Mullin went to St. Thomas Aquinas out in the Flatlands section of Brooklyn while I was attending Immaculate Heart of Mary in Windsor Terrace. Every morning, Christ the same mornings for 8 years, Chris and I donned our white shirt, blue pants, navy tie with the school insignia as we shouldered our books to head off to school. Guys like us know Chris’s upbringing, because it was like ours. When I see images of his father, mother, and brothers I can see the Mullin family dinner table because it was a lot like ours, red faces, bad food, lots of laughs, sports talk and maybe a few arguments. He played the same street games we played like: stickball, Johnny on the Pony and Scully. I know Mully and his friends spent some time, like us, down Breezy Point during the summer. I know he went to Brennan and Carr's. And when he wasn’t playing ball he hung out with his friends at Kings Plaza. At the end of the night, he probably had a few pints at Nana Daly’s or the Jolly Bull too.
Chris and I graduated from high school in 1981, Chris from Xaverian (where my brother Jeff went) and me from John Dewey. Chris was on our radar early on but once he decided to attend St. John’s University in Queens, his legend grew. Mullin was heavily recruited, he could have chosen Indiana, UCLA, Duke….but he chose to stay close to home. As he likes to say, “I just went 12 miles down the Belt Parkway.” This meant something to us. At a time when white flight was real, when the threat of urban decay was scaring a lot of families to Long Island and New Jersey, the Mullins, like the Spinners, the O'Callaghans and the Savinos, stayed in Brooklyn. 1981 was also a time when not only were white people fleeing the city, on our tv's it felt like there were no white guys playing hoops. It seemed to be common knowledge that black guys were just better, naturally, at basketball. We all kind of believed it, we were disappointed but you had to look at the evidence. And along comes Chris Mullin. (And of course Larry Bird but this piece isn’t about Bird, he’s not from Brooklyn)
Chris was an underdog, a Catholic school gym rat, like Jackie Ryan from our neighborhood, who made it to the big time. We rooted for him for a lot of reasons. Christ, if he could be that good at something then maybe we could be too? When he was good, it gave us hope. The kid could flat out play the game. How much fun was it to watch him? Man could he shoot, but he also had a good eye for the court, could handle the ball and was unflappable under pressure, just like we all aspired to be. How many times did we watch Georgetown, the vaunted Georgetown team with Patrick Ewing, David Wingate, Reggie Williams (damn those guys were good and scary) throw their hornets nest of a press at St. John’s. And Mullin would slowly, he was slow, using ball fakes and feints, putting the ball behind his back, between the legs just “handle it.”
Freshman year at SUNY Buffalo, my buddy Ian, Eric Friedman and I brought our Brooklyn accents and our love of the Redmen, they’ll always be the Redmen to me, to Fargo Quad. And our circle of friends: Lynchy, Conroy, Dunleavy, the descentants of Brooklyn Irish who had moved to Long Island, joined us on the Mullin/St. John’s bandwagon. I remember once in the early 80’s we took a road trip from Buffalo to watch St. John’s take on Syracuse and Pearl Washington in the Carrier Dome. We were a spot of red in a sea of orange. That didn’t stop our full-throated cheering as testosterone and Brooklyn pride took over. The game is tied down the stretch, St. John’s has the ball and Mullin is fouled, big mistake. With 30,000 screaming SU fans doing all they can to distract Chris, he calmly sinks both free throws, just like we knew he would. St. John’s wins. That was a fun walk out of the Carrier Dome.
It wasn’t a race thing for us, (Magic is probably my fav) we were just so happy to have a white guy out there, doing well. It’s not racism when you see someone like you, and pull for that person is it? White guys are always sensitive to that I suppose. When the Puerto Rican community makes Roberto Clemente their own or the Italians root for Dimaggio what is that? Human nature? It just feels right to most of us. Fitting that Mullin came along and infused Catholic-school Brooklyn, Queens and The Bronx with a little confidence and pride right when Ronald Reagan was doing the same for the country. In the final days of the Carter Administration, with unemployment skyrocketing, and puppet regimes in Iran poking America in the eye with a stick, Reagan made us proud to be Americans again. Mullin was doing the same for guys like us. I know my friends and I played a lot more ball after Mullin came along. And we wouldn’t think twice about grabbing the round ball and heading to any number of courts around Brooklyn to play the city game. Sometimes we won, sometimes we lost. In the end, despite the fact that we walked a little taller and played with a little more heart, who did we think we were? Chris Mullin? Nah, there's only one of him. Congrats Mully, you made us all proud.
