SCRANTON, Pa. – Cheers, to Gerry McNamara, from the Guinness line at Cosgrove’s Clubhouse & Tavern, where never before could one 19-year-old Irish boy claim so many unacquainted cousins.

Cheers from the Carrier Dome upper deck and its 52 busloads of adoring Scrantonians – 2,000 in all – who marched two hours north to flute their support, in a fan club called ‘McNamara’s Band,’ for a freshman point guard scoring 14.3 points per game.

Cheers from the employees at Stirna’s restaurant, just seven blocks from McNamara’s childhood home in North Scranton. Raise a glass, because suddenly, with one heroic 3-point shot and one euphoric riot of people fixed before a 22-inch television, opening four hours early for a 1 p.m. Syracuse basketball game didn’t seem so silly anymore.

Here’s to Gerry McNamara, the toast of Scranton, Pa. The hero, the role model, the kid with a jump shot who’s made a steely town of 75,640 feel cozier than a Holy Rosary church meeting. His game-winning 3-pointer against Notre Dame on Saturday, the one that gave Scranton the ending it hoped for? That’s all dandy, but any fairy-tale ending requires a fairy-tale story to begin with.

This one begins with a town and its pride for a teenager, a pride so strong that the simple mention of the teenager’s name can turn two strangers in Scranton – young or old, it doesn’t matter – into playground pals or golfing partners or drinking buddies. So by now, because of McNamara, it’s safe to say Scranton’s pretty much run out of strangers.

‘He helps people here make a connection,’ Tommy Bell, an assistant coach of McNamara’s in high school, said at Cosgrove’s the night before the Notre Dame game. ‘People see Gerry on ESPN or at the Carrier Dome, and they know: This is Gerry McNamara. He lives on West Market Street. He has a little white-paneled house. His parents work at the post office.’

At once, McNamara’s an everyman and a talisman. Like much of Scranton’s populace, McNamara sprouts from proud Irish roots and a tight knitting of family and community. But in a town where generations live and die in the same house, hire and retire in the same jobs, McNamara’s success spurs the following.

‘In this area, nobody’s ever gotten more attention,’ said Billy Clark.

Clark’s responsible for a small part of it, because for most SU home games, his company, Cookies Travelers, charters several buses from Scranton to Syracuse. On Saturday morning, Clark’s line of eight buses greeted a parking lot of Scrantonians at 8:30 and fumed north on Interstate 81, 450 people aboard.

Come game time, roughly one of every 37 Scranton residents – including 200 of the town’s 220 police officers – filed into the Carrier Dome. The fans displayed clementine-colored ‘McNamara’s Band’ signs, distributed by the local Scranton paper, and wore No. 3 jerseys and T-shirts, some store-bought and many homemade.

Scranton lacks any notable professional or college teams, so many in northeastern Pennsylvania root for Notre Dame. That partially explains why Saturday’s game with the Irish drew the largest crowd yet from Scranton. But since McNamara signed on at Syracuse, the Irish cognoscenti signed off their allegiances to Notre Dame – or, if nothing else, leased them away for four years.

‘This is the first time in my life I’m rooting against the Irish,’ Scranton resident Jim O’Shea said on the bus ride. ‘I have my Irish underwear on, but nobody can see it.’

Everything’s about Syracuse now, because, as one student said after a Bishop Hannan high school basketball game Friday night, ‘Gerry’s basically taken Scranton over.’ McNamara played four years at Hannan, drawing considerable attention and press while earning the school a state championship his senior year.

‘But now,’ said Hannan principal James Marcks, ‘it’s grown from a Bishop Hannan thing into a Scranton thing.’

By eighth grade, McNamara eclipsed the popularity of the town mayor, who happened to be McNamara’s uncle. Come high school, Jimmy Connors wasn’t ‘the mayor of Scranton.’ Rather, in a turn of good politicking that kept him in office for three terms, his identity became ‘Gerry McNamara’s uncle.’

‘That’s when I knew we had a phenomenon here,’ Connors said.

So if that’s a phenomenon, what’s this? Maybe it’s best stated, as one patron suggested at Cosgrove’s, like this: Gerry McNamara is more loved by Scranton than any other person is loved in any other place.

Consider that when two student reporters from this newspaper drove to Scranton for an article on McNamara, WYOU-TV, the local CBS affiliate, interviewed the SU students for its lead on the 11:00 news, two stories before the first mention of Iraq.

‘Around here,’ an employee at a local sporting goods store said, ‘McNamara gets more press than George Bush.’

He also gets more adulation, as 10-year-old Scrantonian Austin Trubia affirmed on the bus ride to Syracuse last Saturday. For an elementary school project, students picked one person, a leader or role model, about whom to research and write. Trubia opted for Los Angeles Lakers star Shaquille O’Neal, who seemed like a worthwhile selection until the fifth-grader arrived in school to find that every other boy in the class had picked McNamara.

Even in high schools across Scranton, the veneration’s no less. Before a Bishop Hannan basketball game earlier this season, an opponent on rival Riverside walked through the pregame shootaround wearing a replica McNamara Syracuse jersey. As one Bishop Hannan teacher put it, McNamara, at once both revered and celebrated, plays the role of Scranton’s Santa Claus. Sideburns substituted for shag, of course.

