Lacrosse Preview 2008

Pat Perritt arrived late to men’s lacrosse practice on a Wednesday in mid-January, hitched his gear on his shoulder and tried to scurry into the back of Manley Field House.

But then the past caught up with him.

A member of the Syracuse athletic department, the liaison between the players and the media, spotted him. Duty called.

‘Hey, Patty,’ he shouted out. ‘You mind?’ He motioned toward the pack of reporters nearby, hoping for interviews.

The 5-foot-10 junior midfielder looked up, his flat-brim New York Yankees hat tilting back.

‘Yeah, sure,’ he nodded.

He hustled inside, track jacket flapping in the wind. Perritt understood. He’s used to this.

Interviews for Pat Perritt usually mean the same thing these days. They’re games of cat-and-mouse that center on the unspoken question: [ITALICS]Hey Pat, can you tell me more about the time you got arrested?[/ITALICS]

This is Perritt’s new lacrosse life, one he’s willingly accepted in order to get back what he lost last year. It’s growing up, he’ll tell you. That’s what he’s learned.

Don’t be afraid to call this a comeback. It is. Pat Perritt’s return to the Syracuse men’s lacrosse team follows a traditional story arc: a rise, a fall, penance and now a search for redemption.

The rise is easy. A two-time All American at Sachem East High School in Long Island, Perritt followed his brother Bill to Syracuse. He made the cover of Inside Lacrosse magazine with the other stars of SU’s monster 2005 recruiting class, Dan Hardy and Kenny Nims.

He scored 17 goals as a freshman and was an honorable mention All-American. He was nominated in the preseason the next year for the Tewaaraton Award – lacrosse’s equivalent of the Heisman Trophy.

Then, the fall. Perritt and senior midfielder John Carrozza were arrested downtown by Syracuse City Police on March 11 last year, and charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. A police report described both as intoxicated. They were suspended from the team, re-instated, then suspended from the school.

The turmoil rattled the team. Syracuse finished a rocky season at 5-8, its worst record in 25 years.

Perritt was rattled, too.

His anxiety, a condition he said he’s battled since he was a kid, flared up like a sunspot as the negative attention rained down. He withdrew from the university a month after the arrest.

That’s when the penance starts, the atonement for past mistakes.

Perritt slogged through alcohol counseling while home. He got a handle on his anxiety. He worked construction with his uncle during the summer: roofing, siding, housing extensions.

And while appealing his two-semester suspension from Syracuse, he took fall classes at community college.

Now the questions about the arrest – the prying into his personal life – are the final part of penance, the last stretch before he can move on.

That’s where he was in mid-January, stuck talking with a reporter as his teammates filed out of Manley.

Practice would start soon, but Perritt couldn’t join them yet. More questions. Warming up would have to wait.

Finally, minutes later, the two finished up. The team had begun drills.

‘Good to have you back,’ the reporter said.

Perritt clasped his hand and smiled. ‘Thanks.’

He jogged to catch up with the team, shoes clipping on the pavement.

***

No, Kathleen Perritt doesn’t want to talk about this.

She’s not rude, doesn’t slam down the phone when people call to ask. But all this talk about what a monster her son was, well, it gets to her.

Every time a story appears about Pat, it’s always there: the arrest, the charges, the suspension, the reason he withdrew from school (‘an ongoing medical condition that has recently worsened’).

Some stories skimp on the gorier details. They leave out the nasty stuff from the police report: Perritt’s bloody nose, witnesses calling him ‘belligerent.’

Others don’t.

Kathleen knows the context. She lives with the context. She doesn’t need to see her son raked over the coals again.

‘We’re just tired of rehashing everything,’ Kathleen said over the phone from her Holtsville, N.Y. home.

But she did want to add one thing, something people might forget with all the talk about arrests and suspensions and court dates.

‘Just say that we’re very happy Patrick is back at school,’ she said. ‘And we’re hoping for a great season.’

Everyone is. Everyone wants to move on, from 5-8, from suspensions, from the disappointment, the embarrassment. And no one more than Kathleen’s son.

Because Pat, you see, connects with the past, present and future of SU lacrosse.

This is where he always wanted to be, ever since his grandmother gave him a Syracuse lacrosse jersey for Christmas in second grade. Middle school Pat watched big brother Billy win national championships in 2000 and 2003.

Now for the past three years – this fall excluded – he’s roomed with junior midfielder Dan Hardy, who bears the burden of wearing the legendary No. 22.

And greenhorn freshmen like Josh Amidon and Jovan Miller? Senior midfielder Steven Brooks said they can observe Perritt’s intensity, and follow his lead.

Take the first scrimmage of the season. Perritt’s still working to get back into game shape – head coach John Desko said he’s behind physically. He catches a pass against Hofstra, cradling the ball as he searches for the hole in the zone.

Looking, looking, he slips, digging his knees into the Dome carpet. A Hofstra long pole rams into his back. No man’s land. [ITALICS]Screw it.[/ITALICS] Perritt rises up and hurls a shot over the net. The Orange retains possession. Perritt gets up, shrugs. [ITALICS]Let’s go.[/ITALICS]

‘We call him Patty Competition for a reason,’ Brooks said. ‘Every time he steps on the field it’s always competition.’

