March 2, 2000
The Bridgehampton High School boys basketball legacy, believed by many to have died two seasons ago with the graduation of Maurice (Mo) Manning, one of the greatest players ever to wear a Killer Bee jersey, is alive and well, and extremely tenacious.
Last Thursday, the newest legends to join the hallowed Killer Bee roster, Daryl Fishburne, Mikey Turner, Paul Jeffers, Raymond Gilliam, Kwame Opoku, Nick Dombkowski, and Courtney Turner, dispatched the formidable Greenport Porters 62-55 at Westhampton Beach High School, and thus reclaimed the Suffolk County Class D championship.
Stifling Killer Bee defense, aggressive rebounding, superb ball-handling, and sloppy Porter field goal attempts combined to secure the win for the top-seeded locals.
“A lot of people said that since Maurice was gone, that was the end of Bridgehampton,” said Carl Johnson, the Killer Bees’ coach, following the game. “Maurice was good, but basketball was there before Maurice, and I knew it was going to be there after Maurice.”
“I knew the kids could win, they just had to believe in themselves,” Johnson continued. “Tradition is much stronger than any player who ever came through Bridgehampton, and that’s what the kids were working off of. We just had to accept the criticisms and move on.”
The stunning victory over the defending county champion Porters came just a week after the Bridgies succumbed to the North Fork team in a regular-season-ending 47-41 sleeper that made the rivals League VIII co-champions.
—
Bolstered by a number of new South African, Australian, and Irish recruits in their 20s, the Montauk Rugby Club, which is about to embark on its first season of Major League Rugby play, won a warm-up tournament in New Orleans last weekend, defeating Old Blue, the host side, which is also an M.L.R. member, and Jackson, Miss., in convincing fashion.
“The pieces of the puzzle are coming together,” Frank Bistrian, Montauk’s spokesman, said on the team’s return. “With our recent recruiting we’ve increased our depth — we’ll need 30 players to get through the spring schedule — and the squad’s average age has gone way down. There wasn’t another team in New Orleans with our speed.”
One of Montauk’s new recruits, Garth Wakeford, a 6-foot-7-inch, 240-pound number-eight man from Zululand, South Africa, by way of Vancouver, was named the tourney’s most valuable player, largely because of his 80-meter run in game two, during which he dodged just about every one of New Orleans’s players, including the opposing winger.
Montauk defeated the host side 25-3. In addition to Wakeford’s, tries were also scored by Francois Reyneke, a fellow South African from Cape Town, by Dirk Mulder, of Penrith, Australia, and by James Brady.
. . . The Rev. James Short, whose son, Jay, is a Montauk winger, sent the team out onto the pitch Sunday with a reminder that that day’s Bible reading was Psalm 144, whose first verse blesses the Lord, “which teacheth my hands to battle and my fingers to fight” — a fitting sendoff, as it turned out.
—
Early commitments from Lindsay Davenport, the world’s number-two women’s tennis player, who has won Wimbledon and Australian Open championships, and from Todd Martin, the 1999 U.S. Open finalist, have been received, according to Scott Rubenstein, for the Paul Annacone Tennis Classic that is to be played at East Hampton Indoor Tennis on Aug. 20 and 21, the week before the U.S. Open.
Rubenstein also said that the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial, established in 1968 to continue the assassinated senator’s work with the disadvantaged and oppressed, has been added to the Kendall Madison Scholarship Fund, East Hampton Day Care, and Meals on Wheels as a beneficiary of the event.
