‘WELL, Marquette fired me, so you know who I’m rooting for,” Bob Dukiet said yesterday afternoon from his home in Boynton Beach, Fla. Not that he’d be glued to his TV set come the start of Pitt-Marquette, last night.
No, last night Dukiet was previously engaged. To play piano at a private party. Playing the piano is how Dukiet, now 55, has made his living since getting out of college basketball seven years ago. “It’s a mostly older crowd down here, so I play a lot of Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin.
“I’ll run the gamut, from formal affairs at country clubs, to the Marriott in Delray Beach, to senior citizen gatherings. These days I’m ‘Piano Bob of Palm Beach County.’ I’ll play for anyone whose feet still move. I work up a sweat and they like me. In college basketball, the only ones who like you are the ones who shoot the ball. That’s a tough way to make a living.”
Dukiet, who grew up in Livingston, N.J., playing piano, accordion and basketball, was near the top of the charts – with a bullet – in 1986, when he was hired away from St. Peter’s in Jersey City to coach Marquette.
Dukiet was hot. Hot the way college basketball coaches from around here – coaches from St. Peter’s, Fordham, Manhattan, Hofstra – can get hot. Hot enough to coach Marquette; hot enough to play Carnegie Hall.
At St. Peter’s, his teams won conference championships and played in postseason tournaments. At Marquette, where he succeeded Rick Majerus – and where everyone succeeds Al McGuire – Dukiet’s teams won 39 and lost 46. Cut!
In 1996, after eight years at Div. II Gannon in Erie, Pa., where he became the school’s winningest basketball coach, Dukiet packed it in.
“I’d had it,” he said yesterday. “It’s a stressful occupation, especially the recruiting. I coached for 17 years and only had a couple of losing seasons, but that’s all it takes. Now I enjoy watching, that’s all.”
Dukiet didn’t know how much of last night’s Pitt-Marquette game he’d be able to watch. “I should see some of it. It’s a late start and things down here during the week tend to break up early. Actually, I’ll be rooting for Pitt because one of its assistants, Barry Rohrssen, is an old friend.
“But right now, I’m putting on my tux and getting ready to play ‘It Had To Be You.’ “
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WFAN hit a new low in exploitive self-promotion yesterday when it produced and aired a promo in which Sid Rosenberg excitedly boasted that the station scooped its competition by “two hours!” in reporting that Met coach Don Baylor has bone marrow cancer.
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Big change on TBS’s Braves’ telecasts. Skip Caray and Pete Van Wieren, after 27 years together on the superstation, will be relegated to 36 Braves’ games on regional cable network Turner South, in addition to radio.
TBS’s 90 Braves telecasts this season will be called by Don Sutton and Joe Simpson, who previously shared TV and radio with Caray and Van Wieren.
TBS, this week, stated that Braves’ telecasts will have more of a “national feel” and contain “unbiased editorial content” – words clearly aimed at Caray, an inveterate homer, but like an eccentric and occasionally cranky uncle, someone we learned to live with and even, at times, appreciate.
TBS’s baseball telecasts will undergo an overhaul to try to create the look and sound of traditional national network telecasts – despite the fact that one of the two teams playing will always be the Braves.
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Everything’s up to date in Kansas City. The Royals, whose colors had always been royal blue and white, last year got into the gang-wear business – better late than never – when they added a black uniform.
Bingo! The Simon City Royals, a street gang whose colors are dark blue and black, (bum) rushed to purchase – or steal – KC Royals apparel. The Simon City Royals, with chapters in Milwaukee, Chicago and the South, was recently described in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel as a “drug-dealing, gun-peddling, white-supremacist gang.”
The Simon City Royals used to wear Rockies garb. But after the KC Royals added black, they switched teams.
“I had no idea,” Royals’ VP of marketing Charlie Seraphin told the Kansas City Star. “We don’t endorse the type of behavior associated with gangs.”
Well, of course, not. Endorsing gang behavior and cashing in on it are two different things.
(Metro Edition)
Monday’s Rutgers-Georgia women’s NCAA Tournament telecast on ESPN was loaded with shots of Georgia coach Andy Landers in frenzied demonstrations. Play-by-player Mark Jones had an odd word to describe Landers. Jones called him “unflappable.” I think he might’ve meant “highly flappable.”
