Staten Island lost some of its edge last week when Bert Levinson, who spent the better part of a lifetime picking the brains of the sharpest jocks in the old neighborhood and beyond, and poured all that acquired wisdom into an almost uninterrupted spate of winning as the baseball and basketball coach at Curtis High School – and, later, as a junior high school principal, and a basketball referee – passed away at his home in West Brighton.
He was 91, and nobody who knew him would say he frittered away any of that time.
Growing up in New Brighton, where his father ran a neighborhood drugstore, Levinson fell in love with the games early on; and when he fell, he fell so hard that playing ball six days a week was never enough.
On Saturdays when Jewish boys from observant families were expected to go to synagogue, Levinson would stuff his glove, spikes, and baseball uniform into a paper sack, and drop it out a bedroom window into the alley below. Then he’d walk out the front door in his best suit, retrieve his gear, and be on his way to Goodhue Playground or Clove Lakes Park, wherever there was a game to be played.
That devotion paid dividends a few years later, when Levinson and his hometown buddy Vinny Gattullo, Army privates stationed at Fort Carson, Colorado, spotted a poster announcing tryouts for the post baseball team. When the rest of the unit went off to keep the post-war peace in Korea, Levinson stayed behind to play ball with teammates like future Yankee manager Billy Martin.
“I got lucky, he’d say whenever he told the story.
He got lucky a lot after that, coming home to start a career as a teacher and coach in an era when larger-than-life coaches high school coaches wielded their out-sized influence to keep order in the hallways, and allowed their bosses the illusion that they were still in charge.
So it was hardly a shock when Levinson’s high school coach Harry O’Brien, having decided he no longer had the stamina to coach two sports, marched his young assistant into the office of principal James Corbett.
“Mr. Corbett,” he announced, “I want you to meet your new basketball coach.”
And that was that.
A decade later, Levinson would take the same walk with his assistant, Larry Anderson.
In those days, even as a rookie coach, Levinson could walk down the line of prospects on the first day of basketball tryouts, pausing in front of every kid with longish hair.
“Get a haircut,” he’d say, “or don’t come back.”
Telling the story decades later, he’d shrug.
“They all came back,” he said, still amazed at the tug of the games. “They wanted to play.”
He coached some great players – big-leaguers, college stars, and Staten Island Hall of Famers – and some of his competitive swagger rubbed off.
“Coach, what are you worried about,” all-city second baseman Bill Wolfe asked him one day, when Levinson was grousing about a missed sign or a botched cut-off. “We always win.”
And it was nearly true.
Levinson’s teams won seven Island basketball championships in 10 seasons. His baseball teams made six straight appearances in the city championship game, winning back-to-back titles in 1961 and 1962.
He didn’t have the physical stature of some other legendary coaches. But I once saw him stop an argument … and maybe a minor riot … before it started.
Just by raising an eyebrow.
This was after his coaching days were over, when Levinson was officiating the biggest high school games in the neighborhood, and made one of those high-leverage, bang-bang calls that was certain to make somebody mad.
An aggrieved coach stormed off the bench, inciting a crowd that was already teetering on the edge of anarchy.
He was halfway to the scorer’s table when Levinson turned his head. He didn’t speak, or raise a hand. His baleful stare, and that one raised eyebrow, were enough to stop the outraged coach in his tracks. Suddenly uncertain, he retreated to his seat on the bench, and the tension leaked out of gym.
That same moxie came in handy in Levinson’s tenure as the principal at Dreyfus Junior High School, a troubled school in danger of collapse. Levinson succeeded where others had failed, because he wasn’t afraid to try, and because staff and parents knew the new guy couldn’t be cowed; that he meant what he said; and that when push came to shove, he had their backs.
He could be a demanding taskmaster, and an unyielding disciplinarian. But once you were one of his guys, that membership card never expired. Levinson’s word opened doors that might otherwise have been closed. And more than once, he put his own reputation on the line in front of a desk sergeant, district attorney, or judge, after one of his players – or ex-players – got himself in a jam.
It all came back to him later in life.
Diminished by age and illness, and crushed by the passing of his son Mickey, a gifted physical therapist whose clients included baseball greats like Mariano Rivera, Levinson was sustained by the attention of his former players, now middle-aged men.
Some, like Larry Anderson and Larry Liedy, seemed more like sons.
But the doting father and grandfather, who drove his granddaughter to nursery school every day – and waited outside until the end of the school day, just in case she needed him – could be moved to tears by the attention of athletes he hadn’t seen in decades.
At his 90th birthday party, he was serenaded with a personalized version of “My Way” led by Island crooners Al Lambert and Jack Furnari, and a chorus that included Edy, his bride of 58 years, their kids and grandkids, former players and onetime adversaries.
On days like that, when he was surrounded by familiar faces and voices, and the stories started to flow, there were moments when the years seemed to melt away, and he was still Bert Levinson, who could tell a nearly full-grown man when to get a haircut, and stop a nasty ruckus before it started, just by raising a questioning eyebrow.
