Beloved coach takes a look back

Dick O’Neill got hooked on basketball at Chester High School Chester — When he moved from Brooklyn to Chester in 1958, Dicky O’Neill had a smoking habit, a black leather jacket, and Elvis boots. But 11-year-old Dicky proved to be an adaptable young tough and made a speedy adjustment to country life. “It took two days for the jacket to find its way to the urinal in the boys’ bathroom,” recalled O’Neill, now 62. Upon their arrival, the three O’Neill brothers — sons of a six-foot-five New York City motorcycle cop — traded stoop ball and punch ball for basketball, soccer and baseball. In no time they had become as Chester as cream cheese. “We had varied interests, but we were all big, and when you’re big in a small town, you’re kind of expected to compete,” said O’Neill, who topped out at six-foot-seven. And it was a good thing too, not only for Chester, but for the next two generations of local high school boys. Dick O’Neill would go on to become an All-American center on the most celebrated college basketball team in history, and then to achieve his life’s goal: to be as good a high school basketball coach as the coach he had at Chester High School. You can take the kid out of the city. “I was no bargain when I got here,” O’Neill admitted. “I was headstrong, I was — I’m not sure what I was, but moving from New York City to the country setting was easily the best thing that’s ever happened to me.” As a seventh-grader, Dicky wasn’t particularly talented on the basketball court either. “I was probably the last player on the team,” he said. “Probably the only reason they kept me was that I was taller than most of the other kids. And from there, it grew.” So did Dick. He couldn’t find a pair of pants that came down to his ankles. “I tell you, he had bony elbows,” said teammate Walt Nizolek, who still lives in Chester with wife, Donna. “He was a center, but he was skinny.” “Back then,” said Donna Nizolek, pointing to a yearbook photo of O’Neill dunking, “that was rare.” The 27 students in the class of 1964 were a tightly knit group. Six ended up getting married to other Chester High School alums (two of them — Donna and Walt — married each other). Of the 16 boys in the class, 10 were on the basketball team. Donna, once a cheerleader for the basketball team, and seven other “girls” from the class call themselves the 64 Club and still get together twice a year. “It just seemed everyone clicked together when we played,” said Walt, who recently retired from Orange & Rockland Utilities. “In small schools like Chester, there’s lot of peaks and valleys in terms of talent,” O’Neill said. “You had to play all three sports — we had soccer, basketball and baseball then — just to have teams. I came up with a very talented group.” But their innate talent was helped along by the fact that there wasn’t anything else in Chester to do. “We just played a lot,” O’Neill said. “Chester in the ‘50s and ‘60s, there wasn’t too much going on.” Sure, there were ice-skating parties and bonfires, pinball, a pizza parlor, and the occasional school dance — but mostly, there were the games. “The night of basketball games, you couldn’t get a drink,” O’Neill recalled. “Everything was all closed up.” “I don’t remember really having an interest in anything else,” he said. “My mother and father worked, so I didn’t have to, and allowed me to play games all the time.” O’Neill even won over a cheerleader from rival school Florida’s S.S. Seward Institute, Diane Heter — his wife. Still, “she was cheering against me, even though we were dating,” O’Neill said. In 1964, Chester was the section’s undefeated soccer champion. In 1962-63 and 1963-64, the basketball team went 18-3, winning its division but losing the sectional championship game. After high school, the workaday life seemed dull in comparison. “All I know is I can’t drive a nail,” O’Neill said. “I don’t want to learn. The only thing I know about my car is I can drive it.” But he gave work a try, stocking shirts at the Arrow Shirt factory in Chester. There he learned one very important thing. “I knew I didn’t want to work at Arrow Shirt the rest of my life,” he said. “That I knew.” Home is where the ball is On his ring finger O’Neill wears a big bejeweled ring, booty for having been part of the winningest NCAA Division II school ever. That the streak began in 1966, the year that Dick O’Neill — married with a baby on the way — walked onto the Kentucky Wesleyan team as a freshman center. By the end of his senior year, O’Neill was All-American and his college class had earned a spot in the Hall of Fame in Worcester, Mass. History will not remember that he picked the college by blindly pointing at the Barron’s guide. It is a testament to his magnetism that his two younger brothers followed him to his randomly selected school. He settled on Kentucky Wesleyan because they offered to pay for his books and half his tuition, and decided against Brigham Young because he didn’t like their required pledge never to drink or curse. (Not until 1981, when he gave up drinking cold turkey, did O’Neill realize he’d been an alcoholic. He gave up his 28-year smoking habit cold turkey in 1985.) O’Neill would have had every right to mourn the knee injury that required surgery and kept him from playing in the NBA after he’d been drafted by the Seattle Supersonics. Indeed, he walks stiffly now, but he barely mentioned his knee in our interview. He could have coached college, and “I maybe even harbored thoughts of that,” he said. His dad hoped he’d head to the NBA. But Dick had other ideas. “It was always my belief that the high school level was the highest level in basketball,” he said. People think “the NBA is the epitome of basketball success. I think there’s much more success at the high school level in dealing with molding talent, molding individuals.” O’Neill moved his young family back home and got a job at John S. Burke Catholic High School in Goshen as the youngest athletic director — and varsity soccer, assistant basketball and varsity baseball coach — in Orange County. During his 12 years at Burke, the varsity basketball team went 89-20, won three section titles, and — in the crowning season of his coaching career — went 26-0 in 1983 until losing the state championships. When he transferred to Monticello Central School, O’Neill’s job description expanded to include surrogate parent. “A lot of the kids didn’t have parents, or their parents were separated, or they were raised by their grandmother or their aunt or in foster care... There was nobody there for them, and I kind of maybe filled that need.” Monticello alumnus Andre Duncan is the classic example of a tough case made good. As a ninth-grade foster child, “he was such a pain in the ass that I really didn’t even want him in the program,” O’Neill said. O’Neill recently attended Duncan’s induction into the University of Albany Hall of Fame. After reaching his 400 career win, O’Neill called it a day. His is among the 95 names in the New York State Basketball Coaches Hall of Fame. After his last game in February, he was presented with a collage of pictures of the 1964 Chester basketball team. “I’m 62,” he said. “I guess I’ve been in somebody’s gym since I was seven years old. 55 years was plenty.”