Cooley Saved FriarNation

[dex]

Here's what Bob Walsh has to say about Big Ed:

"4th straight NCAA Tourney after losing 2 players to the NBA. Only thing you are allowed to complain about now is where they put the statue."

Cooley rapidly taking his seat at the table of basketball gods Mullaney and Gavitt

All Hail Cooley

you too friarman


www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf052uxFF58

[connfriar]

Gary Walters isn't at the table?

[dex]

COMMENTARY

For Cooley, the battle never ends

BILL REYNOLDS


PC coach Ed Cooley encourages his players during their game against Marguette on Feb. 25. [THE PROVIDENCE JOURNAL/GLENN OSMUNDSON]


He stands in front of his bench during a recent Providence College basketball game at The Dunk.

The PC band is playing.

The Big East banners hang from the rafters.

The large crowd is in an uproar, the emotion almost a living, breathing thing.

He is wearing a dark suit, the sweat all but fast-breaking down his face as he claps his hands, urging his players on, telling them to fight through the pressure, fight through the noise, fight through the tension, fight through all of it.

This is Ed Cooley’s world, this magical place where even his childhood dreams couldn’t have matched the reality of his life today.

And the incredible irony of it?

It is virtually in the shadow of the often bleak world he came of age in, the South Providence of his childhood, one in which too many dreams got sacrificed to the cruel realities of the neighborhood. The unrelenting pressures. The dysfunction. The lack of money. All of it.

“Sometimes I look around in the middle of a game and it hits me,’’ he says, “and I just say ‘WOW.’ I am the Providence College coach, and who would have ever believed that?’’

Because Cooley knows the odds, no question about that.

I first met him when he was a senior at Stonehill College, this kid who had starred on a great state championship team at Central, alongside former Friar Abdul Abdullah. It was 1994.

He talked that day about the dysfunctions of his childhood. How he never knew his father. How he used to eat sugar sandwiches because there never was any meat. How he knew something was very wrong when he was only 9 years old. How he eventually got taken in by a local family, who in many ways, threw him a life raft when he so needed one.

“It was hard for me growing up in South Providence,’’ Cooley said back then. “I was an outcast. I never had good clothes. I never had any money. I was kind of ‘bummy’.”

Through it all he not only survived, he prospered.

By the time he got to Central he was a leader.

“I wasn’t afraid of challenges,’’ he said.

Eventually, both that attitude and his basketball ability got him to New Hampton, a New Hampshire prep school for a year, and then to Stonehill.

Eventually it got him into coaching, and in 2011 it brought him back to be the PC basketball coach.

“I coach the way I played,’’ he said the other day on the PC campus. “I always was the leader, and I wasn’t afraid of the challenges. I feel I was born to be a coach.’’

Not many days go by when, at some point he is all but overwhelmed by the fact that he is the Providence College basketball coach, a black man from inner-city Providence. A black man who was never a pro. A black man who defied so many odds.

“Who would have ever thought a black man from Providence would have this job,’’ he said one morning last week, as sunlight came through the window of his office.

On Saturday, the Friars beat St. John’s for their sixth straight win, almost assuring them an NCAA Tournament bid, which would mean their fourth in a row, with all the top players returning next year.

Does Cooley need anything else on his résumé?

Not a whole lot.

But on this morning he was talking about the long improbable journey that has taken him from the mean streets of his childhood to being the Providence College basketball coach. That, and his unrelenting drive.

“I wake up every day as a kid who couldn’t afford a sandwich,’’ he said. “That is my drive.’’

For the past is always right there on the same scoreboard as the present, the past that shaped him, the past that haunts him, the past he can never forget, the past that fuels him. Call it poverty. Call it lack of self-worth. Call it the enduring legacy of his childhood. Call it anything you want.

It’s that drive that gets up him up every morning at 6:25, the drive that never lets him take anything for granted, even with the three straight trips to the NCAA Tournament; and now, after Saturday afternoon’s win over St. John’s in New York, maybe a fourth.

It’s the drive you see when he coaches at The Dunk, whether it’s the pressure, the fear of failure, the demons every coach deals with once the game starts.

The drive that doesn’t let him take anything for granted, even his own success.

The drive that’s always been there, back when he was just a lost kid in “bummy clothes,’’ back when the very idea of him one day being the Providence College basketball coach was way over the rainbow someplace.

“I wake up every day trying to prove it,’’ Cooley said. “Why? Because I wake up every day like I have nothing, because I can’t get away from what shaped me.’’

He paused a beat.

“But I always believe in the unthinkable.’’

“Why?’’ he was asked,

Ed Cooley looked around his office. “Because I’m living it.’’