found a sliver of information about my 'relatives'
THE HOOP AND THE HARM ZAWOLUK GETS ONE LAST CHANCE
BY WAYNE COFFEY
Sunday, November 22th 1998, 2:05AM
More than four decades removed from his heyday and nearly four years removed from the lowest point of his life, one of the greatest college basketball players in New York City history stands alone on the floor of the Lehman College gym, just inside the top of the key.
It is one of Bob (Zeke) Zawoluk's first days in his new job as an assistant to Darryl Jacobs, the school's new head coach. Zawoluk is wearing rumpled blue pants, shabby shoes and a black wide-brimmed hat. He cradles a ball in his right hand, eyes the rim, lets it go, the shot arching gracefully upward, then falling cleanly through.
On the sideline, Andre Menzies, a thickly-muscled junior guard, shouts his approval. Menzies is the nephew of former St. John's star, Boo Harvey. He is well aware that Zawoluk was once the biggest St. John's star of them all, an All-America center out of St. Francis Prep who would go on to the NBA, and who would own virtually every school scoring record until Chris Mullin came along.
`You still got it, coach," Menzies said.
Bob Zawoluk smiles, and ambles off, his 6-7 frame slightly stooped, his gait hobbled by an artificial hip. His job is to help with Lehman's big men, maybe teach them his sweeping hook shot, the weapon that separated him from the immobile pivotmen of his era.
He hopes it works out. He says he is excited.
After a life that has included vast emotional instability, an arson rap, a crack addiction, a grand larceny conviction, prison, the death of a daughter and all manner of family misfortune, Zawoluk believes better days are here. He talks often about his missed opportunities, the ways he has fallen short.
Maybe this stop, being back in the game on a regular basis for the first time in more than 40 years, will bring a measure of stability.
`It's like a rebirth, in a small way," Zawoluk said. "I feel comfortable about it. I'm going to be as helpful as I can be."
Of his decades of turbulence and tragedy, he says, "Everybody goes through some bumps in the road. You just do your best to get on the right track."
Zawoluk is sitting at a table in the Lehman cafeteria, having a cup of tea, complete with eight packets of sugar. Moderation has never really been Zawoluk's thing. He goes through a box of 25 cigars in three days. Late nights and hR>eavy drinking were his undoing at more than a few jobs. After getting fired by one of the series of auto dealers he used to work for, he got even one night in an alcohol-fueled rage in Queens and Nassau County, dousing two luxury cars with gasoline, torching them, then ramming into 17 other cars, before being apprehended after a high-speed chase on Northern Blvd.
The incident occurred 12 years ago. Zawoluk spent four months in Nassau County jail when he couldn't raise the $2,500 bail. He pleaded guilty to reduced charges of attempted arson and criminal mischief, and wound up getting probation.
`There were times I went off, no doubt about it," Zawoluk said.
It is hard to pinpoint when and where a life unravels. That is especially true in the case of Bob Zawoluk, whose pain, self-inflicted and otherwise, has piled up faster than snow in a nor'easter.
While he was starring at St. Francis Prep, his father, a city cop, died after getting hit by the blade of a snow plow. Years later, he would lose the oldest of his five daughters, Patricia, to a drug overdose. His marriage dissolved amid increasing acrimony, and his wife's nervous breakdown.
Msgr. Marty Bannon ministers out of St. Patrick's of Bay Ridge, and goes all the way back to the 40s with Zawoluk, who was his friend and rival when Bannon was a standout at Cathedral Prep. Bannon still has painfully vivid recall of a visit Zawoluk made to him when Bannon was working as a CYO administrator in Queens in the 1970s. Zawoluk was overcome with confusion and low self-esteem. He had no career, a shattered home life, and mood swings that careened in a tormented triangle of depression, rage and hyperactivity.
Zawoluk sat on the floor, crying uncontrollably. As Bannon tried to comfort him, it was impossible not to think of the big, handsome kid who had been a magazine cover boy at St. John's; of the smart, likable guy who led St. John's to its only NCAA championship game, in 1952.
`It was one of the saddest things I've ever seen in my life," BannoR>n said. "This was a guy who had the world on a string, and it all went out the window."
