Tom Green’s phone has been ringing nonstop for over a month, since word got out that FDU would be hanging a banner with his name on it from the rafters of the Bogota Savings Bank Center.
The banner will be unveiled Sunday, during halftime of the Knights’ 1 p.m. basketball game against Saint Francis. It’s a much-deserved honor for the New Milford resident, who won 407 games and made four NCAA Tournaments as the program’s head coach from 1983-2009.
More important than the unveiling, though, is the reaction “Tom Green Day” has generated.
“I’ve got a ticket list about a mile long,” Green said. “I’ve got a lot of former players who have called me up, telling me congratulations. It’s just really amazing to me, how many former players have reached out to me. It’s really, really nice for FDU to do this.”
Green did college coaching right: He won games, but he also served as an educator and a mentor. That’s why dozens of his former players will be there Sunday, and many more have contacted him to say thanks.
“I’ve heard, ‘Coach, I came in as a boy at 18 and I left as a man at 22. Coach, you were a distinct father figure to me,’” Green said. “Those are the things you don’t really think about at all, but when you talk to a guy that gradated 15, 20 years ago and they tell you things like that, it really warms your heart.”
The 75-year-old, who remains involved with FDU as a color commentator on live streams of the Knights’ games on NEC Front Row, also sees those values vanishing as the sport becomes increasingly transitory in nature. He stuck around Hackensack for 26 years, became synonymous with the institution. It was his life’s work.
“I don’t think we’ll ever see that again,” he said.
A different world
Green grew up in Western Pennsylvania and was an assistant at Tulane when he got the job at FDU in 1983.
“I came on a three-year contract,” he said. “My house note tripled, but my pay didn’t triple.”
In year two, his Knights went 21-10 and won the ECAC Metro Conference tournament before taking top-seeded Michigan to the wire in the first round of the Big Dance, falling 59-55 after half his team fouled out.
A short while later the university president called him into a meeting, “pulled out a sheet of paper and said Tom, that’s your contract,” Green recalled. “And he tore it up right in front of me.”
Green was there to stay. His squads captured four regular-season conference titles and produced 18 winning campaigns out of 26. They made the Dance in 1985, 1988, 1998 and 2005, plus the NIT in 1991 and 2006. His 263 Northeast Conference triumphs remain the most by any coach in that league, and his 407 overall wins ranks third all-time among New Jersey Division 1 men’s basketball coaches. Only Princeton legend Pete Carril (514 wins) and Frank Hill, a pre-World War II figure who won 414 games while coaching Rutgers and Seton Hall (sometimes simultaneously), are ahead of him on that list:
1. Pete Carril, Princeton (514-261 from 1967-1996)
2. Frank Hill, Seton Hall and Rutgers (414-237-1 from 1911-1943)
3. Tom Green, FDU (407-351 from 1983-2009)
4. Don Kennedy, Saint Peter’s (323-195 from 1950-1972)
5. John “Honey” Russell, Seton Hall (294-129 from 1936-1943 and 1949-1960)
6. John Carpenter, Rider (292-328 from 1966-1989)
7. Frank “Cappy” Cappon, Princeton (262-185 from 1938-1961)
8. Mitch Henderson, Princeton (243-126 from 2011-current)
9. Tom Young, Rutgers (239-116 from 1973-1985)
10. Kevin Willard, Seton Hall (225-161 from 2010-2022)
11. P.J. Carlesimo, Seton Hall (212-166 from 1982-1994)
It’s not a coincidence that only one active coach is on that list (two if you count Willard, who relocated to Maryland in 2022).
“Basketball coaching is a whole different world now,” Green said. “I don’t know how coaches do it.”
Last spring FDU’s best player, versatile forward Ansley Almonor, transferred to Kentucky, where he’s appeared in just four games so far this season.
Could Green ever have imagined one of his players leaving a starring role to ride Kentucky’s bench?
“No, never in a million years,” he said. “But the money I heard he received is just too much to turn down.”
This season FDU is 5-11, but it’s hard to say how good the Knights are because they played a ridiculous non-conference schedule that included trips to Miami, Creighton, Nebraska, Villanova, Minnesota, Boston College, Fordham and La Salle. That’s eight “guarantee games” to bring in revenue, double what Green used to schedule.
“The whole purposes is to raise money to start paying players next year,” he said.
‘Makes it all worthwhile’
The idea of leaving has become ingrained in the sport. Green said he went on “10 or 11” job interviews during his time at FDU, including Rutgers twice, Rhode Island, UMass and La Salle. Sometimes, they picked someone else. But more than a few times, he pulled his name from consideration because it didn’t feel right.
“I went to visit Ohio University,” he said. “I was out there for three days, in middle of nowhere. When I got back, I was in the parking lot of Newark Airport and the first thing I wanted to do was hear some noise. I started driving and I laid on that horn.”
Green’s wife owned a real estate business. His son was thriving in school. Leaving for the sake of leaving just didn’t feel right.
Now, just about everybody leaves – some with good reason, some without.
“You lose eight or nine players every year,” he said. “How you operate in that system is beyond me.”
You wonder, years from now, if events like Sunday’s will continue to take place. Not just the banner raising – a wonderful and overdue gesture – but former players coming back to a place they can always call home, recognizing a mentor who made a difference during a formative times in their lives.
“That makes it all worthwhile,” Green said. “I wanted to know the players, I wanted to know their parents, I wanted to know who their friends and girlfriends were. It was a family affair you had with so many players.”
That’s a legacy worth celebrating.
Jerry Carino has covered the New Jersey sports scene since 1996 and the college basketball beat since 2003. Contact him at jcarino@gannettnj.com.
