Taking A Trip Back To The Early Days Of Middlesex County Hoops

PERTH AMBOY, NJ–On Thursday, GMC Hoops touched base with an old friend. Phil Nadal was a co-worker of mine at the place I work at in Raritan Center. However, there’s much more to Phil than that. He is a great mentor. Whether it comes to learning a machine, or playing the game of basketball, Phil had a great mind that was equipped to do both.

Nadal was a 5’9″ guard that played for Ray Newman over at J.F. Kennedy. He played several years for the Mustangs during the late 1960s, and graduated from there in 1970. We was a part of the JFK squad that ended what had been a 35 game losing streak that spanned a couple seasons. Later, he went on to play at Stevens Tech. Despite his size, Phil enjoyed playing inside. He played down low so well that he would go on to teach players much taller than him all the moves he had down low.

Newman used Nadal as a demonstrator at camps and clinics throughout Woodbridge Township. These camps and clinics helped build up basketball in Woodbridge from the lower levels just like Anthony Cotoia had done at South Plainfield and Bill Buglovsky at Perth Amboy. By helping Newman, Nadal got to meet future GMC legendary coaches, Bo Henning (East Brunswick), Paul Schoeb (Piscataway), and Art Flaherty (Perth Amboy Tech). He played at the time of the great Perth Amboy teams with Brian Taylor, and coached by Buglovsky. He also saw the likes of Jay Jorgensen (J.F. Kennedy) and Gary Brokaw (New Brunswick) play.

Phil, who is a very good student of physics, was called Rainmaker by Newman for his high arching shots. Nadal told a story of how he took a jump shot from the right corner at Woodbridge High School that was so high that it hit the ceiling. He also talked about how he used the arch in his shot to make patented hook shots that helped him find a way to score against bigger players that would marvel both his high school and college coaches. Just as he was with physics, Phil was a good student of the game of basketball. Not only in the techniques of shooting and scoring, but also in the running of offenses.

Under the tutelage of both Newman and his college coach at Stevens, Phil studied all aspects of the motion offense, and even added some wrinkles of his own to it through the years. He talked about how well he and his teammates understood and ran the motion offense when he was at Stevens. They all had plays for one another off of the offense, and when he was on the freshman team there, he and his teammates would beat the varsity much like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and his freshmen teammates beat the varsity at UCLA in the late 1960s.

Today, you can find Phil teaching young kids the fundamentals of basketball on the playgrounds of Perth Amboy. He also likes to give those kids history lessons on the heyday of Panther basketball when it dominated high school hoops in Middlesex County with the likes of Brian Taylor and his brother Blake along with Wayne Pennyfeather and many others. He told a story to me about how those great Amboy teams would psychologically demoralize you with the skill they showed not only in their layup lines, but also their dunking lines back in the day.