Zawoluk spent three years in the NBA after leaving St. John's, a knee injury cutting his time short. He went to work for General Motors, then Pitney-Bowes, a salesman who could schmooze and party with the best of them. A VP at Pitney-Bowes an old St. John's buddy saved his job several times, before Zawoluk's late nights and declining production did him in. To this day, Zawoluk says one of his biggest mistakes was getting into sales, because it gave him too much independence when what he needed was structure.
`You're an embarrassment. I can't (cover for you) anymore," the friend told him.
It seemed at every turn there was an old friend or classmate from St. John's eager to help him out, with a job or some money. He became a master at tapping into his connections, and tapping them out. Bannon set him up with a psychiatrist friend, hoping Zawoluk would get the therapy and medication he needed. Zawoluk went once.
`He was manic depressive," Bannon said. "You could never count on him following through."
Jack Kaiser, the former athletic director of St. John's, has seen Zawoluk's struggles up close. "There were a lot of people who tried to help him, but his problems were so bad, it was fruitless," Kaiser said. "I think Bob is basically a fine man. He just wasn't ready for help."
Friends kept hoping he'd hit bottom, but Zawoluk just seemed to tunnel deeper. After getting hooked on crack in the early 90s, he began a new career, in shoplifting, at finer stores all over Manhattan. Not long after getting nabbed at Brooks Brothers and Barney's, he was caught lifting a jar of cold cream from an Upper West Side pharmacy. Security guards pounced on him. Zawoluk says he pulled a pen knife on them after they came at him with baseball bats. His next stop was Clinton Correctional Facility, where he served nearly two years on robbery and grand larceny charges. Suddenly, No. 27 for St. John's was Inmate No. 92A0954.
`(rack) takes you down so fast," Zawoluk says.
Zawoluk was paroled on Christmas Eve, 1993, and eventually moved in with his daughter, Barbara, in her Chelsea apartment. In a matter of months, Zawoluk lost another job selling cars and was back on crack. After a disagreement, his daughter asked him to leave. He stayed for a few days at McBurney YMCA on West 23d Street. The next time he saw Barbara, Zawoluk said she tried to bar him from entering her building. When he got in, he said he smacked and kicked her and pulled her hair.
Barbara Zawoluk got a police order of protection against her father, but didn't need it for long; a positive drug test violated his parole and sent Zawoluk back to jail, this time Rikers Island, where he was beaten up himself a few times.
Three years ago, not long after his release, Zawoluk moved to the Bronx. He lives in an apartment on East 198th St., near the Grand Concourse. His rent is $390. It takes up nearly half his Social Security check. With the $20 per game he makes as a scorekeeper at Basketball City, he ekes out a living, supplemented now with the $2,000 he's earning as a Lehman assistant.
Zawoluk was officially hired earlier this month, along with Joseph Fagan, former coach at John Jay College. He set his new career in motion in August, when he took the short walk through Lehman's stately Gothic campus, and made an unannounced visit to Dr. Marty Zwiren, the school's athletic director. Zawoluk filled Zwiren in on his playing pedigree and volunteered to help coach the big men. The two hit it off. Zwiren referred Zawoluk to Jacobs, freshly hired himself. Jacobs liked Zawoluk so much he offered him a paid assistant's position.
`I think his wisdom around the young men will be great," Jacobs, 32, said. "You don't get to retire and live to that age by being stupid."
Zwiren was unaware of anything beyond Zawoluk's substance-abuse problems initially, but has stuck with him even after finding out about his criminal history. Zawoluk did not lie, either in person or R>on his application, Zwiren said. He just edited.
`It's water over the dam. You just have to go forward," Zawoluk said. "If they don't like it and want me to leave, so be it."
Said Zwiren, "Isn't the City University of New York about hope? About helping people from poor families or disadvantaged backgrounds, who are trying to better themselves?
`If this guy were a country club executive, nobody would care if he's coming back to basketball. The story is what he has been through in his life, and how he might be coming back."
Jack Curran, a former St. John's classmate of Zawoluk's who went on to a legendary coaching career at Archbishop Molloy, may be Zawoluk's closest friend. "He's had a rocky road through this life, but I think this is the greatest thing that has happened to him: something concrete, connected to basketball, where he can help somebody."
