COMMENTARY : Villanova’s Haynes Played On Unwittingly

Jonathan Haynes stood in front of the scorer’s table at Madison Square Garden a few minutes after Villanova won the Big East Tournament, hands acting as a visor over his eyes, looking up into the lights and the crowd on that side of the Garden for his parents.

Haynes comes out of the Germantown section of Philadelphia, 133 W. Manheim, and he is a senior at Villanova, and this was the biggest win he had had in college basketball. In another few minutes he would be sitting on the rim at the Eighth Avenue end of the Garden, cutting down the net, on top of the whole day.

But first he wanted to find Warren and Laverne Haynes. He knew they were in Section 204, but he had no idea that Section 204 was behind him until a sound he had known his whole life, a familiar sound, somehow rose above all the Villanova cheers that rocked the Garden.

His mother had put her fingers to her mouth and whistled at him as if he were at the other end of W. Manheim, in a hard section of Germantown known as The Hollow.

“She’s been whistling at me like that my whole life, ever since I was little,” Jonathan Haynes said in the Villanova locker room later. “I promise you I heard her over everything.”

He wheeled around and saw his mother waving to him. She had come down from Section 204, close to the court. She wore a Villanova cap with Jonathan Haynes’ number, 21, inscribed on the back in rhinestones that sparkled at the Garden like diamonds. He waved back at her.

Then Haynes searched the crowd around his mother for his father. “Where’s Dad?” he yelled at his mother.

From across the court, she shook her head. Laverne Haynes knew what her son would find out in a few minutes, after he had cut down the net, after he had received his championship watch, after the triumphant meeting in the locker room for the best Villanova basketball team since the one that won the national championship 10 years ago.

Warren Haynes had not watched his son’s great day from Section 204 because he was in jail at the Midtown South station, which is on 35th Street, between Eighth and Ninth avenues. A few minutes before one o’clock Sunday (March 12) afternoon, which means about an hour before the Villanova-Connecticut game, Warren Haynes was reaching for his ticket in the lobby of the Garden when a gun fell out of his pocket and discharged. No one was injured. The security people at the Garden grabbed Warren Haynes and by the time the game started, he was at Midtown South.

The charge was criminal possession of a firearm.

“I was in the ladies’ room,” Laverne Haynes said now.

They announced her son’s name over the public address system and he went up to get his watch from Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese. Laverne Haynes whistled again. She has four boys, and Jonathan, who comes out of Germantown Friends high school and transferred to Villanova from Temple in 1991, is her second youngest.

She was asked how she was going to find her husband, and she closed her eyes and shook her head. “I can’t find anything in this city,” she said.

Laverne Haynes was asked if she ever would forget this afternoon in New York and said, “Oh Lord no.”

Jonathan Haynes is a senior guard. He was a starter on the Villanova team that won the NIT at the Garden last season. But this is a better season. When Villanova beat UConn, 94-78, Sunday, Haynes and his teammates had won 17 of their last 19 games.

On the court at the Garden, he had begun celebrating in the last minute, walking down past the UConn bench and then waving his arms to the whole Garden, a wonderful smile on his face. His first season at Villanova, the team’s record was 8-18. Everything had changed now, in the last month of his college career. He had nine assists Sunday and just one turnover. When he came out of the game, he lifted Villanova coach Steve Lappas off the ground.

Then he was the first one up on the rim. He cut down some of the net and once again looked over at his mother and had no idea that the reason he could not find his father was because he was a couple of blocks away in jail.

The last Sunday of the regular season is always an amazing day.

No one had a more unforgettable day than Jonathan Haynes. He heard his mother’s whistle fine after the game, but knew nothing about a gunshot in the lobby of the Garden about three hours earlier.

Lappas told Haynes in the locker room what had happened. Then Lappas didn’t want to talk about a gun going off. Neither did Jonathan Haynes, who answered all the basketball questions and then went looking for the bus with his teammates. At the elevator, he finally was asked a question about his father ending up in jail on his greatest basketball day.

“I’m cool,” was all he said, and then the elevator doors started to close. “We played so good,” he said, and then was gone.

It had been one kind of Sunday for him in New York, another kind for his father, one block north of the Garden, one block west.