BY WAYNE COFFEY
Mike D'Antoni makes Mullens, West Virginia, proud as he replaces Isiah Thomas as coach of the Knicks. Mullens, a once-prosperous mining town located in the southern part of West Virginia, has seen its population dwindle to just 1,650.
MULLENS, W. Va. - Joe Hill is a chain-smoking barber with protruding ears, black glasses and almost no hair of his own. He’s been snipping and trimming for 61 years here, in a one-chair shop in a mostly boarded-up downtown, the drab linoleum floor strewn with hair and cigarette butts, his banter delivered in a thick mountain twang, never to be interrupted by the ringing of a phone.
“Why do I need a phone?” Hill says, smiling. “I just stick my head out the door and yell.”
Just the other day, Joe Hill got a visit from an old friend, a spry, 94-year-old man who isn’t merely a revered figure amid the serpentine roads and steep-sided mountains of southern West Virginia, but the de facto patriarch of the new New York Knicks.
Mike D’Antoni may have made the Phoenix Suns the best show in basketball, and made seven-seconds-or-less a basketball battle cry. He wasn’t the first fast-break-loving coach in the family, though, not by seven decades.
That would be Luigi Giuseppe D’Antoni (everybody calls him Lewis, or Coach), a former principal and standout in basketball, football and baseball, a good enough centerfielder to play four years in the minors and outhit a Cardinal prospect named Stan Musial one season. From the outset of his coaching career, in 1937, Lewis D’Antoni took an undersized team and made it into a hard-running, sharp-passing machine, canvas-sneakered country boys going strong and fast to the basket.
It was a fitting style of play in a county without a single stoplight in 503 square miles.
“We tried to get to the other end of the floor before the other team could get their defense set,” Lewis D’Antoni says. “Get the rebound, get the ball in the middle and go, with two guys on the wing and a trailer.” He pauses and runs a hand through his white hair, and talks about the three fast-breaking point guards he raised (oldest son, Danny, was an assistant to Mike in Phoenix, and the youngest, Mark, is an attorney in Charleston), and about his 1956 team that almost ran by Jerry West and East Bank High in the state semifinals, losing by four because West scored 42.
“I felt bad that we couldn’t stop him, but then he went to West Virginia and the NBA, and they couldn’t stop him there either,” Lewis says.
The fast break is still Lewis D’Antoni’s favorite play in the game, and the same goes for Joe Hill and almost everybody else in this unlikely basketball hotbed, a fading coal-mining town where the Civil War doesn’t seem that long ago (the school nickname is the Rebels and there’s a mural on the gym wall of a Confederate soldier in battle) and the high-school team won six state titles before it consolidated with neighboring districts.
It’s a town where all the talk is about native son Mike D’Antoni coming to New York City.
As he tips back the chair to give a shave to David (Bugs) Stover, 53, the area’s circuit-court clerk, Hill lights up a cigarette and recalls how Mike and his basketball were inseparable when he was a kid, how he’d dribble the ball all the way into town, and right into his barber shop. On the wall behind Hill is a photo of Mike D’Antoni as coach of his Benetton Treviso Italian-League champion team.
Says Hill, “The New York Knicks finally got smart and are going to play Wyoming County basketball. In a few short years they are going to be back on top, yes sirree. They’re going to turn this thing around and they have the right guy to do it. I have no doubt in my mind whatsoever.”
The 24th coach of the Knicks has made a slew of stops in his hardwood career, following a course like few others.
From Mullens High to Marshall University to a couple of stints in the NBA and one more in the ABA, D’Antoni pursued his passion, before getting an offer to play in Italy, where he would become the greatest point guard in Italian League history, a dashing, mustachioed icon who was as much a part of Italian culture as pasta and red sauce. His legend only grew when he moved into coaching and won championships, achieving renown for his high-octane creativity, his willingness to take chances and his insistence on focusing on what players could do, not what they couldn’t do.
It is a template that D’Antoni rode to an average of 58 wins a season in four years with the Phoenix Suns, one that traces entirely to how and where he was raised, near the confluence of the Guyandotte River and Slab Fork Creek.
Mike D’Antoni was born 57 years ago in an upstairs bedroom of a solid little brick home on Moran Ave., which his grandfather had built in 1925. It is a square, snug place on a land parcel not much bigger than a credit card, with a rich oak floors and a round, claw-foot table in the kitchen, where Lewis D’Antoni still makes spaghetti and meat balls and homemade cherry pies, and where the family used to play wickedly competitive games (Monopoly, Risk, gin rummy and bridge, among others), the results always posted on the refrigerator.
It is also where Betty Jo D’Antoni, Mike’s late mother, would engage her four kids in spirited debates and demand their best, a woman who embodied tough love long before the term was invented.
“I’m not raising you for you to like me,” she would tell her children. “I’m raising you for other people to like you.” She was nobody to fool with. From a speck of a town near the Kentucky border, Betty Jo grew up playing basketball against boys. She had some Hatfield blood in her, and if she never went after any McCoys, she was as zealously protective of her clan as all the other Hatfields.
“Devil Anse (head of the Hatfields) would come over to the house, prop his gun on the table and sit with his back to the wall,” says Dr. Kathy D’Antoni, Mike’s older sister, who is vice-chancellor of West Virginia’s community and technical college system. “That’s what my grandmother always told me, anyway.”
At the end of one of her husband’s basketball games, Betty Jo took exception to an official whose controversial call cost Mullens a victory. She clocked the offending ref with her pocket book.
“She didn’t go to too many games after that,” Lewis D’Antoni says, laughing. She did, though, remain a fully engaged Democratic activist, once hosting Ethel Kennedy for a neighborhood tea when her brother-in-law, John F. Kennedy, was running for President in 1960, and serving as a delegate at a number of national conventions.
