NEVER TAKES A DAY OFF
PATRICK CHAMBERS had a second interview scheduled in a few days. He was going to talk with the people at Archbishop Carroll High about their head-coaching job. After a night out with some friends, he wanted to get back at a reasonable hour.
"He says to those guys, 'I can't stay out, I got an interview, I'm heading back to the hotel,' " Patrick's brother, Tim, said as he was telling the story Monday afternoon.
It was in the fall of 2002. Chambers, then an assistant coach to Dan Dougherty at Episcopal Academy, was staying at a Center City hotel. He was in the lobby, talking to a woman who, according to Tim Chambers, was a "friend of a friend."
"I walked into the hotel, saw an old friend, said hello to her," Patrick Chambers said. "She introduced me to a friend of hers. The next thing you know, that's when I got attacked."
The woman's husband apparently thought she was flirting with Chambers. He jumped over a railing, cracked his cocktail glass on the brass bar.
"And sliced him from his ear down to his Adam's apple," Tim said.
The scar on Patrick's neck is the evidence of what happened that night, the same night, according to Tim, they gave his brother "last rites."
"Wrong time, wrong place, wrong situation," Patrick Chambers said.
Chambers lost a lot of blood. He was in the hospital for a few days. He remembers hearing in the ambulance that they "weren't sure if this guy's going to make it."
Chambers did not make the Carroll interview. Paul Romanczuk got that job and might have gotten it under any circumstance.
Chambers recovered. Went to court several times to testify. Went back to Episcopal where he helped coach Wayne Ellington and Gerald Henderson.
After the 2003-04 season, Billy Lange left Jay Wright's staff to take the Navy job. Wright hired Chambers to take his place. It was no great secret that Wright wanted Henderson and/or Ellington.
"We're a very close family," Tim Chambers said. "He confides in us that I'm hoping that I can get one of the two to Villanova and knows that Jay hired him thinking that. That's just the way the business is."
Henderson went to Duke, Ellington to North Carolina.
"I know he was hurt in losing both of those players," Tim Chambers said.
Five years later, Patrick Chambers is the Villanova associate head coach. In his five seasons, the Wildcats are 126-44 with five NCAA appearances, two Sweet 16 appearances, an Elite Eight and, on Saturday, the Final Four at Ford Field in Detroit.
"Sometimes, fate has a funny way of playing things out," Chambers said.
Tim Chambers was watching on television when Carroll and Romanczuk won the PIAA Class AAA state title.
"I'm thinking just how interesting the storylines are of these two people," he said.
Patrick Chambers did not get the Carroll job. He did not get either of the players from Episcopal. Instead, he got everything else.
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