IF YOU ONLY HAVE been half paying attention through the years, you might think Phil Martelli is one-dimensional, the funny man who calls in to WIP who also happens to coach basketball. You would be wrong.
Martelli, 55, can certainly be funny. He can also be introspective, charitable, calculating and competitive. He is anything but one-dimensional.
He remembers everything, which is good and bad. He can be charming. He can be cunning. He can motivate his players. He can irritate his players.
More than anything, Martelli is human. He does not evoke neutrality. He is a stream-of-consciousness talker without a filter. He is what we say we want in a coach or athlete unless that person actually says something interesting or controversial. Then, we attack.
Coaching is 24/7. You can't understand unless you live it.
"This is my life," Martelli says. "My family is next. It's not my family first. I think that's wrong."
That is true of just about every coach. It is just that few will say it.
Martelli's father is at every practice. His wife, Judy, and daughter, Elizabeth, are at every home game. Sons Jimmy (Rutgers) and Phil Jr. (Delaware) are assistant coaches. It is hard to know where basketball ends and family begins, because they are one and the same.
"Every memory I have involves the game of basketball or a team he was coaching," Phil Jr. says.
Judy played for those Immaculata teams that came to life in Tim Chambers' movie, "The Mighty Macs."
"I remember growing up in the gym," Jimmy says. "I don't remember anything else. Even when he came to my high school games, I realized he was watching Eddie Griffin or somebody from Neumann. He wasn't there to see me."
As Martelli gets set to break (barring a major upset) the nearly 60-year-old school record for wins tonight at Hagan Arena against Morgan State, the Saint Joseph's University coach is in the process of reinventing his career for a second time.
This is Martelli's 17th year in the only job he ever wanted. It is forever from that July day in 1995 when he sat in his car in Valley Forge Park, waiting for the call he was not sure would ever come, to last week when he sat at a long table in a conference room next to his vast office - the table is longer than the old office he used to occupy on the other side of the basketball court.
