ST. BONAVENTURE, N.Y. — His favorite player, or one of them anyway, wasn’t an All-Time Team selection and likely wasn’t chosen on many ballots.
He never made an Atlantic 10 all-conference team.
He sits 46th on the career scoring list, 22 points shy of the 1,000-point club.
And yet, you’d have a hard time finding anyone who’d object to the pick, a player who remains on the short list of true fan favorites and whom Gary Nease singled out as one of the best from his 25 years as the voice of the St. Bonaventure men’s basketball team: Dutch big man Peter Van Paassen.
“My power forward, and there’s been a bunch of pretty good ones, (is) Van Paassen,” said Nease, when asked for a starting five from his time as play-by-play man, on the ML Sports Platter podcast Tuesday. “He was tough as nails, and he was one of those guys that set the team up and did the dirty work so that guys like Caswell Cyrus, Patricio Prato and Tim Winn could do their work.”
IN THE last quarter-century, nobody has spent more time around the Bona basketball program than Nease, who called his first game in 1995 and has had a front row seat for every big moment since.
And in a 25-minute guest spot with Mike Lindsley, a 2002 Bona grad and Syracuse-based media personality, he reflected on some of the memories that have made for a compelling radio career.
Nease couldn’t narrow his list to only five players, but did make mention of Courtney Stockard (“the Bonnies would not have made the NCAA Tournament in 2018 if he was not on the team”) and all-time point guards Marques Green and Jaylen Adams (“how do you compare Marques and Jaylen for what they did?”)
“I can’t do top five, but I can do top 15, maybe,” he joked.
He touched on some of his favorite moments, including the Temple and Kentucky games in 2000 and the Bonnies’ run to an Atlantic 10 Tournament title in 2012 behind A-10 Player of the Year Andrew Nicholson.
“Andrew’s performance when they won in 2012; he was not going to let that team lose,” maintained Nease, who then laughingly added: “I wish I could write a book, it’s one of those things … but it would be bigger than War and Peace.”
HE ALSO provided an update on the current Bonnies and the uncertainty of the 2020-21 season.
Nease conducted a radio interview with coach Mark Schmidt on Friday, a day before players came back to campus and 72 hours before their scheduled COVID-19 testing and return to in-house offseason workouts. He asked the 14th year coach about the prospects for this season and the unimaginable potential for a Reilly Center without fans.
Will there be basketball this winter?
“I think so, but who knows,” answered Schmidt, who’s understandably as unsure of the future as the rest of society.
“We think there’s going to be basketball, but in what shape?” Nease continued. “That’s the question. How do you socially distance the Reilly Center? You get 800 students packed into that student section and you have 3,500 (season ticket holders). How do you socially distance? Who gets to go?
“I know it’s been a big concern for St. Bonaventure athletics. They’ve been holding Zoom meetings, they’ve been trying to figure out this whole situation. They might get it figured out and then somebody might come out and say, ‘No, you can’t have fans.’ It’s frustrating right now.”
IN 25 years, Nease has been fortunate enough to call many more good moments — J.R. Bremer’s 3 from the corner, Jordan Gathers’ buzzer-beater in the 2014 A-10 Tournament, Matt Mobley’s last-second shot to top Vermont — than bad.
He began a year after Bona made the 1995 NIT and a year before it landed a program-changing recruit in Tim Winn. And he’s been here for everything that’s followed, from its late 90s resurgence to the current golden era under Schmidt.
“The biggest recruit (Jim Baron’s staff) got early was Winn,” Nease pointed out, “and they continued that run of really good point guards, with Shandue McNeill kind of showing Tim the ropes (and on down the line). We’ve always had a solid point guard and you need that kind of player on the floor.
“As far as the excitement goes, we had the down years that we don’t like to talk about anymore … we like to talk about it now because look where we are now compared to what happened 17 years ago. You give credit to a lot of people … who kept the program alive to start with and got it running to the point where it is today.”
NOW ENTERING his 26th season, the job, Nease said, has only gotten “more and more exciting.” And that figures only to remain so given just how good the Bonnies might be over the next two years.
“When I first started, (Bona) didn’t travel very well,” he noted. “Now you go to some of these places that are kind of outside the Bona alumni circle and there’s a good representation. That’s another thing that coach Schmidt has been able to do; he brought the excitement back to Bona basketball, and now people want to be there instead of just saying, ‘Oh yeah, they’re playing I’ll catch them on TV.’ They want to be at the game now.”
In two-plus decades, Nease has fond memories of any number of people associated with the Bona program. But he’ll always have a particular admiration of Van Paassen, the 6-foot-11, 265-pounder and one of the nicest players ever to wear a Bona uniform.
“I remember going to the team banquet after his sophomore season,” Nease remembered. “They had it up at the Bona clubhouse. I had the unfortunate pleasure of being the guy right behind him in the buffet line. I had to wait after every station for them to re-stock.”