That’s the book on Perritt the player: feisty and fiery, the stocky kid whose three older brothers never let him win at anything. He wears his emotions on his sleeve, talks a little trash, tries to fire his boys up.

The book on Perritt the person?

‘He’s kind of just like that in his whole life,’ Hardy said. ‘It’s just fun to have him around.’

So here comes the hard part, the story Kathleen is tired of hearing about. Last year, that energy spilled over.

The season started with such promise. Perritt put up a hat trick in a season-opening home victory over Hobart. After a pair of losses, the Orange earned a huge road victory at then-No. 2 Georgetown on a Saturday afternoon.

That Sunday night, Syracuse police responded to a call involving Carrozza and Perritt and a fight downtown on Walton Street. The two assured the police they were fine. The officers took their word, and left.

They would return.

Another call came in, which, according to a police report obtained by The Daily Orange, described the two midfielders as showing ‘violent, tumultuous behavior’ outside the Ohm Lounge on Franklin Street. The two resisted arrest, the report said.

A police officer slugged Carrozza and confiscated a set of fake IDs. Perritt sprinted down the street. Officers found him a block away. Both were taken and arraigned at Onondaga County Justice Center.

For Perritt, the memories of the night are hazy. He didn’t think straight. Maybe didn’t think at all.

What happened? Too keyed up after the Georgetown win? Maybe. Too much to drink? Definitely, Perritt said.

‘You’re in college, you don’t really know your limits,’ he said. ‘You just don’t make the right decisions all the time.’

The athletic department suspended them indefinitely – a penalty lifted after two games and a public apology from the pair, when Perritt said he had stopped drinking. But things didn’t end there.

Carrozza and Perritt were the second and third players arrested that season. Junior defenseman Sean McGonigle was arrested on Feb. 15 after a charge of assault from a Jan. 20 incident.

But that didn’t receive the same coverage as Perritt’s. Even after he was reinstated, Perritt felt the shame of embarrassing his team, his family, his university.

The anxiety kicked in.

The condition manifests itself in different ways: the overflow of apprehension can dissolve into nausea, heart palpitations, headaches, stomach aches. It depends on the person.

‘I really don’t know how to explain it,’ Perritt said. ‘It’s just something that . . . sometimes it’s very stressful, and it’s tough for me to handle certain things a little more than it is for other people.’

It was too much, whatever it was. Sometime on either Sunday April 15 or Monday April 16 of last year – Perritt isn’t sure the exact date – he left campus. He slipped into his car and drove home alone, a solitary five hours. Time to think about penance, and maybe, hope for redemption.

‘It was really difficult for me,’ Perritt said. ‘I needed to take some time and reflect on what I did and what I needed to change in order to get back to the person that I wanted to be.’

Home was the best place to do that.

***

Kevin Keenan didn’t know how to bring it up. It just seemed so [ITALICS]awkward.[/ITALICS] He had just met the guy.

Sure, the Walt Whitman High School senior had known [ITALICS]of[/ITALICS] Pat Perritt for years. He’d seen him on lacrosse blogs or the Newsday sports page plenty of times.

But Perritt had only been working at the Lacrosse Unlimited in Huntington for a few weeks, enough time to talk lacrosse – Keenan plays defense at Whitman – but still too early to talk about, you know, the elephant in the room. The reason Pat was there in the first place.

‘But then I kind of just manned up and asked him about it,’ Keenan said. ‘Like, he kind of talked about it a little bit. But I didn’t really want to talk to him about it, ’cause it was kind of weird.’

Most of the high school kids who worked with Perritt at the store seemed this star-struck, said Tara Haver, the store manager. But Perritt worked well with them.

The store was a sanctuary for him, a place to go after his classes at Suffolk County Community College finished. He worked the register. He talked with the kids.

And he waited and hoped to go back. The SU Judicial Review Board had suspended him for two semesters – Carrozza was suspended for one – but an appeal was in the works to shorten that.

The criminal charges had already been sorted out. A Syracuse City Court judge agreed to dismiss them, as long as Carrozza and Perritt avoided another slip-up during a six-month period.

Still, the university suspension meant Perritt couldn’t return to campus. He missed fall practices with the team, taking history, sociology and music classes at Suffolk instead.

By the time the appeal went through in early January of this year, Perritt was ready to go. He came back just as spring practices began.

Carrozza returned after Perritt. He was still finishing up a class at community college back home in Westchester, N.Y.

But both have learned from last year, they said.

‘It hurt me at the time, and now the only thing it can do is help me,’ Perritt said. ‘Just look back and think and realize, that I need to turn that switch off.’

His plate is full now. Classes to keep up with, a reputation to earn back.

It’s hard to tell when penance ends and redemption begins. But Perritt is getting close.

‘Everybody makes mistakes,’ Perritt said. ‘Sometimes people’s are worse. I made a mistake, and it’s something that, thank God, I get to fix.’

ramccull@syr.edu

Published on February 13, 2008 at 12:00 pm