Perspective | Tom Konchalski made basketball better. The sport won’t be the same without him.

That’s as a result of the telephone won’t ring on any of these days — Easter, the Fourth of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving or Christmas — with the voice on the different finish wishing me a “Happy [fill in the blank]” after which beginning the dialog with the following query: “How are Christine, Danny, Brigid and Jane Blythe?”

Those are the names of my spouse and three youngsters, and that was the method Tom Konchalski at all times started his vacation calls. He added Jane’s center title as a result of he preferred the method it sounded. How a lot part of the holidays had been Tom’s telephone calls? Christine, who by no means met him, would ask me what time she thought he would name on Thanksgiving or Christmas to determine when to schedule dinner.

Tom, who was without query the most trusted and revered highschool basketball expertise scout ever, died Monday at 74 after an extended, troublesome bout with most cancers. To say his dying will be mourned in the basketball world is a monumental understatement.

Shortly after Tom went into hospice Friday, I used to be speaking to UMBC Coach Ryan Odom — whose dad, former Wake Forest and South Carolina coach Dave Odom, was certainly one of Tom’s closest buddies — about the impression Tom’s dying would have on basketball.

“It’ll be like when Dean Smith died,” Ryan stated. “Everyone will mourn.”

There’s one distinction, and this isn’t meant as a put-down of Smith in any method. Like any profitable coach, Smith had individuals who didn’t like him — if solely as a result of he gained so usually.

Tom Konchalski had no enemies. None.

He by no means drove a automotive, however he by no means wanted one when he attended video games, summer season camps or tournaments, as a result of coaches would line as much as provide him a journey if solely to choose his outstanding thoughts for a couple of minutes.

“One of the best people I’ve ever known,” Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski stated Friday when the information that Tom was in hospice started to unfold.

When Krzyzewski went to summer season camps to scout, he had a really brief listing of individuals he would go to dinner with between periods. If he was in the same place as Konchalski, he would discover him — inevitably on the high row of the bleachers someplace — and say, “Come have supper with us.”

My friendship with Konchalski started in 1979 when, as a really younger Washington Post reporter, I attended one thing known as the Boston Shootout, which was then a distinguished summer season event. I went, not solely to see good younger gamers, however as a result of occasions like that had been an excellent place to get to know school coaches.

It was Tom Abatemarco, then an assistant at Maryland, who pointed to a really tall man with jet-black hair standing on the again row of a bleacher and stated, “You really want to know what’s going on, that’s the guy you should be talking to.”

He was proper. Tom was well mannered to a fault and was prepared to reply any query about anybody. His solely request was that I not ask him questions whereas he was watching a sport — that was his work time. “I owe it to every kid I scout to be paying full attention when I’m writing a report on them,” he advised me early in our friendship.

As the years went on, I known as Tom increasingly more usually — not only for his critiques on gamers however as a result of he knew everybody and all the things in school basketball. I keep in mind when Joe Harrington, then the coach at George Mason, employed a younger assistant named Rick Barnes. “Get to know Rick,” Tom advised me. “He’s going to be a star.”

My solely criticism with Tom was that he was usually unattainable to achieve. He lived in the Forest Hills neighborhood in Queens — he had grown up in the borough and graduated magna cum laude from Fordham — and didn’t have name ready on his telephone. He briefly had an answering machine, however he removed it as a result of he bought too many calls he didn’t need to return and he couldn’t declare to not know somebody had known as when he nonetheless had the machine. He by no means owned a pc, and he wouldn’t have been in a position to get on the Internet when you paid him to do it. After some time, I made some extent of getting him inform me his journey schedule so I may be positive to see him in particular person.

There had been occasions he would come to Washington to see a few video games in a day after which go straight again to New York. I’d decide him up at Union Station, go to the video games with him, seize one thing to eat — Tom liked Mel Krupin’s deli — and drop him off to take a late prepare house. I treasured these days. It was like working towards a PhD in basketball — previous and current. To the very finish, Tom’s reminiscence was extraordinary.

Those vacation telephone calls by no means lasted lower than an hour. After I had stuffed him in on my household, we might begin speaking hoops. Tom began out as a scout in the early Seventies, working for the legendary Howard Garfinkel, who based the first vital nationwide summer season basketball camp — Five-Star — in the Sixties and, at the same time, the “High School Basketball Illustrated” scouting report. When one other of the NCAA’s foolish guidelines made it verboten to run each a summer season camp and a scouting service, Garfinkel offered HSBI to Tom, who was by then writing it anyway. For the subsequent 36 years, Tom typed his stories on his typewriter, took them to be copied and mailed them out to subscribers. I used to be on the subscription listing — however he refused to let me pay.

“I’m not taking your money, Coach,” he would say, at any time when I introduced it up. (Tom and I known as one another “Coach,” largely as a method of creating enjoyable of coaches who truthfully believed that “Coach” was their first title.)

Seth Davis of the Athletic finest summed up how basketball folks felt about Tom: “The only honest man in the gym,” he stated someday as we walked right into a summer season camp fitness center by which Tom would possibly very nicely have been the solely sincere man.

Tom liked all sports activities — he labored as a linesman at the U.S. Open tennis event and later as an usher on the previous grandstand court docket. But his old flame was basketball; he had grown up going to Madison Square Garden along with his father and older brother, Steve, who coached at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia for 45 years and is Canada’s all-time winningest school coach. When the court docket at St. Francis Xavier was named for him a number of years in the past, Tom joked proudly, “Now there are two Coach K courts: one at Duke and one at St. Francis.”

During the pandemic, earlier than his well being made it unattainable for him to get out a lot, Tom went to outside AAU video games though nobody was allowed to take a seat courtside. “You could watch through a fence,” he stated. “It really wasn’t bad at all.” He paused. “It was basketball. That was all I needed.”

During our name on Christmas, he advised me his medical doctors had taken him off the experimental therapy he had been on for a couple of months. “The tumors are still growing,” he stated. “There might be some chemo that can help. We’ll see.”

Tom was by no means a complainer. Whenever we talked about the most cancers, even on Christmas when he admitted he was in fixed ache and couldn’t style meals, he would say, “A lot of people have it a lot worse than me.”

This week, the whole basketball world has it worse than Tom — as a result of we don’t have him anymore. I’ve misplaced a liked one. And the holidays won’t ever be the same.