This is the third of three excerpts from Bill Reynolds’ book Our Game: The Story of New England Basketball, published by Hall of Fame Press. Today’s excerpt is from the chapter “God Must Be A Dominican.”

From the beginning of his basketball career, Dave Gavitt always seemed to be a few moves ahead of everyone else.

From Peterborough, N.H., a small town in the southern part of the state that looks like a postcard come to life and was the setting for Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, he went to Dartmouth, where his freshman coach was Al McGuire. He played on two Ivy League championship teams that were coached by Doggie Julian, and led by Rudy LaRusso, who later played for the Lakers. Gavitt was the cerebral point guard, a coach on the floor, even though he hadn’t been a recruited player.

“I think I played a lot because I understood the game,” Gavitt said.

“I was always intrigued intellectually by the game, but I never was the typical Dartmouth kid. I always was working, waiting on tables, hustling. I thought I’d like to coach when I was at Dartmouth, but the Ivy League atmosphere didn’t encourage it.”

When Gavitt graduated in 1959, he didn’t go into coaching. Instead, he went to work for AT&T in Washington, D.C., because Dartmouth athletes were supposed to go to the boardroom, not the locker room. But he quickly discovered he could not leave the game behind, and took a job at Worcester Academy for one quarter of his AT&T salary. He taught history and was the assistant basketball coach. He also coached jayvee baseball and cross country.

“The hockey coach got sick, and I even did that for three games,” Gavitt recalled.

‘A PhD in basketball’

In the summer of 1963, Joe Mullaney was looking for an assistant coach at Providence College. The process of hiring an assistant was still pretty simple. There was no national search even though the Friars were part of Eastern college basketball’s elite by then. Worcester Academy coach Dee Rowe suggested Gavitt to a priest, who passed the information on to Mullaney. Since Mullaney and Gavitt had both played for Doggie Julian at Holy Cross, the pieces seemed to fit. And, after just one year as a prep school assistant, Gavitt went to PC.

Being an assistant coach then was nothing like now, when assistants have to be out there hustling players all the time, with a salesman’s smile. Gavitt was not only Mullaney’s assistant, he also taught a sociology course. On top of that, he coached an undefeated freshman team led by Jimmy Walker. When he wasn’t working, he was at Mullaney’s house, watching television or babysitting. He was single at the time, and he and Mullaney became very friendly.

“It was like getting a PhD in basketball,” Gavitt recalled.

After four years with Mullaney, Gavitt went back to Dartmouth as the coach-in waiting; Doggie Julian was in poor health, at the end of his long career. That first year, Julian’s health deteriorated further, and Gavitt took over at the age of 29.

Then he lost his first nine games.

He’d won 90 games during his years with Mullaney, making him think that it was going to be easy. But, in his first two years as a head coach, he had to weather a lot of adversity. In retrospect, Gavitt thought it was good for him.

“I learned a little humility,” Gavitt said.

When Mullaney left Providence for the Lakers in the spring of 1969, Gavitt returned to Providence as the head coach. By that time, he already had resurrected Dartmouth and been named New England Coach of the Year.

One of the best

Gavitt’s success as a coach sometimes get overshadowed by his other accomplishments. It’s too easy to perceive him as the man who built the Big East Conference. Or someone who became one of the biggest power brokers in the game. Or, the coach of the 1980 Olympic team and, later, the boss of the Boston Celtics. But, in fact, Gavitt was considered by his peers to be one of the best coaches in the country, even though he never got the attention given to a Dean Smith or Bobby Knight.

During Gavitt’s 10-year reign as coach at Providence College, the Friars made eight straight postseason appearances and five trips to the NCAA Tournament. His teams were exceptional with many exceptional players, including future pros Kevin Stacom and Joe Hassett. But, undoubtedly, his 1972-73 team is the one people remember the most. Led by Ernie DiGregorio and Marvin Barnes, two local stars, the Friars that year took their game up a few notches, becoming only the second New England school to go to the Final Four since 1947.

Even now, so many years later, people remember Ernie and Marvin in ways that other great college players have been forgotten. A scriptwriter with a vivid imagination could not have created a more colorful pair; DiGregorio, the flashy little point guard from North Providence, who seemed to have sprung out of some playground fantasy; Barnes, the gazelle-like forward, who leaped out of a Providence ghetto as if the American Dream was waiting on the rim. Both were products of a turbulent time when all the rules were changing, and not just in basketball.