Zawoluk has a disarming warmth about him. He hands a visitor a cigar, and fairly glows when a new acquaintance tells of his recent wedding. He seems lost in sweet reminiscence when the subject turns to someone's young children. "Take lots of pictures," he said. "That's my advice. It goes by so fast."
He is a man who has quickly made lots of friends around Lehman, and impressed his players. He is also a man who threatened suicide when he called the Daily News a few years ago, saying the NBA was holding up some money due him; who talks softly about rebuilding a relationship with Barbara, yet shows little remorse over his crack-fueled abuse of her.
Marty Bannon has seen Zawoluk's hyperactive ups and devastating lows for years, the wreckage of what Bannon believes is a serious chemical imbalance. He is as encouraged now as he has ever been.
`He's in a calmer mood. He has more contentment," Bannon said. "It's the most hope I've had for him in 20 or 25 years."
Bob Zawoluk likes to compare himself to Darryl Strawberry, who has re-made himself into a widely admired figure, after years of infamy. He would love it if he could do the same.
He said he hasn't used drugs in some three years. He refuses to allow himself to get consumed by regrets. Zawoluk doesn't know if it's just a mellowing that comes with age, but he agrees with Bannon, says he's calmer, more stable. "I 'm just happy with my life," he said. "I don't have any wants. I find myself in a very enviable position."
Zawoluk's Lehman coaching debut came Friday night, in the season opener against St. Joseph's of Patchogue, L.I.
There are 22 more games on the schedule, over the next three months. The bouncing of the balls, the rhythm of a season, they both feel very good to Bob Zawoluk, who, decades beyond his playing prime, finds himself back in the game, a rookie coach searching for a fresh start, and so much more.
ZAWOLUK FILE
Bob Zawoluk scored 1,826 points in three seasons at St. John's, more than anyone in school history except for four-year players Chris Mullin, Malik Sealy and Felipe Lopez.
The school's first 20-point-per-game scorer, Zawoluk also:
Led St. John's to the only NCAA championship game in school history (an 80-63 loss to Kansas in 1952).
Holds the single-game school scoring record (65 points).
Had a three-year won-lost record of 75-15.
Was a three-time All-American.
Was named to the All-NCAA tournament team in 1952.
BY WAYNE COFFEY
Sunday, November 22th 1998, 2:05AM
More than four decades removed from his heyday and nearly four years removed from the lowest point of his life, one of the greatest college basketball players in New York City history stands alone on the floor of the Lehman College gym, just inside the top of the key.
It is one of Bob (Zeke) Zawoluk's first days in his new job as an assistant to Darryl Jacobs, the school's new head coach. Zawoluk is wearing rumpled blue pants, shabby shoes and a black wide-brimmed hat. He cradles a ball in his right hand, eyes the rim, lets it go, the shot arching gracefully upward, then falling cleanly through.
On the sideline, Andre Menzies, a thickly-muscled junior guard, shouts his approval. Menzies is the nephew of former St. John's star, Boo Harvey. He is well aware that Zawoluk was once the biggest St. John's star of them all, an All-America center out of St. Francis Prep who would go on to the NBA, and who would own virtually every school scoring record until Chris Mullin came along.
`You still got it, coach," Menzies said.
Bob Zawoluk smiles, and ambles off, his 6-7 frame slightly stooped, his gait hobbled by an artificial hip. His job is to help with Lehman's big men, maybe teach them his sweeping hook shot, the weapon that separated him from the immobile pivotmen of his era.
He hopes it works out. He says he is excited.
After a life that has included vast emotional instability, an arson rap, a crack addiction, a grand larceny conviction, prison, the death of a daughter and all manner of family misfortune, Zawoluk believes better days are here. He talks often about his missed opportunities, the ways he has fallen short.
Maybe this stop, being back in the game on a regular basis for the first time in more than 40 years, will bring a measure of stability.
`It's like a rebirth, in a small way," Zawoluk said. "I feel comfortable about it. I'm going to be as helpful as I can be."
Of his decades of turbulence and tragedy, he says, "Everybody goes through some bumps in the road. You just do your best to get on the right track."