Says Mike, “She ran the family, and sometimes it seemed, the whole neighborhood, from that kitchen table.”
The stock on D’Antoni’s father’s side was no less sturdy. It was 99 years ago - July 4, 1909 - that Andrea D’Antoni came through Ellis Island, an immigrant from the Campi region of Italy, his destination (McComas, W. Va.) clipped to his lapel. He went to work in the coal mines, earning 65 cents for every five tons of coal he extracted, but the mines were dangerous, dirty places, and after 10 years he saved and borrowed and opened up a grocery store in Mullens. The hardships rarely stopped. The store burned down while he was out delivering groceries in a horse-drawn wagon one day, so Andrea D’Antoni painstakingly rebuilt the business. He lost a baby to measles and his wife at 36 years old to kidney failure, but still raised four children, all of whom attended college.
“Very few people could have overcome these adversities to live a successful life,” Lewis writes in the family history he put together.
Lewis himself is no less steadfast, dedicating his life to education, coaching and setting an example for his kids. “There’s not a more respected man in this town,” Joe Hill says. Lewis spent the last four winters in Phoenix with Mike and his wife, Laurel, and grandson, Michael, but home is unmistakably here. He has his friends, his 18-year-old Mercury Marquis, his vegetable garden, even his golf game; just four years ago, at age 90, Lewis D’Antoni shot a hole in one at nearby Twin Falls Golf Course, using a seven-iron on a 140-yard hole.
“You play long enough, you get lucky,” Lewis says.
Lewis and Betty Joe set expectations high for their kids, settling for average not an option. More than anything, Mike says what he got from his parents and indeed, from the whole community, was a sense of empowerment, and possibility.
“We were back there in the mountains, but we thought we had everything, and we did,” Mike says. “Everybody looked after everybody. You felt safe. You thought you could conquer the world, and everybody else thought you could conquer it, too.”
These are not easy times in Mike D’Antoni’s hometown. Once a mining and railroad boomtown, Mullens’ population has dwindled to 1,650 from 5,000, the real-estate market so depressed you can buy a house for $25,000. People began to leave when the mines started closing a few decades ago, and when the worst flood in county history hit in 2001, that sure didn’t help, either. “Everybody lost something and a lot of people lost everything,” says Don Nuckols, who coached Mike in high school and won five state championships. “Young people aren’t staying here, and how can you blame them, when there are no jobs?”
Tucked in a hollow, mountains rising above the town like skyscrapers, Mullens has seen its bustling, brick-lined downtown turn gray and largely vacant, the hotels and furniture stores and restaurants and movie theaters vanishing with the people.
And yet, even with one in five people in the county living below the poverty level and one in four Mullens residents not finishing high school, there remains an almost palpable determination to come back. Joe Hill says it’s already starting, with smaller mining operations starting up, and the railroads returning. When a rural community is forged amid the perils of mining, resilience runs as deep as the veins of minerals, and so does community spirit. It was never more apparent than at the Mullens High basketball games, where sellout crowds approaching 2,000 were the norm.
“If you didn’t get there by halftime of the JV game you didn’t sit,” Don Nuckols says.
People who know Mike D’Antoni best speak of a humility that goes to his core, a quality nobody expects to change with his new $24 million contract. D’Antoni’s role model and life mentor, his father, never made more than $50 per month for coaching, and as far as anyone can remember, has never said as much as a single boastful word. When Louis was inducted into the West Virginia Athletic Hall of Fame, he was presented with a plaque that slightly overstated his credentials.
Lewis mounted the plaque, but whited out the overstatements.
Mike’s favorite Italian saying - framed on the wall of his home - translates thusly: “At the end of the (chess) game, the kings and pawns all go back into the same box.”
Maurizio Gherardini, VP of the Toronto Raptors, hired Mike D’Antoni as a coach in the Italian League and has known him for more than 30 years. Gherardini says D’Antoni is as relentlessly upbeat as any person he has ever met.
Did D’Antoni mope when a horribly timed leg injury likely cost him a spot on the 1972 Olympic team? When he collided with Artis Gilmore and got hurt again during his last NBA tryout, with the Bulls?
“The guy would tell you there are never problems, only solutions,” Gherardini says. “He knows how to find something positive in every situation, and how to transfer that optimistic view to the people around him.”
It is an outlook Mike D’Antoni absorbed from the start, growing up in a hollow in the foot of West Virginia, feeling as if everyone in the town wanted nothing more than for him to succeed, believing that if you don’t try out new things, you’ll never know what you can do.
Now Mike D’Antoni takes on his greatest professional challenge, at the reins of an ill-conceived, underachieving roster that plays in the world’s most dysfunctional arena. Once, when he was a kid, D’Antoni got so incensed over losing a game to his siblings that he began banging his head against the wall. His mother fetched a bucket of ice water and splashed it into his face.
“He never banged his head against a wall again,” Kathy D’Antoni says.
Lewis D’Antoni, the original fast-breaking coach in the family, watches all of Mike’s games, and just about every other NBA game, too. He does it on the high-definition TV that Mike and Dan bought for him, over his objections, sitting in his favorite recliner in the little brick home on Moran Ave. He’s not worried that his son will fail, or be overwhelmed by the obstacles facing him, or resume the head-banging. It’ll work out. It always does. Mullens will come back. So will the Knicks, and Lewis D’Antoni can’t wait to watch it happen, and to share the news with Joe Hill down at Hills Barber Shop, when Mike D’Antoni brings Wyoming County basketball to W. 33rd St.
“What he’s accomplished, coming from a small community of this kind, is unbelievable,” Lewis D’Antoni says. “I’m proud of just about everything he’s ever done.”