Behind a lonely square window in the Carmelo K. Anthony Basketball Center wall sits Syracuse’s elaborate national championship trophy. One hundred feet away, the crystal casts the spotlight on Gerry McNamara. It’s the kind of reserved ‘Syracuse spotlight’ for which McNamara, a self-described simple man, returned to Syracuse.

In the week of the five-year anniversary of McNamara willing SU to the 2006 Big East tournament championship, he is right where he wants to be as a part of Syracuse basketball. This time as a graduate assistant coach embarking on what he hopes will be an illustrious coaching career.

His mentality is nothing but perfection — and winning, as always. His father, Gerard ‘Chiz’ McNamara, knows it all too well, since the time he dug up a grassy knoll and poured a concrete patio, wheel barrel by wheel barrel, right behind the McNamaras’ tiny house at 915 W. Market St. in Scranton, Pa. It’s where Gerry first honed his dream.

‘His goal is to be the best coach that ever coached that game,’ Chiz said. ‘That’s who he is. That’s what he does.’

Becoming the best is the goal. But for now, he revels being here — invisible — as much as he cherished his magnum opus four-day run in Madison Square Garden in 2006. This is as good as the spotlight of that week, when he captured America’s attention as the face of college basketball.

‘To me the spotlight is never me. The spotlight is Syracuse,’ McNamara says. ‘To me the spotlight is Syracuse, and I feel like I am in the spotlight. The reason I love what I’m doing is because I am doing it where I love to be.

‘Because I care so much about this.’

***

It’s 2:40 p.m. on a Wednesday, and not a single current Orange player will touch the court for another 20 minutes. The now 27-year-old McNamara shoots alone, sinking 10-of-11 free throws 100 feet away from the 2003 national championship trophy he helped win for Syracuse as a freshman guard.

‘Feels like yesterday,’ McNamara says. ‘Problem is, this thing goes by way too fast.’

Despite a three-season sabbatical from Syracuse basketball, the man SU head coach Jim Boeheim dubbed as his ‘perfect leader’ never really left. The love was always there, whether playing professionally for Olympiakos B.C. in Greece or fishing for catfish with his brother Timmy at their cabin halfway between the McNamaras’ hometown of Scranton and Syracuse.

In his heart, Gerry never wanted to leave. He has always been here, in this exact spot shooting free throws — this very concealed spotlight invisible to the legions of Syracuse fans and Scrantonians who once swooned every time he uncoiled to unfurl a 3.

To him, Timmy, his father Chiz, and one of his best friends and mentees, Andy Rautins, McNamara’s return to coach at SU was the obvious next step. Another one of McNamara’s mentees, SU sophomore guard Brandon Triche, skipped ninth grade earth science at Jamesville-Dewitt to catch a glimpse of the fire McNamara now helps instill in Triche.

And to Rautins, who played with and was coached under McNamara, there are even traces of Boeheim and SU assistant coach Mike Hopkins in McNamara.

‘Gerry is a Syracuse lifer,’ Rautins said. ‘Watching him at practice sometimes, he looks like Boeheim. He sits and watches, hand on his lip. He’ll just sit there, watching. But it’s also a style Hopkins has. He gets people fired up like (Hopkins) does. They pattern each other, Gerry and Hop.’

For McNamara, it was meant to be. And his life speaks to that — from the time, as a tike, he tiptoed around his backyard court the size of a matchbox to his trial tiptoeing the 3-point line at Madison Square Garden.

‘I wanted to pursue a career in coaching,’ McNamara said. ‘I wanted to come back and do something I love for this Syracuse program.’

Yes, McNamara’s life is one of winning. But the mindset Timmy describes as ‘confident yet humble’ was never on greater display than five years ago at the Garden.

***

Five years ago, a pale and prideful 22-year-old ripped the breath out of a college basketball nation. One day after another, he provided the drama.

His knack to simply win shone through. It’s the same mindset from bleary-eyed trips to Montrose, Pa., when Chiz and Timmy would never have a shot to top Gerry. While they set up the boat, Gerry had already reeled in three catfish.

‘He is one of those guys when the game is on the line, he always wanted the ball, and not everybody wants to be in that position,’ Chiz said. ‘And he wants to do that all the time.’

With the ninth-seeded Orange trailing Cincinnati by two, McNamara split two Bearcat defenders and nailed a once-in-a-lifetime 3-point runner with 0.5 seconds left. Since that day, Gerry’s practiced the shot once: last season, while goofing off with Rautins and SU guard Brandon Reese.

‘One of the greatest shots I have ever hit,’ McNamara said. ‘Part luck, part skill. But to just hit that shot moving forward to send us to a second game…’

The noon draw with the nation’s titan in Connecticut. This time, instead of a once-in-a-lifetime shot, McNamara just took one he always does. With 5.5 seconds left, his stop-and-pop 3 sent the game into overtime.

‘The second shot was just a deep 3,’ McNamara said. ‘Under the circumstances, was necessary.’

Between games, SU trainer Brad Pike was the ‘main reason’ McNamara was able to perform. The pain in McNamara’s groin was so bad he had to squeeze his leg in an attempt to brace himself before sneezing.

It was the most pain he had ever gone through. To put on socks, he laid on the floor. He physically couldn’t lift his legs to 90 degrees. Still, he fought.

‘I am going to wear myself to the bone,’ McNamara said. ‘And that’s really what I did.’

With the help of Pike’s successful impromptu task of creating a bath full of six laundry bags of ice for McNamara in his hotel room — and his own will — McNamara played on after frosting twice a day.

