“He was one of the best ball-handling guards I’ve ever seen, ever played with, or ever played against,” Scott Rubenstein, a teammate of the late Kenny Carter’s on East Hampton High School’s 1976-77 state-champion boys basketball team, said the other day at the East Hampton Indoor Tennis Club that he manages.
“He was magic,” said Howard Wood, who co-captained that 22-1 East Hampton Hall of Fame team with Rubenstein before starring at the University of Tennessee and, for a decade, in Spain’s premier league. “He did things no one else was doing then, no-look, behind-the-back passes, dribbling between his legs. . . . He had the quickest hands I’d ever seen, you could tell he would play in college.” He did, at Auburn and Anderson University.
“And he was just the nicest, friendliest guy you’d ever want to meet . . . a fantastic player and an even better person.”
The life of Carter, who died at the age of 63 on Feb. 27 in West Union, S.C., where he had lived since 1978, is to be celebrated at the Clubhouse adjacent to the tennis club’s indoor courts in Wainscott on April 27 from 5 to 9 p.m.
“We’re hoping that members of his family and friends and guys who played basketball with him turn out,” said Rubenstein, who attended Carter’s funeral. “I think his grandson and great-granddaughter are coming. They’re the nicest family. . . . We’re trying to get his wife, Sherrie, and his two sons and daughter to come up. We want to celebrate his life, to share stories. . . .”
“When Kenny was in the fourth grade, you could tell he was different from the others,” Rubenstein continued. “We were athletes and played hard, but Kenny had a gift. He had a gift, but he didn’t settle. You saw how hard he worked — you didn’t want to let him down.”
What well might have set East Hampton’s first state-championship boys basketball team on the road to its eventual success, Rubenstein recalled, were lopsided losses the Biddy team, coached by the late Ed Petrie Sr., sustained in trips to New Orleans and San Juan, Puerto Rico, when they were 11. “Howard and John Thompson were too tall, but the rest of us were on that Biddy team that set two records in New Orleans: the fewest points scored in a game and the most points allowed in one. We did well in New York State, but we were to learn that it’s a big world out there.”
“What did we learn. . . ? We learned that we had to do everything better if we wanted to be that special team.”
“We played all the time. Coach Petrie would open the middle school gym in the morning before school, and after we ran cross-country in the afternoon and came back to the school for a drink, there’d be a basketball in the middle of the gym and the lights would be on. . . .”
“It was a special year,” Wood said of that ‘76-’77 season, which began with 91-88 and 69-63 wins over St. Agnes and Babylon, the defending county champion and Long Island’s top-ranked team, which had been riding a 38-game win streak.
Carter, Wood, Ed Petrie Jr., Tony Gilliam, and Rubenstein were the starting five. On the bench were John Thompson, Randy Strong, Jerome Jefferson, Matt Bennett, Andy Fischer, and Anthony Allison. David Kelly was the manager.
“We presented other teams with a lot of problems,” said Rubenstein. “First, they had to cover Eddie, Kenny, and Tony, and when they figured out how to do that, then Howard could go one-on-one. If they double-teamed Howard, one of those guys would get a shot off. It was hard.”
It was standing-room-only that winter in East Hampton’s gym. “They had bleachers behind the baskets,” Rubenstein recalled. “The whole community was behind us. We’d go to Eddie’s Luncheonette [now the Golden Pear] and the pillars of the community would buy us breakfast and ask us about our games and say, ‘Good luck on Tuesday,’ or ‘Good luck on Friday. . . . ‘ We were very lucky to live in a community that supported its students and teams the way ours did. Eddie Cangiolosi was such a huge supporter.”
“You ask me what else I remember. I remember the camaraderie we had within our team, within our school,” Rubenstein said. “I’ll always remember when we were doing layup drills, the kids lining up on the ropes to watch us, and we’d put our hands out and slap fives. It felt good to know we were making such an impression on these young kids. . . . I remember walking into a gym in Southampton and the little kids packing the entryway, and saying, ‘That’s Carter . . . That’s Carter . . . That’s Carter. . . .’ He set an example for everyone. You never heard of him doing anything wrong or getting in trouble. Coach would yell at me and Howard, but he never yelled at Kenny. They had a special relationship. Instead of yelling, he’d pull him aside. Nobody ever had anything bad to say about Kenny. He had the greatest smile, but when he had the ball, you better be looking. He could thread it through a two-inch opening. The ball would hit you in the face if you weren’t looking.”
The ’76-’77 team outscored its regular-season opponents 84.3 to 53.1 on average. Steve Bromley Jr., The Star’s sportswriter at the time, reported an opponent’s fan as saying of a 20-point loss to the Bonackers, “Twenty points — that’s almost an upset.”
Tom Collins, who coached Albertus Magnus, the team East Hampton defeated for the state championship in double overtime, told Bromley that the Bonackers were “the best team we’ve faced. We’d heard about Petrie and Wood, but Carter” — who finished with 19 points, seven assists, and five steals — “really hurt us. We didn’t know about him.”