‘Sucker punch’

In all honesty, Phil Martelli didn’t see it coming.

Martelli had received a text from Director of Athletics Jill Bodensteiner, J.D., the morning of March 18, asking him to join her for a 1:30 p.m. meeting in Regis Hall with University President Mark C. Reed, Ed.D. Martelli didn’t think anything of it. In fact, he had prepared for it, spending the weekend making notes for what he thought was a typical end-of-the-season review.

“I had spent all weekend writing up paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs of changing this or moving that or changing staff assignments or doing something different in strength and conditioning and nutrition and practice,” Martelli said. “So I just thought that that was what we were doing.”

Reed began the meeting.

“Dr. Reed did some historical remembrances about things that he and I had been through, and then he turned it over to Jill,” Martelli said.

Bodensteiner told Martelli the program needed a change, and it soon became clear to Martelli that the change was him.

“Jill said it,” Martelli remembered. “She said it. She said change is necessary, and I realized, ‘They’re talking about me.’”

Martelli said he understands it was their decision to make, to let him go after 24 years as the head coach of the St. Joe’s men’s basketball team. He’d been a part of the program since 1985 when he was hired as an assistant men’s basketball coach, rising to head coach in 1995.

But the way the message was delivered felt like a “sucker punch,” “a blindside tackle,” and one, Martelli said, that “cut my heart out.”

“The messaging that I wasn’t good enough to coach the team was what got communicated,” Martelli said. “It’s devastating. I always tried to be a good partner. We had a lot of good partners at Saint Joseph’s, or we would not have had the success that we had. But at that moment in time, all I knew was, ‘You’re not good enough.’ And that’s a baseball bat to your gut.”

Bodensteiner gave Martelli the opportunity to retire, but he said he didn’t consider it at all.

“I wouldn’t do that,” Martelli said. “That isn’t honorable. Kids go to school because of their coach.”

After the meeting with Bodensteiner and Reed, Martelli went straight to his car. His thoughts immediately shifted to his family. He drove 30 minutes to his home in Media, Pennsylvania.

When he walked in, he found his wife, Judy Martelli, in the computer room. There, he was forced to say the dreaded word aloud: “Fired.”

The Martellis spent the next half hour in their computer room, crying.

Former Head Coach Phil Martelli, days after being fired from St. Joe’s, said he struggled to deliver the news to his family. PHOTO: MITCHELL SHIELDS ’22/THE HAWK

At 7 a.m. the next morning, Phil and Judy Martelli arrived in the video room in Michael J. Hagan ’85 Arena for a meeting with the team.

Assistant Coaches Geoff Arnold ’86, David Duda and Mark Bass ’95 knew why the team was gathered that morning. Martelli had spoken to all three by phone the night before.

“It was a challenge because when I’m talking to them on FaceTime, I don’t [just] see them,” Martelli said. “I see their wives. I see their children. I see their world, and it’s not that their world was changing. Their world was imploding. As the head coach in this situation, I feel that I have failed them.”

The players, though, had no idea what was in store. Martelli texted them frequently and they didn’t think anything of his request to meet that morning. Martelli, who rarely scripts his remarks, had written a message to deliver to them.

“I didn’t know if I could get through it if I didn’t script it,” Martelli said. “The players were shocked.”

After he made his remarks, the Martellis got ready to leave. But the 14 players were not ready to let go. They each thanked him. They hugged him. They said they loved him.

“These are young men, and we’re not really that comfortable expressing emotion,” Martelli said, holding back tears. “But when a 19-year-old kid says he loves you, take it from there.”

Senior guard Chris Clover, one of the players in the room, said he and his teammates were stunned by Martelli’s news. After the Martellis left, the players sat in silence for 10 minutes.

“No words were said,” Clover said. “We just went back into the locker room, and that was it.”

At about 10:30 a.m., Bodensteiner emailed the campus community to let them know that Martelli was out and the university would immediately begin a search for a new coach of the men’s basketball team.

The Martellis were already back home by then. They sat together in a recliner for the rest of the day, waiting for sleep. But as word spread, the phone calls and emails began pouring in, thousands of them, and Martelli knew he would answer them, all of them.

“It’s always been a big deal to me that you answer everything that comes in,” he said.

While Martelli had a scripted message for his players, when telling his three adult children and their spouses, he said he spoke from “my heart and my head.”

Elizabeth Jeffries ’09, Martelli’s youngest of three children, was upstairs tending to her four-month-old when she heard her dad’s voice down the stairs. While Martelli lives nearby, his unannounced visit was out of the norm. She instantly knew something was wrong.

“It really was as if I was looking at someone who didn’t know where he was or what was going on around him,” Jeffries said.

Jeffries’ thoughts immediately turned to her grandfather, Phil “Pops” Martelli Sr. Pops had been a fixture at St. Joe’s basketball games and practices. His signature gesture was to thank each player after a game, win or lose. Had Pops not passed away less than two months ago on Feb. 6, Jeffries said she would have assumed that was the reason for her father’s visit.

Martelli had waited until Jeffries’ husband, Patrick, returned from work to deliver the news. He pulled Jeffries and her husband aside, hoping the couple’s older children would not hear.

“I cried immediately, and it was just a sinking feeling, a really hard thing to hear,” Jeffries said. “It was just a whirlwind of emotions from there.”

