Gorman was great

By Scott Benjamin

HAYESTOWN AVENUE – Sitting in his office outside Henry Abbott Tech’s Daniel Garamella Gymnasium one afternoon in November 1988 just months after he concluded a stellar coaching career, Tony Gorman said, “The public is misinformed.”

“They think that the emphasis in playing high school sports is on these kids getting a college athletic scholarship,” he explained.

Those apparently are few and far between. In 2023, CT Hearst sports columnist Jeff Jacobs wrote that nationally only seven percent of the high school athletes ever play in college. That includes non-scholarship Division III.

Said Gorman, “What we’re doing is teaching kids about sports that they can play well into their adult lives.”

At Abbott Tech, he coached Larry Harrison, who became the coach at the University of Hartford; Tom Hester, who was on the team at Ohio University; and three-time All-State forward Sylvester Vines. However, Gorman also instilled a value in sports that led many of his players to continue playing their games for decades in the adult recreation leagues.

Gorman – who did play basketball in college – Western Connecticut State University, then known as Danbury State College – continued playing in the Danbury adult league well into his life and was an avid tennis player. For generations he was one of the premier area high school officials in soccer, a sport that he had never played, and one of the most respected umpires in baseball.

In addition to basketball, he played baseball at Fairfield Prep in the late 1950s. One of his teammates was Pat Jordan, who became a minor league pitching bonus baby. Jordan proceeded to write about his pitching experiences in “A False Spring, which was rated by Sports Illustrated as the 37th best sports book of all time.

One of the former soccer officiating coordinators once said, “If it is Wednesday and we have a bunch of state semi-final games on Saturday, I usually have five coaches calling me, asking if Tony Gorman is available to referee their game.”

In 2005, Gorman told Jim Stout of The News-Times of Danbury about his philosophy for officiating: "We're all going to miss calls, but controlling the match and allowing the players to determine the outcome is critical. You normally don't have to yell or take out a card to do it. If the pace gets a little heated, you try to tighten it up right away, slow things down on a free kick, take time on re-starts or throw-ins, talk to the players. You get the game down to a crawl if you have to, then hopefully they start to play again without incident.”

Gorman said in 1988 that soccer had changed more over the years than basketball.

Then-Newtown High School Athletic Director Bob Sveda said that in the 20 years that he had coached soccer there – 1959 through 1978 – collectively there were only a few players who were good enough to play on the NHS teams of the 1980s.

Gorman said that the emergence of youth soccer in the 1970s had changed that dynamic. In contrast, he said the All-state basketball players he had in the late 1960s and the early 1970s would be just as dominant in the present day.

Gorman’s basketball coaching career included six Western Connecticut Conference (WCC) basketball championships and six Harold Swaffield Awards from the Fairfield County Board 9 Officials for demonstrating the best sportsmanship. He also coached the Wolverines to the WCC soccer title in 1975.

Gorman was inducted into the WCSU Athletic Hall of Fame in 2001, the Abbott Tech Hall of Fame in 2011 and the state coaches’ Hall of Fame in 2013.

Jerry West once said that whenever you saw Bill Russell on a basketball court, he stood out because he projected a regal presence.

It wasn’t exactly that way with Gorman, but he was tall, athletic, well-coordinated and looked dignified whether he was in a suit and tie on the bench during a game or his physical education teaching wardrobe during practices.

Mario DiLorenzo, who was then the principal at Abbott Tech, once half-jokingly said that he always was careful about what he did while walking in the gymnasium because of Gorman’s high standards.

Tony Savino, then the sports director at 940 WINE Radio in Brookfield, said in 1985 that while he was doing the interviews for his high school basketball preview show a coach at another WCC school told him privately that Gorman and Carl Charles, then the boys’ basketball coach at Weston High School, were the two best coaches in the conference.

However, that wasn’t the way it was in 1967 when Gorman after coaching in the Watertown schools and then one season as the junior varsity basketball coach at Abbott Tech, became the varsity basketball coach.

They say the best jobs to take are the ones where the expectations are relatively low and the potential for short to intermediate-term success are high.

Succeeding the legendary Dan Garamella didn’t’ fit that category.

Garamella graduated from the highly-regarded Arnold College of Hygiene and Physical Education in Milford, which other than Springfield College, was considered then to be the best school for physical education in the East.

He had the opportunity to play in the National Football League or become a boxer, but instead entered the Navy during World War II, serving as a Chief Petty Officer and teaching karate.

He arrived at Abbott Tech in 1946 and employed a strict disciplinary regimen.

If a student wasn’t fully prepared for physical education class at least twice a marking period they received an ‘F.’ During a nine-week marking period from October to December there was a stamina test for push-ups, sit-ups, squat thrusts in a minute and for squat jumps. You had to pass all four tests to earn an ‘A.’ Otherwise you had an 'F.'

Students walking with their shoes on the gym floor were ordered to immediately do 10 push-ups.

Not only had Garamella led the Wolverines to state basketball titles over each of the two previous seasons, they hadn’t lost a regular season game in four years. He had coaching offers to Oberlin College and Iowa State. Not only did Abbott Tech eventually name its gymnasium after him, but the city of Danbury has a boulevard that bears his name.

When Gorman took over as varsity coach, the Wolverines captured their first six games and then lost by one point in double overtime in an out-of-conference tilt with New Canaan.

The next morning Gorman overheard one of the cafeteria workers say, “We’re going to have to get a new coach.”

He said over his 21 years at the helm, Abbott Tech “never had much depth.”

Perhaps there were one or two seasons when his teams had the best or second-best player in the WCC at each of the starting five positions, but after that, there was a huge drop-off in ability

Even when Tech had less talent, he found a way to prevail. As the number four seed in the WCC Final Four tourney in 1982, the Wolverines emerged with the championship trophy.

Gorman grew up in Danbury and was a regular in the sports leagues at the War Memorial, where Bill Swanson, the longtime athletic director at Bethel High School, was one of his first coaches.

He became acquainted with Garamella, who served as president and then treasurer at the War Memorial. Garamella even allowed Gorman to practice with his Abbott Tech teams during school recesses while he was at Fairfield Prep.

After three years in the Watertown schools, Gorman taught social studies, health and physical education at Abbott Tech from 1966 through 1997 and served as athletic director into 2007.

Gorman said some people attach a stigma to the technical high schools, indicating that they are designed for those who can’t make it elsewhere.

“That obviously is not the case,” said Gorman. “I don’t think our kids are much different than the ones at the other high schools. Sure, they are a little more interested in work and in getting enough money to buy a truck.”

Some college students regularly skip classes. But there are recent graduates of Abbott Tech who are the same age as the traditional college students, that are working for an electrical contractor or at an auto body shop and show up on time daily, treat the customers properly and earn a handsome salary without having to endure student-loan debt.

Abbott Tech also sends its graduates to college, but at a lower rate than the other public high schools.

“Our students can do well in college,” said Gorman. “The most determining factor in succeeding in college is how badly do you want it. I had classmates at Fairfield Prep that scored higher on the SAT than I did, but they didn’t have as high a grade point average when they graduated from college.”

We lost Tony Gorman last November.

Abbott Tech and the area sports community were fortunate to have him for generations.