Bittersweet time for Orange
SYRACUSE, N.Y. – After Syracuse rallied to beat Rutgers in overtime last month with guard Gerry McNamara on the bench nursing a thigh injury, coach Jim Boeheim delivered a message to his team.
“This is a great lesson for all the guys,” Boeheim said. “They can win without Gerry.”
The Orange haven’t had to do that since the 2002-03 season, when McNamara and Carmelo Anthony helped lead Syracuse to its only national championship. McNamara, who plays the game with unmatched intensity, has never missed a game at Syracuse – his streak of 129 straight starts is tops in the nation.
But now the end of his college career is near. McNamara will play his last regular-season home game today against No. 4 Villanova, and he will be sent off in style. For the first time in its 26-year history, the Carrier Dome is sold out, which means the Orange’s NCAA record for largest on-campus crowd to see a college basketball game – 33,199 set a year ago against Notre Dame – will be eclipsed.
“The years have been great,” McNamara said. “I’m not quite ready to reflect on them yet. I think there’s going to be plenty of time for me to do that at the end of the season. Right now, I just want to soak it all in.”
So do his biggest fans, mom Joyce and dad Gerry, who have yet to miss one of his games.
“Everybody is getting really excited. I know it’s going to be crazy,” Joyce McNamara said. “I just can’t believe we’re at this point. It’s bittersweet.”
“We’re looking forward to it in one respect, but we’re not looking forward to the fact that it’s the end of his college career here,” the elder Gerry McNamara said. “We’ve loved every minute of it for four years. That part’s going to be hard.”
Why all the fuss over this 6-foot-2, 180-pound guard who looks like a throwback from a bygone era? Why will more than 3,000 fans from his hometown of Scranton, Pa., population 75,000, pack more than 60 buses, receive a police escort out of town, and make the two-hour ride north to watch No. 3 play one last time?
“He’s brought joy to this city,” said Billy Cook, whose Scranton-based company, Cookies Travelers, operates 22 of the buses that will be part of the motorcade. “We have people who never followed the sport in their lives, senior citizens, tuning in to watch him play.”
They’ve seen an awful lot. McNamara is only the sixth player in school history to score 2,000 points (he has 2,003), is Syracuse’s leading free-throw shooter (89 percent), ranks second in steals (251) and minutes played (4,570) and fifth in assists (604), and his 379 3-pointers place him seventh in NCAA history.
Small wonder he’s on the watch list for the Wooden Award and Naismith Trophy and is one of 16 finalists for the Cousy Award. No wonder Villanova coach Jay Wright is concerned about today’s game.
“I don’t know what to expect,” Wright said. “I don’t think we’ve ever played anywhere against a player of this magnitude in terms of what he means to a program, in terms of what he means to college basketball. A player that’s as loved as Gerry McNamara playing his last home game? I don’t know if we’ll ever do this again.”
That McNamara is one of the most popular players in school history stems as much from his grit and leadership as his impressive statistics.
In the second round of the team’s championship run through the NCAA tournament three years ago, he was bloodied by a blow to the head over his right eye that sent him to the locker room. He returned with a bandage above his nose, hit three 3-pointers in the final 8 minutes, and Syracuse beat Oklahoma State after trailing by 12 points.
In his sophomore season, McNamara was injured against Seton Hall at the start of Big East play but still averaged more than 37 minutes in the remaining 13 games of the regular season, scoring in double figures nine times. In the NCAA tournament he averaged 26.7 points over three games, highlighted by nine 3-pointers and a career-high 43 points in a first-round win over BYU.
At first, McNamara thought that injury was a groin pull, but an MRI after the season revealed a stress fracture in his pelvic bone. He was ordered to rest for three months.
This has not been the farewell season McNamara envisioned. The lone senior on the team and its biggest scoring threat, he has been constantly double- and triple-teamed by coaches who know that if they stop him they have a good chance at victory because of the Orange’s lack of a consistent low-post game.
In the last 11 games, McNamara has failed to reach double figures five times and his average has fallen to 16 points per game as the number of quality shots he’s taken has dwindled along with his shooting percentage (35.1 percent overall and 32 percent on 3-pointers).
“Gerry is a marked man. He gets face-guarded, he gets hit. That guy has to go through so much,” assistant coach Mike Hopkins said.