Zawoluk is sitting at a table in the Lehman cafeteria, having a cup of tea, complete with eight packets of sugar. Moderation has never really been Zawoluk's thing. He goes through a box of 25 cigars in three days. Late nights and hR>eavy drinking were his undoing at more than a few jobs. After getting fired by one of the series of auto dealers he used to work for, he got even one night in an alcohol-fueled rage in Queens and Nassau County, dousing two luxury cars with gasoline, torching them, then ramming into 17 other cars, before being apprehended after a high-speed chase on Northern Blvd.
The incident occurred 12 years ago. Zawoluk spent four months in Nassau County jail when he couldn't raise the $2,500 bail. He pleaded guilty to reduced charges of attempted arson and criminal mischief, and wound up getting probation.
`There were times I went off, no doubt about it," Zawoluk said.
It is hard to pinpoint when and where a life unravels. That is especially true in the case of Bob Zawoluk, whose pain, self-inflicted and otherwise, has piled up faster than snow in a nor'easter.
While he was starring at St. Francis Prep, his father, a city cop, died after getting hit by the blade of a snow plow. Years later, he would lose the oldest of his five daughters, Patricia, to a drug overdose. His marriage dissolved amid increasing acrimony, and his wife's nervous breakdown.
Msgr. Marty Bannon ministers out of St. Patrick's of Bay Ridge, and goes all the way back to the 40s with Zawoluk, who was his friend and rival when Bannon was a standout at Cathedral Prep. Bannon still has painfully vivid recall of a visit Zawoluk made to him when Bannon was working as a CYO administrator in Queens in the 1970s. Zawoluk was overcome with confusion and low self-esteem. He had no career, a shattered home life, and mood swings that careened in a tormented triangle of depression, rage and hyperactivity.
Zawoluk sat on the floor, crying uncontrollably. As Bannon tried to comfort him, it was impossible not to think of the big, handsome kid who had been a magazine cover boy at St. John's; of the smart, likable guy who led St. John's to its only NCAA championship game, in 1952.
`It was one of the saddest things I've ever seen in my life," BannoR>n said. "This was a guy who had the world on a string, and it all went out the window."
Zawoluk spent three years in the NBA after leaving St. John's, a knee injury cutting his time short. He went to work for General Motors, then Pitney-Bowes, a salesman who could schmooze and party with the best of them. A VP at Pitney-Bowes an old St. John's buddy saved his job several times, before Zawoluk's late nights and declining production did him in. To this day, Zawoluk says one of his biggest mistakes was getting into sales, because it gave him too much independence when what he needed was structure.
`You're an embarrassment. I can't (cover for you) anymore," the friend told him.
It seemed at every turn there was an old friend or classmate from St. John's eager to help him out, with a job or some money. He became a master at tapping into his connections, and tapping them out. Bannon set him up with a psychiatrist friend, hoping Zawoluk would get the therapy and medication he needed. Zawoluk went once.
`He was manic depressive," Bannon said. "You could never count on him following through."
Jack Kaiser, the former athletic director of St. John's, has seen Zawoluk's struggles up close. "There were a lot of people who tried to help him, but his problems were so bad, it was fruitless," Kaiser said. "I think Bob is basically a fine man. He just wasn't ready for help."
Friends kept hoping he'd hit bottom, but Zawoluk just seemed to tunnel deeper. After getting hooked on crack in the early 90s, he began a new career, in shoplifting, at finer stores all over Manhattan. Not long after getting nabbed at Brooks Brothers and Barney's, he was caught lifting a jar of cold cream from an Upper West Side pharmacy. Security guards pounced on him. Zawoluk says he pulled a pen knife on them after they came at him with baseball bats. His next stop was Clinton Correctional Facility, where he served nearly two years on robbery and grand larceny charges. Suddenly, No. 27 for St. John's was Inmate No. 92A0954.
`(rack) takes you down so fast," Zawoluk says.
Zawoluk was paroled on Christmas Eve, 1993, and eventually moved in with his daughter, Barbara, in her Chelsea apartment. In a matter of months, Zawoluk lost another job selling cars and was back on crack. After a disagreement, his daughter asked him to leave. He stayed for a few days at McBurney YMCA on West 23d Street. The next time he saw Barbara, Zawoluk said she tried to bar him from entering her building. When he got in, he said he smacked and kicked her and pulled her hair.
