way to play ball and wanted nothing else. They were very much Queens guys, the same age, friends forever, and I greatly enjoyed playing Father Curran's Molloy teams in Briarwood. Jack never cursed. Marv was a coach impersonating a longshoreman or a sailor. Both were legends without a doubt.
George Vecsey
3/16/2013 05:41:29 am
Al, it's a good thing Marv showed you how to hold Kevin Joyce to 40 or 50 points. Probably, Coach Curran was berating Joyce, if less colorfully. Great days. GV
Richard T.
3/16/2013 05:52:07 am
A great tribute to a great person. On hearing the news of Coach Curran's passing on Thursday, there was one universal theme that stood out in the e-mails of my Molloy classmates and other Stanners: the fulfilling purpose of life Coach Curran had in guiding and shaping the lives of countless young men. He never waivered in his principles and values and instilled great pride in all of us.
Big Al
3/16/2013 01:15:51 pm
George V.,
Mike C
3/16/2013 02:20:32 pm
RIP Coach Curran,love the St Francis quote. Thanks as always for the point of view and candor George. The first time I saw him in action was in 1974 at the NY State Big Eight Basketball Tournament at Hofstra, his star players included Whitey Rigsby.
It's complicated
3/16/2013 03:55:07 pm
Not everyone who played for Curran loved him all the time. Famously, your brother wrote of his own experience in 1999:
Andy Tansey
3/17/2013 12:49:18 am
One thing that's complicated about my perspective is an admitted bias on my part that tends to respect authority, perhaps to a fault. I could never have played for Mr. Curran - no talent - and so I ran XC & track - no speed - and so I ran distance and never won a varsity medal. Back in those days, Mr. Curran still taught gym, and I remember his patience in teaching me how to shoot free throws. I felt privileged. That, and his recognition of the name, were my only connections.
George Vecsey
3/17/2013 04:09:34 am
The answer to these comments is: all of the above. My vision of Jack Curran comes from being a soccer player who got benched in high school. Curran was a steady and wise voice to a columnist in recent decades. Different role.
bruce picken
3/17/2013 11:06:27 am
george,
GeorgeVecsey
3/19/2013 01:17:20 am
Bruce, good to hear from you. Your Canadian sensibility (with your personal vantage point from Nara) keeps me on my toes. I do refer sometimes on my own site to the so-called World Series,if I remember. Then I am accused of being a communist or a kenyan or a fascist or something. Can't win. GV. 3/17/2013 12:15:41 pm
Bruce
Gene Palumbo
3/18/2013 11:37:09 am
In case you've gotten out of the habit of checking the Times every day to see if there’s a column by George, just wanted to let you know that he wrote one last week: "Where Are the Yankees I Loved to Hate." 6/14/2013 01:25:08 am
These girls are cute and smart, they deserve to be there. Good job, girls and good luck! 9/6/2013 02:24:36 am
May the soul of one of the best coach in the world will rest in peace. RIP. 1/14/2016 05:55:19 am
The topic of this post is Honoring Jack Curran, Lifer Coach. He is such a great person and I like to follow him because basketball is my favorite game. Comments are closed.
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Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online. The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal…. After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness. The progress stems mostly from three factors: First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot. Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.) Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year. “Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.” That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.” That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data. One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines. Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks. Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths. The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions. Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately Republican and white. Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.) *** From the great Maureen Dowd: As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop. But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels." --- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing. *** "Putting out the paper," we called it. Much more than nostalgia. ---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html Categories
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