In the early ’70s, every other kid looked as if he had stepped off a Sgt. Pepper album cover, drugs were a new rite of passage for a new generation, and women started to play sports in greater numbers, thanks to Title IX.

In basketball, the college game was becoming more black, the UCLA dynasty was nearing its end and the NBA entered a strange netherworld between the end of the Russell-Chamberlain era and the beginning of the Bird-Magic era. Critics complained it was becoming too black, too riddled with drugs.

A whole new ballgame

Change was in the air in Providence, too.

In 1972, a Civic Center opened in downtown Providence, a modern new arena that could seat 13,000 people. From the minute it opened its doors, Providence College basketball was never the same. No longer were the Friars a team that played in a 3,500 seat campus gym. Now they were accessible to thousands, a reality that created the marketing of the Friars as Providence’s pro team.

It wasn’t enough to have games that catered only to students and alumni. To fill the Civic Center, the Friars had to attract so-called subway alumni, fans whose allegiance had nothing to do with once having gone to PC. A better schedule helped to do this, a schedule that stretched beyond the confines of New England. DePaul. Western Kentucky. Jacksonville. All played in Providence that winter of 1972, lured at least in part by the new arena.

The Friars’ first game in the Civic Center drew more than three times the number of people that used to squeeze into Alumni Hall. For the Friars, the team that had been virtually unheard of just two decades before, it was a new day.

The makeup of the Friars that year was special. All the parts blended together beautifully, making the whole better than the sum.

Kevin Stacom was the other guard. He was 6-foot-4 and could get out on the break, a perfect complement to Ernie D. Stacom also shot over 50 percent from the field and was excellent defensively. A transfer from Holy Cross, Stacom would go on to play in the NBA for five years. The forwards were Charlie Crawford from New Haven and 6-foot-8 Fran Costello from just outside of Boston. Both were skilled players who could do a little bit of everything. But the real stars were Ernie and Marvin.

Barnes grew up in South Providence, the city’s poorest neighborhood. He slept in the same bed with his mother and sister until he was 16. His father was rarely around. Marvin is one of basketball’s all-time characters, to some a likable miscreant with a heart of gold, to others a bad actor who squandered his basketball talent and threw fortune away.

There are a zillion Marvin stories, each one more outrageous than the one before. Local legend has it that when he was in high school, he held up a city bus wearing a jacket with his name on it. Another incident was more serious. Shortly before the ’72-’73 season began, Barnes was arrested for hitting teammate Larry Ketvertis in the head with a tire iron, the supposed aftermath of a fight that had broken out during practice. This act has haunted Barnes ever since.

At Providence College, Barnes was seen as a charming eccentric, like some man-child in a body that one day was going to make him very rich. After his senior year, he signed a contract for $2.1 million with the Spirits of St. Louis of the old American Basketball Association. Yet, his life quickly spun out of control. In St. Louis, he went through his money as if it were Monopoly dollars, buying cars, mink coats, big pimp hats, and once chartering his own plane after missing a team flight. Later, he would have drug problems that ended his career, problems that would come to define much of his adult life. Barnes is a poster child for squandered potential and broken dreams, the embodiment of too much, too soon. But to see him as a college player was to know that he was unique, as dominant a big man that has ever played college basketball in New England.

“He’s the saddest story in basketball,” TV analyst Steve Jones once said.

Jones was a teammate of Barnes with the Spirits, and said of him: “Most talented player I ever saw come into the game.”

‘Ernie D. blood’

DiGregorio’s story was almost as fantastic. He was white, slow, couldn’t dunk, and came out of a high school league that had never sent anyone to Division I college basketball, never mind Providence College. Defying belief, this same person went on to be an All-American, signed a huge professional contract, and became Rookie of the Year in the NBA.

But no one ever worked harder at being a basketball star than Ernie did. His drive was legendary. They used to call it “Ernie D. blood.” He believed that if he practiced more than anyone else, he would be better than anyone else. Period. It didn’t matter how gifted you were. For DiGregorio, hard work alone could spell success.

He was the kid who practiced and practiced and practiced some more, as Rhode Island as Narragansett Bay and corrupt politicians. He was also the kid next door, “our” kid. To see Ernie in that winter of ’73 was to see what fame was all about; he was white and Italian in a city that was largely white and Italian. In short, he was direct from Central Casting. All that, and behind the back passes, too.

To this day, Cousy says Ernie DiGregorio saw the basketball court the same way he did, the ultimate compliment.

