Back in the days before the blush came off Chris Mullin’s rose I postulated about his early recruit Malik Ellison (who I interviewed here: http://www.bigeastboards.com/?p=1183) that he was a Jonah, meaning jinx (or if you prefer, Mush), the pejorative meaning of which arises from poor Jonah of the old testament. For those of you godless types, Jonah was tasked by Our Lord to visit bad news upon the city of Nineveh but instead fled from his labors aboard a ship bound for Tarshish, which ship a peeved Yahweh afflicted with a violent storm that threatened the life of captain and crew, which captain and crew threw Jonah into the ocean, where he was swallowed by a huge fish which carried him to Nineveh and vomited him up upon the beach, where a chastened Jonah delivered the Lord’s message, which was essentially to quit your wicked ways or else. Anyway the evidence against Ellison – who scored 18 points in his season debut at Hartford this week, where he’s a graduate transfer – comprises both his on-court ineptitude (he’s averaged about a third as many turnovers a year as he has points over the course of his career) but also the misfortunes visited on the teams for which he played: SJU was 22-43 in his two years there, Pitt was 14-19 and Hartford currently sits at 4-7, which is carry the one 40-69 over a four year career, which I think we can agree is less than auspicious, especially considering his pedigree.
I started thinking about Ellison after the West Virginia game. In that game despite LJ Figueroa being held scoreless in the second half and despite Mustapha Heron shooting 2-12 and despite St John’s two-headed point guard committing eight turnovers SJU won, improbably, because Greg Williams – a 20 percent three point shooter – hit a nutty three as the shot clock expired and because Saint John’s was gifted 15 more free throws than WVU – and made 21 of them, having previously missed four of every ten – including two on a questionable call with five seconds left that provided the margin of victory and meanwhile WVU, a 70 percent FT shooting team shot 40 percent from the line. Or consider last night, when with St John’s on the ropes Brown senior Joshua Howard blew a lay-up line lay-up, from which miss Brown did not recover. And this in a week where half of Georgetown’s team was dismissed for their wicked ways and half of Seton Hall’s team went down to injury and suddenly it occurred to me that maybe Coach Third Choice has some sort of inverse Malik Ellison hoodoo going on, because how things have gone this year at Saint John’s are exactly the opposite of the way things usually go at St John’s. I’m not going to rehash all the vigorous rogerings SJU has taken over the years (you only have to recall last year’s Seton Hall game to know what I’m talking about) and the terrible injuries, to Jayson Williams, Billy Singleton, Rob Thomas, Darryl Hill. And so I wondered: is it possible that the curse is lifting and that CTC is the guy doing the lifting. And having thought that I wrote what became the beginnings of this essay, within four hours of which Mustapha Heron went down with what looked to be a pretty severe injury. And it occurred to me: maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m the Jonah. St John’s. The Dee-troit Lions. Any one of a thousand horses whose noses were an inch too short. It all makes a weird sort of sense.
Maybe it’s me.
If you told me ten years ago that I’d even be considering this I’d have scoffed. Because there was a time I didn’t believe in anything. Nowadays though I’m so cynical that I don’t trust my own skepticism so everything’s on the table: Yahweh, Mohammed, Buddha, heaven, hell, vampires, ESP, ghosts, UFOs, Big Foot, Mothman, Nessie, Chupacabra, sea monsters, mermaids. So why shouldn’t I be a bad luck charm, because there are more things in heaven and earth Horatio. And in fact if my rudimentary understanding of the physics of infinite universes is correct all these things must exist, if not in this universe then in a parallel one. Which on the bright side means there’s a universe where maybe it’s not me and where St John’s has won a couple of national championships under long time head coach Jay Wright … Regarding Heron’s injury, the normal among us hope it’s not serious and that if it is that he recovers quickly. And yet I’d bet real money that somewhere this morning on some fan forum sewer some member of the worst most ignorant fan base in all of sports has expressed the idea that Heron’s injury might be a case of addition by subtraction, that he wasn’t playing well anyway and that the team wasn’t going anywhere this year and that his loss will afford CTC the opportunity to give his bench some well needed seasoning, which could only help the team moving forward. As I said, real money … Regarding CTC, at first I thought it a tad odd that instead of sprinting across the court to see why his star player – who’s after all we’re told is just like a member of his family – was writhing on the ground with what looked like maybe a career ending injury he stood in front of his bench with his arms folded. I mean I don’t much like my family but if one of them was screaming in pain I might inquire what the problem was. Whereas CTC just stood there, which in retrospect I see the wisdom of. Probably he didn’t want the rest of the team getting agitated, so he just stood there looking bored and after the game when asked about what Heron’s loss might mean to the team said merely, well “it’s next man up.” Pure class.
