The 3-year-old boy liked pizza. After all, they called his daddy, the basketball coach from Brooklyn, Slice.
On a warm late February evening in Miami Beach, before sundown, his father’s two pals from the borough, one Sammy Stern, a retired Division II coach, and Dr. Gary Prince, six-foot-five hoop junkie chiropractor, were only too happy to take the boy, Rowan, and his father, Barry Rohrssen, to a colorful pizzeria, Call Me Gaby.
They were ushered to a table outside, on Washington Ave. across from Joe’s Stone Crab. Three pies were ordered, orange juice with a straw for the boy, Diet Cokes for the old friends – the illusion of weight-management. They did what a lifetime of hoopsters inevitably do: one story after another, some stretched by the toll of memory, all filled with laughter. Sammy as the high school star at Wingate playing alongside Roger Brown in front of a standing-room-only crowd in the old Garden. Slice as the head coach at Manhattan before serving as chief assistant and recruiter for Kentucky’s Final Four, 38-1 team in 2015 and doing a one-season stint at St. John’s. And Prince, a die-hard park player, traveling by his 3-speed Schwinn from Second Street to Manhattan Beach to Gravesend, with his Voit basketball, madras shorts, Converse sneakers, white t-shirt, two pair of sweat socks, wavy black hair and love in his heart.
They made certain to avoid talking politics, knowing that their conflicting, all-too-familiar views of Trump versus Biden could chill (kinda interrupt) the warm spirit of old friends off the court. The same friends, decades back, who would play all weekend long and then grab a late afternoon Mister Softee, where they would inevitably get a free cone or shake from a guy they knew working the truck. The same friends who could lose touch for years but then, upon seeing one other, wouldn’t lose a beat.
Ah, the stories, medicine for the aged, a playground of innocence, filled with characters of the ball. On Sammy’s very first day of his hoop-coaching career at New York Tech in 1972, his boss cut his annual salary from $3,000 to $1,500. Slice, always on the recruiting trail, “seeing no evil, speaking no evil, hearing no evil.” Prince, finally gaining admission to the only chiropractic school in the country willing to give him a chance — and only because the university’s president granted one wish to its coach — Sammy! — after he led the team to the national championship game. Sammy had always been a point guard — a giver dishing out assists — and so his one request made perfect sense:
“Can you put my friend Gary into our chiropractic program?”
Guys took care of their pals. A park rule. The boroughs set the standards; the repetition, the choosing of sides, the zones, the gyms, the halfmoon backboards, the fights, and later, the jobs, interviews, women, careers, romances, and the ball, forever the ball.
The little boy loved the attention. He was happy. He was destined someday, seemingly out of the blue, to remember and talk about being with daddy and his pals. Don’t we all?
His father, with impeccable confidence, would and could recite his list of the Tri-state’s best pizza places as if Mount Rushmore: Spumoni Gardens, John’s on Bleecker, Frank Pepe’s, off the highway in Connecticut, L and B’s …the cheese, sauce, grease, temperature, near perfect. Tonight, though 1,500 miles south of the neighborhood (a specific neighborhood or a figurative thing?), it was close to the real deal. The boy was going to be well-trained. Bet on it. He would have a handle, box out, keep his elbow tucked. And he would know the fold and the wax paper, the slow drip of the grease. He too loved pizza, which is why Prince suggested the place. The boy had been around long enough to mimic the right way. He knew the unwritten rules, too: use the backboard on his layup drills, respect the first bite. He would, ever so cutely, and guaranteed to create a laugh, seek the attention required by whispering to the slice, blow on it, a huff and a puff, to cool it down — already knowing the feeling of a scalded upper palate.
The rules of the game would change from park to park. Some guys played three-on-three, straight seven to win, others ran full, had to win by two. Most loved pepperoni or sausage or thinly cut meatballs on their pie, and anyone with the least amount of common decency and taste understood pineapple toppings were the equal of calling three seconds in the park. Are you kidding me!
Patricians need not enter. De Blasio’s knife and fork: unwelcome.
This was not a table that needed to be introduced to their “server.” Pizza right out of the oven, still bubbling, designed to seduce. “You like it, Rowan?” He glowed.
