Golden Jubilee

Jack Curran remained in his seat, head down, arms crossed. He knew the accolades were coming. The rattling off of all his championship teams, hundreds of victories and the more than 500 student-athletes he sent to college.
“It was overwhelming,” he said.
Curran doesn’t like the attention. He would have preferred to be coaching, moments after Archbishop Molloy edged St. Francis Prep, 45-41, to move him two wins shy of 900.
Instead he was shaking hands with so many of his former players and students as the school honored his 50 years of service as a baseball and basketball coach with a deserving celebration in the aptly named Jack Curran Gymnasium.
“I hate to inconvenience them,” he said.
Not all of his great players were on hand - Kenny Anderson and Kenny Smith were no-shows - but the Briarwood school was filled with familiar faces. From Senator John Sabini to former ABA star Kevin Joyce to Mike Capo, who was on Curran’s first team back in 1958, they all shared fond stories of the legendary coach.
“You think of Molloy, you think of Jack Curran,” said Joyce, now an institutional sales trader in New York. “He was always the measuring stick to me for all the coaches I had going forward. All of them, with big credentials and big games, still never matched up. He was just a better coach. He would have the answers they didn’t have.”
Curran took the job in 1958 after seeing an advertisement in a local newspaper while selling building materials in West Springfield, Massachusetts. Lou Carnesecca, the baseball and basketball coach there, was moving over to St. John’s, so there was an opening. There hasn’t been one since.
“When I was here playing, we would joke ‘Coach was going to be here forever,’” said Matt Rizzotti, a first baseman in the Philadelphia Phillies minor league system and a Molloy graduate. “When time stops, that’s when he’ll stop.”
“You’re not going to see anything like this again,” Sabini said.
Curran’s achievements are endless. He has been inducted into nine Halls of Fame, such as the National High School Athletic Coaches Association Hall of Fame and the New York City Basketball Hall of Fame. Four separate years, he has won city championships in two sports - 1969, 1973, 1974, and 1987 - while no other local coach has done it once. His 2,492 career victories, 898 in basketball and 1,594 in baseball, make him the winningest coach in each sport among city coaches. His teams have also claimed 22 crowns, 17 in baseball and five in basketball.
“He obviously loves what he does, and if you love what you do, you can do it forever,” said New York State Supreme Justice Gregory Lasik, who has sent three of his children to Molloy.
Since turning down a job offer at Boston College, Curran has never thought twice about leaving. At the age of 77, he isn’t slowing down, either. He doesn’t coach physical education anymore - he did that for 42 years - but the passion remains.
“My relationship with younger people, that’s why I stayed with it,” Curran said. “It’s a vocation, working with young people. Here I had something I enjoyed doing, so I decided to stay.”