The Gene Guarilia Interview
By:
Michael D. McClellan
|
Monday, September 26th,
2005
You were born on September 13, 1937, in Duryea, Pennsylvania, which is a few
miles northeast of Pittston. Please tell me a little about your childhood,
and about your family What are some of the things that stand out?
Right
up the street from where we moved, in Duryea, was a Catholic school - Holy
Rosary Grade School. My brother was in second grade at the time, and I
used to go up and sit on the street corner and call his name out while he
was in class. So, a nun called my mother and said, ‘You know, Eugene has
been disturbing the lessons in my classroom.’ I was four at the time
[laughs]. My mother said, ‘Gee, I don’t know what to tell you. Every time
Joseph goes to school, Gene follows along behind him because they’re used to
playing together.’ So my mother suggested that the nun just take me into
the school and keep me out of trouble. The nun says, ‘I don’t know, he
looks kind of young for first grade.’ But somehow my mother convinced her
to take me in, and I did pretty good. I kept up with the other first
graders, who were all at least a year older than me. So the nun calls my
mother and says, ‘I think he’s going to be okay.’ And that’s how it
started.
As I’ve said, my older brother was Joseph. He was a very good football player at Duryea High School, but he hurt his knee. He got married at a very early age – actually, it was the day after he got out of high school, and I was the best man in his wedding. My younger brother’s name was Gerald. He had rheumatic fever when he was a youngster, which was a very scary time. He joined the navy after graduating from high school, then went to college, and became an administrator with Blue Cross/Blue Shield. Both Joseph and Gerald have since passed away, and my parents are no longer living. I’m the last of the Mohicans.
I really didn’t play organized basketball at Holy Rosary. What they had was physical education, and they put a couple of barrels on top of a table. That’s how I got started [laughs]. I was pretty proficient at it, so I decided that I liked it because I could do it well. The first time I played organized ball was in ninth grade, and we played every Saturday morning. That was my extent of my basketball experience up to that point.
You were
set to play collegiate ball at George Washington University, but you took a
brief detour. What happened?
When
I graduated from high school, the George Washington basketball scouts came
to me and said they thought I was kind of young – I graduated from high
school when I was sixteen years old – and they wanted to send me to a prep
school for a year. Basically, they wanted me to mature a little bit. So I
went to Potomac State in Keyser, West Virginia. That was a great experience
playing for Potomac State, because we played a lot of four-year schools, and
I was only a freshman. I did pretty well, and there were so many great
schools down there – Fairmont State, Glenville, West Virginia Tech, and
Concord, just to name a few. When we played West Virginia Tech, they were
the highest scoring team in the nation at that time. They were averaging
something like 114 points-per-game. They became known as the Century Club
because they averaged more than 100 points-per-game that season. They beat
us, but it was actually a very good game. It was 119-111, or something
close to that. Playing at Potomac State was quite an experience – I’ll
never forget it.
From
there, it was on to George Washington University.
After
Potomac State I went down to George Washington. Naturally, I had to be
red-shirted because I left Potomac State after my freshman year. If I had
stayed for my sophomore year, then I could have gone straight into GW and
played – that was the rule at the time. So I got red-shirted – that meant I
didn’t play at all for George Washington during my sophomore year. So I
played for Hagerstown-Fairchild, which was sponsored by Fairchild
Industries, a big aircraft organization based in Hagerstown, Maryland. I
got to play against a lot of All-Americans, such as guys like Jesse Arnelle
from Penn State. We play mostly against Air Force bases, and other AAU
teams. So I kept busy during my sophomore year, rather than laying around
and doing nothing.
You
played collegiate basketball for Bill Reinhart at George Washington, as did
Red Auerbach. Auerbach admired Reinhart greatly, and patterned Boston's
up-tempo attack after the offense that Reinhart had installed at GW. Please
tell a little bit about Bill Reinhart.
Bill
Reinhart, believe it or not, took the place of my father. My father died
when I was twelve years old – I had just finished up with Holy Rosary Grade
School, and he died that following August. So even though my mother
re-married when I was a senior at Duryea High School, I really didn’t have a
father during that period in my life.
When I went to GW, Bill Reinhart called me in his office and he said he knew that I’d been through some tough sailing. He was very supportive – he helped me out a lot, gave me a tremendous amount of very good advice, and he was the one who really set me on the straight and narrow. He became my father figure – Reinhart was a great, great man.