By the time the check arrived, the three ballers had dusted off all remnants of the boy’s crust. There was to be no check-splitting, no way, would never happen. Slice, a generous soul, older first-time dad at 58, tried to teach Rowan an early lesson of friendship by making “the grab.” Prince, who somehow built an unusually successful practice, a former Studio 54 doorman-turned gym owner with devoted followers including soap opera stars, college coaches, Knicks bench warmers, mobsters, ripped it from Slice’s hand. He was quicker, not exactly his forte on the court.
They were about to get up, an early night. Sammy, whose wife was working the ER as a nurse at Jackson Memorial, needed to be picked up before 7 pm. The boy, though, had been promised an ice cream dessert down the block. Could there possibly be more joy? The men, of course, would comb the counter for fat-free, before giving in to double mocha chocolate chip, in a cup, firm in their belief that by foregoing a sugar cone, their calorie count would plummet.
Everyone but Slice, the daddy, had their backs to the out-of-control speeding Bentley, driven by a 75-year-old woman named Resitze Tauber Gamble with a reported history of dangerous driving, including a DUI charge. Trying to parallel park, she got confused, meant to go forward, hit reverse hard, and bang, bang. She ran over signs, trees, tables. And right into old friends and a boy. Smoke darkened the air.
Pedestrians ran as if a bomb went off. Sammy was hit, knocked unconscious. Slice was out cold, 50 feet away. The little boy disappeared under the red-hot car. Prince, crushed, groaned, “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.”
One died. One never will be able to feel his right arm. Another has had multiple operations on his leg. The boy, buried, got the hockey assist from some Good Samaritans, who joined together to free him. One, two, three, bend your knees, and lift, pull him out, get him out. Is he? Is he?
Yes, the little boy was alive.
Prince was not. Dead at 7:35 pm on a warm late February evening in Miami Beach. Crushed to death, waiting for next.
Gary was the same guy who had just beaten cancer of the throat and neck, who took care of his sisters, who overcame the odds of his own modest background in which his father sold shoes in Harlem. Whom one lifelong friend, Rock Eisenberg, the retired head coach at Tilden High School, described as “a savage workaholic with the heart of a prince.”
Word spread at home. The ball as unifier, reporter, humanitarian, estate planner. The old park buddies were in shock. Franny, Ronnie G, Big Mattera, Ditto, names of the orange rims themselves. Prince never married. The sisters he left behind were devastated. One call after another, from the Rock to Drew Brown, son of Bundini, to Ditto, son of a cantor, to a retired Wall Street friend, to send his private plane to pick up the casket in order to bury The Prince where he belonged, in Brooklyn.
At the hospital, while Sammy’s wife, Gale, waited for him to pick her up following the afternoon shift, the ambulances arrived. First there was Slice, unable to move or feel below the waist, who, moments before, had gazed up from the street, his eyes searching for his baby boy, his heart for the first time ever doubting his faith, before spotting Rowan, sitting at a table, being comforted by a cop, alive.
Strapped to the stretcher, he refused to enter the ambulance without his boy. “No way. No way.”
And there was Sammy. Out cold, didn’t see a thing. “Felt as if I were shot in the back,” he later said. He was smashed “to smithereens,” as they used to say in the park, soon to be fitted with plates and rods in his back and no nerves in his left arm, for good, the same arm with which he threw countless off-the-dribble passes to guys cutting to the basket.
They arrived at the ER, Sammy begging Gale, “Where’s Slice? Where’s Rowan?”
“Sssh, they’re here too.”
“Where’s Gary?” he asked.
She wouldn’t answer for a day.
The Jackson Memorial doctors were kept busy. There were numerous surgeries; Rohrssen has had five operations on his leg. The Brooklyn friends buried Prince at “home.” The driver had her license suspended for a year; that was it. She never contacted the men or the families whose lives she plowed over.
One week into their forever hospital stay, one week after Prince promised to take the boy out for pizza and ice cream, Rowan, his own bones broken, was allowed to leave the pediatric ward to visit his daddy on another floor. The nurse closed the curtains and dimmed the lights in Slice’s room.
The boy climbed into daddy’s bed, stroked his whiskers. They lay still, their own moment of which only the heart can talk, “Daddy,” said the boy, “do you remember the night we had pizza?”
Dan Klores is a Peabody Award-winning filmmaker. He is also the founder of the Earl Monroe New Renaissance Basketball High School in the Bronx.