Barnes and DiGregario grew to complement each other on the court; the 6-9 black kid from the ghetto and the 6-foot Italian kid from the neighborhood. And despite the fact that the racial climate in the early ’70s was like kindling just waiting for a match, they got along great with each other, which is maybe one of the nicest things about this great PC team.

But then again, bringing people together was another of Gavitt’s great skills. He knew how talented both Ernie and Marvin were. He knew that if they didn’t get along, it would have divided the team and maybe ultimately ruined it. So when Ernie D. was a senior, Gavitt sat Barnes down and essentially told him that this was DiGregorio’s year, that he was the senior, and that the next year would be his.

Barnes bought it.

“Ernie was the number-one son,” Barnes always joked, “I was the number-two son, and Kevin Stacom was the number-three son.”

Gavitt was adroit at getting people to do what he wanted them to do without being confrontational about it. He had a knack for getting people to realize that what he was proposing was, ultimately, in their best interest. He had done that two years earlier with DiGregorio. It had been one of Ernie’s first games as a college player, and he had been awful, throwing the ball all over the place, taking bad shots.

DiGregorio was sensitive, a young player with a lot of pressure on him. So Gavitt brought him into his office, sat him down, and began running the tape of the game. He didn’t say a word. DiGregorio kept watching, seeing the bad shots, the risky passes. Still, Gavitt never said a word. Eventually, DiGregorio stood up.

“I understand,” he said.

Gavitt never had another problem with him.

What could have been

The Friars ended the regular season 24-2, and entered the NCAA Tournament ranked fourth in the country, the first time in seven years Providence College had been back to the NCAA Tournament. The Friars then beat St. Joe’s and a very good Penn team to get to Maryland.

This was the era when Maryland was trying to be “the UCLA of the East,” the slogan Lefty Dreisell had brought with him a few years earlier. It was a Maryland team led by three future pros: Tom McMillen, John Lucas and Len Elmore. Before the game, Dreisell mispronounced DiGregorio’s name, creating the impression that he wasn’t too worried about tiny Providence College, even if this was the finals of the Eastern Region. This was the ACC, right? And the game was going to be played in ACC country, right?

No matter.

DiGregorio scored 32 before he fouled out, but by then the Friars had enough points as Barnes and Stacom also had big games. The Friars were going to the Final Four, only the second New England school to do that since Holy Cross in 1947. And they were doing it with four starters who had grown up in New England, further proof that New England players had come of age and were now more than capable of playing on the basketball’s biggest stage.

A week later, Providence College started blowing out Memphis State in the national semifinals, putting the Friars seemingly on a collision course with Bill Walton and UCLA. The Friars played as if the game was in Providence instead of on national television in St. Louis. At one point, DiGregorio threw a half-court pass to a streaking Stacom, who knifed through two Memphis State teammates. Oh yeah. He threw the pass around his back. To this day, it’s often called the best pass ever thrown in a Final Four.

But then Barnes hurt his knee midway through the first half and everything changed. With every missed rebound, the dream slipped further away in the second half. Memphis State finally took the lead late in the game and went on to win by 13. The Friars bid for a national title? Over.

The next year, the Friars went back to the NCAA Tournament, even though DiGregorio was off to the Buffalo Braves, where he would be the NBA Rookie of the Year. This time they lost to David Thompson’s North Carolina State team in the Sweet Sixteen.

‘God must be a Dominican.’

One morning in the mid ’70s, Mike Tranghese sat in a cinder-blocked office in a corner of Alumni Hall talking about the incredible success of PC basketball. It was just a few years removed from the Final Four in 1973, the Friars still a huge draw in the Providence Civic Center, the only New England school that was playing what remotely could be called a national schedule.

Tranghese was the PC sports information director then, having come down from Springfield a couple of years earlier. By the end of the decade, he would leave Providence College to go work for Gavitt’s new league, the Big East Conference. He would ultimately succeed Gavitt as the conference commissioner, becoming one of the biggest power brokers in the college game. But on that long-ago morning, he was just someone who knew he was in the middle of something no one could have scripted.

“When we were in St. Louis at the finals, people looked at our enrollment figures and thought it was a typographical error,” he said.

“We were listed at 3,300 (students) and they thought there must be a zero missing, that it must really be 33,000.”

Tranghese leaned back in his chair, stared for a second at the large color picture on the wall of the game against Memphis State in the national semifinals. He seemed lost for a second in the incongruity of it all, then said with a laugh, “God must be a Dominican.”

breynold@projo.com