Collier: Heart of Big East basketball still New York City
Thursday, January 04, 2007

By Gene Collier, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Pitt's Big East basketball season gets launched tonight in the State of New York, 250 miles from the City of New York, but typically just a short theoretical jumper from a New York state of mind.

That's where every Big East season begins and ends, pivots and thrives, lives and dies.

The schedule reads Pitt at Syracuse, 7 p.m., but it might as well show Rutgers at Seton Hall, Marquette at Providence, or even Louisville at Notre Dame. Even though the post-modern Big East map now stretches through zip codes from Wisconsin to Florida to traditional New England, fully 20 percent of the players on Big East rosters this year, including five Pitt Panthers, played high school basketball in or near New York City. Of the conference's 16 teams, only two have managed to put together a roster with no help from the Gotham megalopolis.

The question first posited 25 years ago when Pitt traveled to Syracuse to play its first Big East Conference game (losing, 87-66) has been modified some in a quarter century, but its chicken-egg qualities have only calcified.

Is the Big East the magnificent monster it has become because of the style of basketball played in the magnificently monstrous New York Metro area, or has the Big East influence so pervaded Big Apple area street culture that there is simply no other way to play?

"There's no other conference out there that has as many urban schools," said Pitt coach Jamie Dixon, failing to add that there's no other conference out there with as many schools, period. "But there's no question that [New York] style basketball defines it. We recruit in Cleveland, other parts of Ohio, and those kids just don't identify with the Big East in the same way.

"I know some people consider Pittsburgh almost kind of a Midwestern place, but when you talk to basketball people, Pitt's an Eastern city because of its history in the Big East."

So we talked to some basketball people yesterday, basketball people who, wherever they go in this conference, bang into players who often grew up very close to where they grew up, playing very close to the way they played.

"For me the New York style is tough players that just want to get in there and create for their teammates," said Pitt guard Ronald Ramon of the Bronx. "It's diving on the floor, playing your best defense, all the things I learned from playing in the parks and just being outside all day playing basketball."

It's not just a style that converts easily once taken indoors -- at least easily enough that All Hallows High retired Ramon's No. 14 after his spectacular prep career -- but adapts to urgent Big East realities, which still include the notion that maybe this game ought to be played with helmets.

"New York style is very tough, very hard-nosed," said Pitt point guard Levance Fields, "which makes it an easy transition to college, just because of the way Big East basketball is played. Everybody in New York is lookin' to the Big East first. Lookin' at the Big East from Brooklyn, that's what I saw. It's the way basketball is played in New York."

Fields is the former New York Daily News and Newsday Player of the Year, whose path to Big East stardom began in a place so very familiar to such discussions, Xaverian High School. Former Panther Chris Taft was off an assembly line of Big East products coming out of 7100 Shore Road, Brooklyn, a line stretching back to St. John's legend Chris Mullen.

Less than two years ago, Fields was playing in the Jordan Classic All-Star Game at Madison Square Garden, scoring 18 in the second half. Tonight he takes his impeccable floor game into the Carrier Dome, the theater of so many New York legends dating to what now must seem prehistoric icons such as Pearl Washington.

Fields knows that Pitt was selected the top team in the Big East in a preseason coaches poll, but it's further from his memory than last year's final score of last year's title game: Syracuse 65, Pitt 61.

"We don't want to fall into that trap," Fields said. "Just because the coaches voted that way, we all know what it takes to play in this league."

There is no lack of caution on Pitt's part derived from the fact that Syracuse is atypically unranked at the moment despite its 11-3 record, that the Orange got fewer votes in the current AP poll than Drexel.

"In the Big East," said Ramon, "teams lose players and other guys come in and step up right away."

Yeah, I think we've established a pattern here.


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(Gene Collier can be reached at gcollier@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1283. )

Nice read. Thanks for posting.