The phone rang on that February morning in 2014 when the
familiar voice was on the other line.
“Jim, it’s OC,” the voice said, but I knew who it was by the
time “Jim” came out of his mouth. “Listen, Jay Williams, Ray Cella and I were
talking the other day and we all decided that we wanted to bring you lunch.”
My friend OC, the member of the Basketball Hall of Fame for
his contributions as the premier college basketball writer in America for the
Associated Press for more than 40 years, was going to come to my front door in
Kearny to bring me a sandwich.
“OC, you don’t even know where the hell Kearny is,” I said
to him. “You’re crazy.”
But sure enough, OC showed up at my door – albeit after
getting lost while driving just a little bit on the way – holding a box full of
sandwiches and chips and “these Italian cookies to die for,” OC said, bringing
me and Jay-Bird and Aldo Cella lunch.
OC had heard that I had spent some time in the Kessler
Rehabilitation Institute and that I was still having a tough time walking. I
was still confined to my home at the time, already certain that I wasn’t going
to make my annual sojourn to the NCAA Final Four with my Maguire University
buddies, and so totally afraid that I may not have been able to walk freely
ever again.
As the true friend that OC was to me for the last 35 years,
OC helped to organize the trip to Kearny to bring me lunch. The four of us sat
in my living room for a couple of hours, laughing and telling stories. If there
was one thing that OC did better than anyone, it was telling a story. He was
the Stephen King of storytelling novellas, turning even the slightest meeting
into a saga.
I will forever remember the image of OC walking up my
walkway with a box full of Italian sandwiches from a deli in Queens that he
loved and a box of these Italian cookies that diabetics like OC and myself
should not have been eating.
OC knew that one of his good friends was sick and feeling
down in the dumps, so he wanted to do whatever he could to cheer him up.
That was OC at his finest. That’s the story I’ll always
remember. And that’s what came to mind almost instantly Monday morning, when I
received word that OC had indeed passed away at the age of 64. His health was
in decline over the last couple of years. He lost a toe here and a half of his
foot there due to his battle with diabetes. His heart was failing.
But he never once forgot one of the poor schlubs that he
dealt with during his early heyday at AP, back when we met in the 1980s, when I
was the Sports Information Director at St. Peter’s, when Jay Williams was the
main man at the MAAC offices and when Ray Cella was the SID at Iona.
That was OC. Whether it was helping a friend and colleague
who couldn’t walk by bringing him an Italian sub and a smile or whether it was
spending the entire length of a basketball game just laughing and kidding
around, that was Jim O’Connell in a nutshell.
He was quick witted and funny and always willing to tell a
tale. But he was also loyal and faithful as they come on this planet.
I also don’t know if OC had any enemies. I know there were
some in the world of college basketball that he didn’t particularly care for,
but as a mortal enemy, no way. As for having friends, well, OC had thousands.
Literally thousands of people called OC “friend.” I was so very fortunate to be
one of those people for the last 35 years.
I was a friend long before I started to work for Associated
Press 17 years ago. I used to speak to
OC two, maybe three times a week, when I was at St. Peter’s and there was no
other form of communication like e-mails, Twitter and Facebook, other than the
phone call and word of mouth.
OC and I became good friends from those phone calls, talking
about Willie Haynes and Alex Roberts and Ted Fiore and the Peacocks. No text
messages, no Tweets. Just the old fashioned phone calls and the liquid lunches
in New York City. There were plenty of those. Sometimes, those lunches dragged
out into dinners because there was storytelling going on in some bar like P.J.
Clarke’s outside the campus of Fordham University or Dohoney’s or the Park
Tavern in Jersey City after a Peacock home game.
OC was enamored with my recall of college basketball, all
stored away in the back of my noggin. We constantly told stories back and
forth, reliving our greatest memories.
I’ll never forget OC’s friendship to me. He was a mentor, a
teacher, a colleague for the last 17 years, but first and foremost, he was my
friend. I loved OC. I know I’m not alone. There will be countless other
tributes written and said about him over the next week or so. His list of
friends stretches far longer than mine.
But he was truly the best friend anyone could want. He was
beyond just the premier college basketball writer in the country and a member
of the Basketball Hall of Fame. He was OC. It’s about as simple of a tribute I
can give to anyone. He was OC. Two little letters put together to utter a
sound. It’s a sound that is so melodious because it represents only one person.
I grieve for wife Annie and his two wonderful sons, Andrew
and James, both of whom I got to know pretty well over the years. I met Annie
for the first time after a golf outing that OC ran every year and had no idea
that she was a great college basketball player in her own right at Fordham and
that’s how the two met.
God bless OC. I’ll treasure those days of covering Seton
Hall basketball games together, telling him about how bad of a player Ty Shine
was or how no Seton Hall player could make a jumper from “the corner of doom.”
Sitting next to OC during a basketball game was like sitting next to royalty,
because he knew everyone and had a story to tell about practically everyone.
I know people get sick, get old and die. But I didn’t want
my last conversation with OC to be over me having a tough time filing a story
to AP about a Seton Hall basketball game. But that’s what it was. Back in
January, I covered Seton Hall-Georgetown for AP and my computer was acting
weird. So I had to try to recover my story off the laptop and cut and paste it
into an email in order to have OC edit it for me.
“It’s OK, Hague, I’ll cover your ass once again like I
always do,” OC said.
Damn straight he did.
I hope God shines a little light on my buddy. I wish I could
have said goodbye, wish I could have told him how much I truly loved him, how
much I cherished that visit with Jay-Bird and Aldo and the Italian subs when I
was sick and scared. The laughter and the stories brought me back to reality. I
hope to carry on in OC’s memory. Rest in peace, brother.