‘We were kind of like, ‘Fix it after the season,’ and he was going to play,’ Pike said. ‘There was no way he wasn’t going to.’

In the semifinals, he did it again. He hit a 3 with 48 seconds left to propel SU into the Saturday championship game with a one-point win. And on Saturday, SU became the first school in Big East history to win games in four straight days to capture the crown. Pitt lost to a battered McNamara. He did it.

Timmy and Chiz became sudden celebrities. Midweek, Chiz sat at a red light waiting to park at the Garden, looked out the window and suddenly jumped out to snag a newspaper, the cover of which read ‘Mac-Mania.’ A bystander asked him if he was ‘Gerry’s dad.’

‘I said, ‘Matter of fact, I am.”

***

McNamara says he never spoke with Boeheim about coaching under him during his playing days. But as Gerry grew up in the working class house 33 feet from the Star Salon on West Market Street, Chiz knew Gerry’s current job would come.

‘I don’t think there was ever a question in my mind he would stay with the game forever,’ Chiz said.

The house is the quintessential Scranton abode. The entrance to the McNamaras’ comes way of an elevated stoop of wooden white steps on the side — just around the corner from the alcoved basketball court.

Inside, the basketball king of Scranton was reared by his parents, Chiz and Joyce.

And ever since 6-year-old Gerry nailed his ‘career’s’ first ‘3,’ the first possession down on an eight-foot hoop in a Scranton Biddy League game, Chiz — who was also Gerry’s childhood coach — wasn’t shocked by anything else that would happen.

That’s because Chiz knew Gerry had a zest and pride to him that is Scranton. Chiz would know. He was a basketball-playing Scrantonian of his own in the 1950s. That’s where he earned his nickname — the ‘Chizler’ — by ‘chiseling’ the ball from other defenders on the playground down the street from his childhood home. He had the same quickness Gerry does. The name stuck.

Gerry wouldn’t get a moniker of his own until his days at Syracuse, when Hopkins proclaimed him ‘G-Mac.’ That name stuck, too. But well before it was coined, Coach Chiz raised Gerry to become a player who was an on-court coach. The kind Chiz knew Boeheim loved to have, years later, when he would see Boeheim get up, to only sit back down again when Gerry knew exactly the play to call or set to run.

And these days, the duality of player and coach, Chiz feels, is putting Gerry ahead of the curve. So is the time he puts in.

‘He is a proven player,’ Chiz said. ‘Guys respect him for that aspect of it. What he is learning is how much time coaches put into the game. Gerry is probably (at the Melo Center) 12 hours a day, every day, loving every minute of it.’

***

Five years after it all ended, McNamara is a coach sitting six seats down from Boeheim. He’s between SU players Dion Waiters and James Southerland, who he can’t instruct. NCAA rules prevent him from that.

Where McNamara helps the Orange is with scouting. Breaking down game tape with Hopkins before SU practices, McNamara arrives every day at 9:30 a.m. He has his own office and scouts until 3:30 p.m.

His main role is penning the tendencies of each of the opponent’s best players and communicating them to SU’s players via a piece of paper. Five or six things accompany each opposing player. Sometimes there are a few more notes, such as when SU played Connecticut in February. McNamara’s main thing to key in on, Triche said, was to not even let Kemba Walker shoot the ball, never mind score.

‘We knew which shots he was going to try and do,’ Triche said. ‘We knew he would try to go in the lane and try to use a pump-fake, and we always stayed down on him, it kind of messed him up.’

McNamara works with Triche, Scoop Jardine and Mookie Jones mostly, engraining in them what it takes to perfect the duality of Boeheim’s combo-guard. It’s the role he perfected: scorer who can also run the SU offense. Triche and Jardine are getting the hang of things as SU is on the Big East’s longest winning streak heading into Thursday’s tilt in the quarterfinals of the tournament vs. St. John’s (2 p.m., ESPN).

McNamara helped Rautins with the role last year on a No. 1-ranked SU team. The current New York Knick credits his friend with not only helping to take his game to the next level, but SU’s as well.

‘Gerry kind of brought us together a little bit, brought swagger back,’ Rautins said. ‘He maintained that edge, and I think he passed it along to me.’

Rautins had the chance because McNamara made the drive up from Scranton to Syracuse in March 2009. McNamara returned to talk with Boeheim. His professional career was derailed by injuries, some lingering from that gutsy Big East run. The groin hadn’t fully healed. McNamara needed surgery on his left ankle, but he never got it. His professional career in Europe left him frustrated.

He surprised Boeheim before Syracuse took off for Miami for the first and second round of the 2009 NCAA Tournament. Boeheim surprised him in turn.

At a crossroads in his career, McNamara was offered the job as a graduate assistant. He took two weeks to think about it and accepted when Boeheim called him back.

Since then, McNamara says college coaches have inquired about his future plans. For now, though, he professes he is 100 percent focused on coaching at Syracuse.

‘A dream scenario it would be to be a part of this program for a very long time,’ he said. ‘If that happens, the future will tell.

‘For the time being, I am happy.’

***

Five years after becoming the most talked about athlete in America for a week, McNamara is content. He wants to split time between his Syracuse townhouse with his wife Katie and grueling days at the Melo Center.

Syracuse is where his life is. The court is where his spotlight lies. He is cherishing the opportunity to teach new SU players the lessons learned from days shooting on the concrete patio in his backyard and on the hardwood Garden. And those who know him best think more days in the national spotlight are to come.

‘It’s inevitable he is going to be whatever he wants be,’ Rautins said. ‘Friendship aside, I think he will be one of the best coaches of all time.’

aolivero@syr.edu

Published on March 9, 2011 at 12:00 pm