Martelli’s eldest son, Phil Martelli Jr. ’03, currently works as an assistant men’s basketball coach at Bryant University in Rhode Island. His younger brother Jimmy Martelli is the director of basketball operations at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). Because they’re so far away, Martelli used FaceTime to share the news with both his sons.

Jimmy Martelli was in the midst of preparing for the first round of the NCAA Tournament.

“One of the hardest things we had to do was reach out to my son at VCU,” Martelli said. “He wasn’t at home. He was at the office. Here he is getting involved in the greatest athletic event that a college team could achieve, the NCAA Tournament, and [we’re] here having to look at him through FaceTime. He’s alone. He’s not with his wife. He’s surrounded by graduate assistants and other assistant coaches. He’s broken and sobbing. It felt awful, taken from the highest of joys to the lowest of lows.”

Phil Martelli was so distraught that he couldn’t bear to turn on his TV to watch the NCAA Tournament last week. On March 22, he finally tuned in to watch his son’s team play against the University of Central Florida. VCU lost 73-58.

For Martelli, the St. Joe’s men’s basketball program and his family were one and the same.

“Saint Joseph’s was part of me, and I was a part of Saint Joseph’s,” Martelli said. “That was our way of life, my family and I. That was our way of life. And now it’s a place that I worked.”

Martelli holds the game ball from his 310th win, making him the all time winningest coach in St. Joe’s history. PHOTO COURTESY OF SJU ATHLETICS

At the top of Martelli’s long driveway sits a basketball hoop with an SJU Hawk sticker pressed on the bottom right corner of the glass. Four days after he was fired, Martelli opened the door to his home dressed in a black turtleneck, pants and socks. He looked somber, tired.

There are touches of St. Joe’s throughout his home. Hand-painted SJU Hawk logos on wine glasses are on display inside glass-paned kitchen cabinets. On the granite countertop is a stack of prayer cards—Pops’ card is on top. One room over, graduation photos of the Martelli children line the top of a desk. Next to the desk is a signed basketball in a display case.

In the right-hand corner of the living room, more memories. Martelli pointed toward where Pierfrancesco Oliva, a senior forward, once slept upright in a chair for two nights after dislocating his left knee during a game against Duquesne University. Martelli didn’t want Oliva to be alone, so after Oliva was discharged from a Pittsburgh hospital, Martelli brought him back to his home to recuperate.

Judy Martelli entered the kitchen, returning from a trip to Goodwill and the post office. She began to describe the toll the past few days had taken on the family. Even the smallest interactions had been difficult, like her trip to her favorite McDonald’s.

A fan of fountain soda, Judy Martelli has visited the same McDonald’s drive-through for years, often interacting with the same employee, who would ask about about the most recent St. Joe’s basketball game, win or lose. But Judy Martelli was dreading the conversation she would have on  this particular visit. It had been heart-wrenching to tell their three children and nine grandchildren, but it was hard to talk to other people, too. For this reason, she suspected she would avoid going to church on Sunday although her husband probably would, she said.

“They can take his job away from him, but they can’t take away the connections he’s been able to make,” Judy Martelli said.

Phil Martelli, phone in hand, sat down at his kitchen table. He had spent the week since his firing characterizing his pain to television cameras and on the radio as one that might never heal.

A usually animated Martelli was often speechless when asked to reflect on his time at St. Joe’s. That was especially true when asked about his future, both in the immediate and the long term.

At age 64, Martelli has never worked anywhere but St. Joe’s. He knows coaching for a Division I men’s basketball team again is a long shot.

“Look at the hiring practices,” Martelli said. “I’ve never left Philadelphia. And the only way that this could possibly work, the only way this could possibly work is if I leave Philadelphia.”

The Martellis have spent their entire life in the greater Philadelphia area. Martelli grew up in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania and graduated from St. Joseph’s Preparatory School and Widener University.

On Feb. 11, Martelli laid his father to rest after a funeral mass at St. Philomena Roman Catholic Church in Lansdowne, where Pops regularly attended the 7:30 a.m. mass on Sundays. At the 7:30 a.m. mass the Sunday after Martelli was fired, the Gospel reading recounted a parable of a fig that does not produce fruit. The owner of the tree is encouraged not to cut it down, to give it a chance to produce again. Rev. Paul Castellani’s homily that followed was about second chances.

Martelli isn’t sure what his second chance will be.

“When I wake up Monday morning, I’m a fired basketball coach,” Martelli said. “Where do I go? Where would you go Monday morning if you were me?”

He won’t be going to Hagan Arena on Monday. His feelings are “too raw.”

But Martelli also isn’t going to sit and nurse his wounds. He said he needs to find a lawyer to go over his contract with St. Joe’s. He needs to line up health insurance. And he has to consider his next move.

“I can’t sit around here and wallow,” he said. “And I can’t assume that someone will call me. There might be athletic directors out there that might say, ‘Eh, he’s going to do TV. He’s going to do broadcasting.’ No. I know who I am. I need to have people that will keep my name in the coaching circles.”

What would it be like to return as a visiting coach to Hagan? Martelli mused, flashing a smile.

“Now, I will say this,” he said, “if I get an opportunity, and again, it’s a hypothetical, a hypothetical…it would be really cool. No. I would never play them. It’s too emotional. Too too emotional. Too too emotional.”