Barbara Zawoluk got a police order of protection against her father, but didn't need it for long; a positive drug test violated his parole and sent Zawoluk back to jail, this time Rikers Island, where he was beaten up himself a few times.
Three years ago, not long after his release, Zawoluk moved to the Bronx. He lives in an apartment on East 198th St., near the Grand Concourse. His rent is $390. It takes up nearly half his Social Security check. With the $20 per game he makes as a scorekeeper at Basketball City, he ekes out a living, supplemented now with the $2,000 he's earning as a Lehman assistant.
Zawoluk was officially hired earlier this month, along with Joseph Fagan, former coach at John Jay College. He set his new career in motion in August, when he took the short walk through Lehman's stately Gothic campus, and made an unannounced visit to Dr. Marty Zwiren, the school's athletic director. Zawoluk filled Zwiren in on his playing pedigree and volunteered to help coach the big men. The two hit it off. Zwiren referred Zawoluk to Jacobs, freshly hired himself. Jacobs liked Zawoluk so much he offered him a paid assistant's position.
`I think his wisdom around the young men will be great," Jacobs, 32, said. "You don't get to retire and live to that age by being stupid."
Zwiren was unaware of anything beyond Zawoluk's substance-abuse problems initially, but has stuck with him even after finding out about his criminal history. Zawoluk did not lie, either in person or R>on his application, Zwiren said. He just edited.
`It's water over the dam. You just have to go forward," Zawoluk said. "If they don't like it and want me to leave, so be it."
Said Zwiren, "Isn't the City University of New York about hope? About helping people from poor families or disadvantaged backgrounds, who are trying to better themselves?
`If this guy were a country club executive, nobody would care if he's coming back to basketball. The story is what he has been through in his life, and how he might be coming back."
Jack Curran, a former St. John's classmate of Zawoluk's who went on to a legendary coaching career at Archbishop Molloy, may be Zawoluk's closest friend. "He's had a rocky road through this life, but I think this is the greatest thing that has happened to him: something concrete, connected to basketball, where he can help somebody."
Zawoluk has a disarming warmth about him. He hands a visitor a cigar, and fairly glows when a new acquaintance tells of his recent wedding. He seems lost in sweet reminiscence when the subject turns to someone's young children. "Take lots of pictures," he said. "That's my advice. It goes by so fast."
He is a man who has quickly made lots of friends around Lehman, and impressed his players. He is also a man who threatened suicide when he called the Daily News a few years ago, saying the NBA was holding up some money due him; who talks softly about rebuilding a relationship with Barbara, yet shows little remorse over his crack-fueled abuse of her.
Marty Bannon has seen Zawoluk's hyperactive ups and devastating lows for years, the wreckage of what Bannon believes is a serious chemical imbalance. He is as encouraged now as he has ever been.
`He's in a calmer mood. He has more contentment," Bannon said. "It's the most hope I've had for him in 20 or 25 years."
Bob Zawoluk likes to compare himself to Darryl Strawberry, who has re-made himself into a widely admired figure, after years of infamy. He would love it if he could do the same.
He said he hasn't used drugs in some three years. He refuses to allow himself to get consumed by regrets. Zawoluk doesn't know if it's just a mellowing that comes with age, but he agrees with Bannon, says he's calmer, more stable. "I 'm just happy with my life," he said. "I don't have any wants. I find myself in a very enviable position."
Zawoluk's Lehman coaching debut came Friday night, in the season opener against St. Joseph's of Patchogue, L.I.
There are 22 more games on the schedule, over the next three months. The bouncing of the balls, the rhythm of a season, they both feel very good to Bob Zawoluk, who, decades beyond his playing prime, finds himself back in the game, a rookie coach searching for a fresh start, and so much more.
ZAWOLUK FILE
Bob Zawoluk scored 1,826 points in three seasons at St. John's, more than anyone in school history except for four-year players Chris Mullin, Malik Sealy and Felipe Lopez.
The school's first 20-point-per-game scorer, Zawoluk also:
Led St. John's to the only NCAA championship game in school history (an 80-63 loss to Kansas in 1952).
Holds the single-game school scoring record (65 points).
Had a three-year won-lost record of 75-15.
Was a three-time All-American.
Was named to the All-NCAA tournament team in 1952.