I’ve made the point before in this blog that it’s so odd how memory works. After my friend Nolan died, I emailed a couple of people in Auburn: one had no memory of him, but I distinctly recall her being at a party with him; another remembered him very clearly, but I couldn’t imagine how they would have known each other.
There are two guys with the same last name who stick in my memory for very different reasons. Jack Calabria was an insurance agent. Dante Calabria played basketball for the University of North Carolina.
Dante John Calabria was born in Pottstown, PA, pretty much my parents’ first stomping grounds. He attended the University of North Carolina and played basketball for Dean Smith from 1992-96. The 1993 team won the national championship. He’s had a wild career since, playing professional basketball in Italy, Greece, France, and Spain for 16 years and was a five-time all-star. Then he became a coach, at UNC-Wilmington with old UNC-er Buzz Peterson, then in Italy under the famed Larry Brown (Dante has dual citizenship, dammit, good for him, where’s my EU passport and Italian villa?), now as an assistant at Barry College in Florida.
But Nancy and I remember him as a player on Dean Smith’s North Carolina teams. Let me be clear about this: I am not speaking pejoratively here. But every time Calabria came in, chaos ensued. He threw himself all over the court, diving after balls, or creating a turnover and then taking the ball back. Here’s something I don’t remember: he was an excellent long-range shooter and still holds the record for percentage of three-point shots made at Carolina.
What Nancy and I liked about him is that he seemed utterly out of control. My loyal readers probably don’t know that Dean Smith recruited stunningly talented people, players with great speed, who could certainly shoot, run like hell, rebound, do it all. But by the time they were seniors, Smith had broken their spirits. They played controlled basketball within his system. They won a lot, yes, but they looked…defeated. Not Dante Calabria.
Here’s something I’ll never forget. I was playing pickup ball in Woollen Gym, the oldest gym on campus, and pickup games flourished on all of the six or eight half courts. We kept sneaking peaks at the other side of our court, because a member of the varsity basketball team, Matt Doherty, was playing. This would have been 1983 or so, a decade before Calabria showed up.
(Why he’d risk injury playing with a bunch of jerks is beyond me. But sports history is full of this sort of misprision. I played basketball in Auburn with a kid named J.B. Brown who was drafted by the Chicago White Sox and seemed a cinch to make the major leagues till someone stepped on his ankle in an off-season basketball game one year. Aaron Boone famously tore up his knee doing the same thing, and the New Yrok Yankees voided his contract. Athletes can be dumb, dumb, dumb.)
At one point in this pickup game, Doherty drove to his left to the foul line, went up to take a shot….and passed instead to someone under the basket. The pass was deflected. Wha??….Take the fucking shot! But this is what Dean Smith taught: unselfishness beyond reason.
But not Dante Calabria. He was untameable, even by Dean Smith. He seemed to have fun! Nancy and I loved him, and our call, “Calabria alert!” wasn’t an alarm but a call to disorganized joy. As we say in the corporate world, he added value. I bet he’s a helluva coach.
Speaking of the corporate world, now we must speak of Jack Calabria. I met him when I was at AIG. He came to Wilmington to present his program; we were all going to get very rich thanks to him. He, or his organization, or someone, was going to market life insurance to the employees of a national auto parts chain. This was can’t-miss big bucks!
At our meeting, he sat at the head of the table and was very smug and assertive, demanding that everything get done yesterday. He was tall and thin and good-looking enough, with short dark hair and an honest mustache. Our contracts administrator, BJ, the woman whose group would write the actual policy, probably liked him, but he was not my kind of boy and I thought he and his attitude could fuck right off. He acted really shady and had no understanding of the regulatory issues. For some forgotten reason, auto parts stores’ employees wasn’t a valid group for regulatory purposes, but BJ said she could just “throw it in the Missouri trust” and all would be well. Jack couldn’t have cared any less about that.
This business unit sold life insurance policies to companies for their employees, which sounds innocent enough, but one of their happy lines was selling to third party nationals: say, French people who were working in Brazil. The Brazilian regulators didn’t give a damn, as the insureds weren’t Brazilian, and the French didn’t as it wasn’t insurance sold in their territory. So anything went. What a way to make a stingy amount of money.
Anyway, I thought Jack Calabria was just as likely to be selling Rolexes out of his suit jacket pockets, so I thought I’d better check with this unit’s heads to make sure they knew this guy and were OK with him. The head of the group was named Greg Something. I asked him, but he was busy with the 30,000 foot issues with which he normally dwelt. One of his employees sneered at him because he had a publicity picture taken of himself without his wedding ring. Greg told someone once, “George LIKES working for us.” No. I did not, and I regret that I never got a chance to tell him.
There was another fellow, Bob Something, who was something like the chief operating officer for this group. I asked that Bob guy about Calabria, and he was very shaky and evasive—someone else had looked into it.
I had been at AIG long enough to know that this smelled like socks gone way worse than having penicillin growing in them. This would play out that the whole thing was a fraud, Calabria would disappear with the premiums, no one would have any insurance, and people would start asking the obvious questions that should have been asked at the beginning. At AIG, the lawyer was always disdained as unnecessary to making a deal until it fell apart, and then why the fuck hadn’t he gotten more involved? And no good saying Greg and Bob didn’t tell me anything.
So I did my own due diligence and called the name at the auto parts company that someone had accidentally given me and asked if Calabria was indeed on the level, their employee or at least their agent or maybe a broker. The guy I spoke to was in Georgia somewhere and had this distant hillbilly twang. He answered me politely enough, then like a true southerner went behind my back and called Bob or someone and gave them hell about me. Bob yelled at me, and I said, Well, if you’d had any information yourself I wouldn’t have had to go ask Jethro.
BJ duly filed the product, I guess I signed off on the non-compliant advertising, and they proceeded to sell about three life insurance policies in total.
So I Googled Calabria the other night, and guess what? He lives in Seattle. I assume it was the same guy; he still is a broker for the auto parts people. I came upon a filing in his divorce and he had something like $6 million in 2010. Thereby proving that crime does pay.
Two Calabrias, two entirely different people. It’s idle speculation to wonder what they would make of each other. From my perspective, I wish I’d met Dante instead.
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