It was the Tuesday of Final Four week in basketball-mad Louisville, so naturally Bob Valvano was going to have Dick Vitale on his midday show on ESPN680 radio. Before they chatted, Vitale sent him a note: “Let’s talk off the air.”
Valvano went to a commercial. And Vitale gave him the most amazing news: “Jim’s going in the Hall of Fame. It’s official.”
A thousand things swirled through Valvano’s mind, so many memories of his big brother, his ticket punched to Springfield, Mass. Before he got too carried away, Vitale offered a caveat: “Keep it to yourself! They want to make a big announcement this weekend! Don’t tell anyone!”
“Naturally,” Bob Valvano says, laughing, “I immediately told everyone.”
The best call was to his brother, Nick, the oldest Valvano brother. Bob delivered the news that Jim, the middle of Rocco and Angelina’s three boys, was going to the Hall.
“That’s funny,” Nick told Bob. “I thought he was already there.”
And, you know, he wasn’t alone. Valvano was such an outsized force in life, and succeeded in just about everything he tried — coach, announcer, motivational speaker — it was easy to assume he’d already taken his place among the game’s immortals. Nowhere does his impact still resonate more than around here, where he grew up in Corona, Queens at St. Leo’s Parish, played high school ball at Seaford and collegiately at Rutgers then all but invented big-time hoops at Iona.
True story: when he first got the job at Iona, Jim was introducing himself to every high school coach with any player who could possibly help the Gaels. To one he was straight forward enough: “Hi, Jim Valvano, Iona College.”
“Young guy like you?” the coach replied. “You own the whole thing?”
All these years later, everyone who knew Valvano treasures their Valvano stories. It was 40 years ago Tuesday that his N.C. State Wolfpack crafted one of the forever Cinderella stories in the NCAA Tournament, beating Houston for the title. In three weeks, it’ll be 30 years since he lost a fight to cancer a month after delivering the “don’t give up” speech at the first-ever ESPY awards.
“It’s why I love March because I know I’ll always see Jim twice,” Bob says. “Every year they play that ESPY speech on the anniversary [March 4], and every year they show him running around the court in Albuquerque like a maniac, spinning around and running.”
He pauses.
“And now,” he says, “we’ll always have the fact that he became a Hall of Famer in March, too.”
Jim’s enshrinement was probably delayed because of how things ended for him after 10 years at State, when he admitted he’d been juggling too many balls and failed to tend to the details of his program. He was 337-200 across 18 years at Bucknell, Iona and State, and only at State did he not have to build the program up from the dust.
He doesn’t go in as a coach, but as a contributor.
“I think he’d have been proud of that,” Bob says. “He always said the two hours you play basketball a day, that should be all that’s on your mind. But after that, be a force of good in your community. Affect people’s lives in a good way. I think that’s what’s being recognized.”
Jim Boeheim, the newly retired Syracuse coach, told Bob last week, “I feel sorry for the people in the world who never got to meet your brother” and together both men felt a melancholy twinge because, Bob’s words: “Jim’s acceptance speech would have been one for the ages.”
It means a lot to Bob to believe their father, Rocco, a longtime coach at Seaford, would have been thrilled at the news, too. Rocco was never far from Jim’s thoughts. Another true story: Rocco and Angelina were at an airport in North Carolina when Rocco looked up and saw his boyhood hero, Joe DiMaggio. He approached, Joe D was happy to chat, and Angelina told her sons later: “He looked like a 12-year-old boy,” which was important for them to hear because hours later Rocco died of a heart attack.
A few months later, Jim was at a dinner before the old Bing Crosby golf tournament and spotted DiMaggio in the buffet line. The two of them chatted. A few minutes later, Jim was white as a sheet when he returned to his table and his wife, Pam, asked: “Are you OK?”
“I think,” Jim said, “I may have just told Joe DiMaggio that he killed my old man.”
“A little sad, a little sweet, a little funny,” Bob says. “Isn’t that what he wanted?”
We’ll end with one more true story. As a 13-year-old kid, Jim had filled index cards with 10 lifetime goals. Some made sense: make the varsity basketball team. Play in college. Some were a bit more ambitious for a Corona kid: drive a Cadillac. Appear on the “Tonight Show.”
Some were preposterous: “He wanted to win a national title. When my father heard about this — and this was when Jim was at Johns Hopkins, so it was genuinely crazy — he showed Jim two packed suitcases and told him ‘when you play in that game, my bags are already packed.” And years later, Rocco took them to Albuquerque.
It was only last week that Bob remembered that Jim had only attained nine of those goals in life. The last one came true last week, the news delivered to his kid brother by his old broadcasting wingman, Vitale.
“Thirty years after he left us,” Bob Valvano says, “Jim’s dreams are still coming true.”