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Carril's one-liners sometimes run to several sentences and relate to the verities, as he sees them, of his sport. And life. To wit, basketball is a game most artfully performed by poor boys growing up on mean, urban streets. "The ability to rebound is inversely proportional to the distance one grew up from the railroad tracks," he likes to say. Since the best rebounders and shooters from inner-city schools are in demand at institutions that offer athletic scholarships, which Princeton does not, and rarely meet Princeton's rigorous admissions requirements anyway, Carril must cast his lines elsewhere. This leads to a corollary Carrilism that says the shrewd coach must never recruit players from schools whose names include the words country, day or Friends. "Ecole," he says. "Don't forget ecole." Players who are products of the kind of affluence such names suggest are never tough enough when the game is on the line. "You can't win with three-car-garage guys," Carril insists. "With two-car-garage guys, you got a chance." Says Kit Mueller, a student of economics who is the anchor of this year's team: "We've got a one- door garage with a divider in it, so I guess I'm O.K."
Carril grew up as a no-car-garage guy in a $21-a-month apartment hard by Quinn's Coal Yard in the hills of eastern Pennsylvania. His father, an immigrant from Castile, Spain, spent long days, weeks and years shoveling coal into an open-hearth furnace run by Bethlehem Steel. What Pete remembers most clearly about this Depression-era environment was the ethnic bonding prevalent among the Spanish, Polish and Italian inhabitants. "We always had food to eat," he says. "Families stuck together." The absence of material possessions was an advantage, Carril believes. "It made us innovative, creative," he says. Sometimes there were no ball fields and few balls, which led Carril and his contemporaries to improvise games. One involved dodging thrown rubber balls in a narrow culvert. It was not for the slow of foot.
More organized sports pointed the direction away from the furnaces. Too puny for his first love, football, Carril discovered hoops in the seventh grade. "It was the game I could play," he says. And how. Pete was a dervish guard at Liberty High School, leading the team to consecutive 24-3 records. That earned him a place at nearby Lafayette College, where a raffish free spirit named Willem van Breda Kolff came to coach and inherited Pete, then in his senior year. "I had my preconceived notions," says van Breda Kolff of his sawed-off, would-be star. "He threw up some weird shots." But van Breda Kolff, a former player in the National Basketball Association, recognized talent. "Pete was very, very quick," he says. And deceptive. Years later, when Princeton graduate Bill Bradley was a young player with the New York Knickerbockers, he came to Carril for mano-a-mano pointers. Carril, who had not coached Bradley in college, was then in his late 30s; Bradley was in his prime. "He was not bad at making you think he was going to take the shot, when what he was really going to do was drive past you," says Bradley. "I was a player," says Pete.