‘When Scranton has somebody who makes it big – and that’s not too often – the people here love it,’ said Phil Yacuboski, a news anchor at WYOU. ‘He’s the hometown hero, and he’s only [19].’

‘We just can’t keep up with how big it’s gotten,’ said McNamara’s mother, Joyce.

Chiz McNamara has become pretty big in his own right, which is to say, everybody in town knows he’s Gerry’s father. Nowhere was that more evident than at Scranton High’s 3,000-seat gym, where Chiz stood against a wall by the baseline to watch a Gerry-less Bishop Hannan team play in the district playoffs Friday, 12 hours before he’d travel to Syracuse and watch his son.

After Hannan dropped the game in overtime – ‘Boy, sure coulda used Gerry tonight,’ one observer remarked as Hannan junior Matt Blume missed 2 of 3 late free throws – Chiz bottlenecked the gym entrance while exchanging pleasantries with well-wisher after well-wisher.

Thirty-seven handshakes, four kisses and countless, You goin’ up tomorrow?’s later, Chiz and his wife left an empty gym.

‘It’s amazing,’ said Chiz, whose real name, Gerry, has been long since overwritten by his nickname. ‘Just shaking hands with all these people, and a lot of them have been following Gerry since he was in seventh or eighth grade.’

During childhood, McNamara honed his game on an elevated stage of pavement – barely large enough for a pick-up truck – in his backyard. A slanted Action Force basketball hoop manicured McNamara’s jump shot, although Blume, the Hannan junior and a family friend, remembers that McNamara would sometimes fall off the ledge while shooting long-range jumpers.

Since moving to larger stages, McNamara’s practice has been well-served. En route to being named 2002 Player of the Year in Pennsylvania, the 6-foot-2 guard led Bishop Hannan to a state championship. But listen to the stories that spill through Cosgrove’s Tavern and you’ll see that another McNamara moment trumped even the state title.

A game earlier, in the state semifinal against defending-champ Trinity, McNamara wrote Scranton’s best-ever barbershop tall tale by pouring in 55 points – 41 in the first half. That two-quarter stretch included nine 3-pointers.

‘Never seen anything like it,’ Bell, the Hannan assistant, remembered. ‘He was unconscious. People were literally running out of the gym at halftime with their cell phones. Like, ‘Hey, you wouldn’t believe what I’m seeing right now.”

As Bell, just one sunrise from a 130-mile drive to Syracuse, relayed the story at Cosgrove’s last Friday night, the playoff loss that transpired several hours earlier seemed long forgotten.

Here, McNamara is the panacea. The inspiration. The impetus to raise 75,000 glasses. An iconography of Rocknes and Horsemen clutter every wall in every pub, but come game day, McNamara is the icon who’s responsible for filling every barstool in town.

‘He truly is an icon,’ said a Bishop Hannan janitor named Tommy. ‘I’ve never seen one person change everything so quickly. People see what he can do, and now there’s hope for everyone.’

Make no mistake, Scranton doesn’t need McNamara. For the last century, it’s done just fine with a status quo, so what’s another generation of the same? There’s a certain charm to a place where a solicitation for directions prompts a 10-minute conversation. Or to a place where restaurant owners will introduce themselves on the rare occasion that an out-of-towner walks in. Or to a place where high school sports keep a safe perspective but also attract enough interest to make them worthwhile.

‘The people of Scranton feel like they’re part of it,’ NFL Hall of Famer Mike Munchak said. ‘They watched you grow up, and they don’t forget about you when you leave. That just doesn’t happen anywhere else.’

Until McNamara, Munchak remained Scranton’s most celebrated athlete. Munchak graduated from Scranton Central in 1978. He advanced to Penn State and later to the NFL’s Houston Oilers, where he was a perennial Pro Bowler on the offensive line.

Yet even Munchak admits that he never surpassed the status of ‘mini celebrity.’ McNamara, as 10-year-old Trubia points out, ‘is bigger than a movie star.’

He did nothing to detract from that reputation Saturday.

Movie star grew into Oscar winner when McNamara flashed open on the baseline with 22 seconds left and Syracuse down, 80-79, to the Irish. Shoulders squared and feet pegged just behind the 3-point arc, McNamara accepted the pass from guard Billy Edelin and converted on what he’d later call his biggest shot of the year.

‘He wasn’t going to let 2,000 people from Scranton down today,’ Syracuse head coach Jim Boeheim said after the 82-80 SU win.

An hour after the shot, McNamara, still in uniform, strode from the locker room back onto the Carrier Dome court, where he celebrated with roughly 30 relatives and friends while signing autographs for a short line of children.

By nightfall, though, nearly every Scrantonian in the building would return home, back to their families and friends, their jobs and their churches, their pubs and their restaurants. And McNamara, with nothing more than a jump shot, would continue to make all of those things pretty darn enjoyable.

Published on February 28, 2006 at 12:00 pm