Coach Mario Garza likes what he sees. But he’d love it if he saw a bounce pass.
“Speedy!” he shouts across the miniscule Buchanan Street YMCA gym at 5-foot-4 Michael Bradshaw, who deservedly shares a nickname with the Looney Tunes mouse.
“That was nice, but a bounce pass would have been beautiful. Get that gunpowder off your hands and put on some baby powder!”
Garza, an average-sized man, stands easily a head shorter than the bigger players on his Jewish Community High School boys’ basketball team. He has closely cropped black hair, a diamond stud earring and dangling loop protruding from his left lobe and sports a loud yellow throwback San Francisco Warriors jersey.
If the outfit didn’t sell you, Garza’s gently sloping shoulders and dangling arms are telltale signs of many a day spent hunched over the basketball.
He laughs and jokes with the boys when they form a ball-bouncing, gum-snapping procession from the high school a few short blocks over to their San Francisco home court at the Y, but once the team hits the hardwood, it’s all business.
“I can’t even walk into your school anymore. Your teachers and administrators — they’re all thinking championship! That’s your fault. Let them get complacent, not you,” he upbraids his wide-eyed players.
Garza speaks in a high-pitched, razor-sharp sing-song reminiscent of Malcolm X, and even when he’s shouting it feels as if he’s speaking quietly and forcefully, enunciating every last syllable.
“You guys haven’t won anything yet. I don’t want to be the Indianapolis Colts!” he finishes off, making a reference none of his team missed to the pro football squad that always chokes away the big game.
To be fair, Garza’s guys have won something. As of press time, the team is 16-2 and an eye-popping 15-0 in the Small Schools Bridge League. The Wolves have already clinched the top seed in the SSBL tournament, which kicks off on Valentine’s Day.
And the Wolves aren’t exactly winning these games on forfeits. Even a rudimentary glance at a team scrimmage reveals that, as the Who put it, “The kids are all right.”
When star scorer Jojo Grossbard shoots the basketball, it appears to be hurtling toward the hoop in a gently curved, invisible pneumatic tube. At 6-foot-4, center Mike Yagudayev is a load in the low post. Point guards Michael Bernstein and Gavriel Matt possess the deft passing touch and court vision that coaches can’t teach.
But why won’t they make a bounce pass?
“I’m not going to say this again,” shouts Garza, which is one of his favorite phrases. “Bounce pass! Bounce pass!”
The coach, known as “Cardio Mario” due to his training work with University of San Francisco athletes, likes to break up his squad into the starters and reserve players for scrimmages.
These games are inherently one-sided, but Garza believes that evenly matched teams would be dominated by the stronger players, so he forces the reserves to assert themselves.
“This is the only way they’ll improve,” he says with a shrug.
It seems to be working; at a recent practice the shirtless reserve squad came within a whisker of toppling the starters.
As he stands on the sideline surveying his team in action, Garza barks a calculated mixture of cajoling, technical instruction and compliments of both the forehand and backhand variety.
Watching one of his reserves confidently can a three-point rainbow from the right corner, Garza lets out a whoop of delight and deadpans, “When that kid learns to play defense, he’s gonna be a star!”
If his team has one problem, “they’re too smart for their own good.” The bunch is “easily bored,” and has trouble focusing on opponents they dispatched with ease earlier in the season.
So far, the team hasn’t blown any of those games, though, as Garza admits that he occasionally channels volatile college coach Bobby Knight to focus his team.
The coach was about to expound on his team’s deficiencies when he was distracted by one of his reserves pulling off a nifty, no-look touch pass to a cutting teammate for an easy bucket.
“Beautiful! Excellent!” whooped Garza.
His poker face breaks into a wide grin.
“Last year you never would’ve done that!”