Pro and Poor: My Season as Professional Lacrosse Player Part 2

The 1988-1989 New York Saints of the MILL that I played on consisted of largely my Long Island Lacrosse club teammates and a few players from the recently established New York Athletic Club Team (NYAC) out of Manhattan. Notable NYAC players on the Saints included Hall of Famers Kevin “Cooker” Cook (Levittown Division, Cornell, 2x USA) and Roddie Marino (Massapequa, UVA, 2x USA). The Saints also had a lot of other very good players including my Long Island Lacrosse teammates Jeff “Whack” Goldberg a Levittown guy and good friend of Kevin Cook. Whack and Cooker both where both surfing fanatics and they had the same builds and used the same Brine superlight 4 sticks. Few players in my day played with that model stick. I later learned from Cornell’s Frank Kelley it was the perfect stick for faceoff guys. From NYAC we also had the very talented defensemen Darren Muller (Brown All American and the 1985 Ivy League Player of the Year). Darren was big, fast, and a great athlete who played with reckless abandon. He played like Dennis Rodman—lots of hustle and throwing body everywhere to make plays but without all the off court drama. I may have been a professional lacrosse player, but without my day job teaching at Hempstead High School, I would have starved, sleep on the streets, defaulted on both my car payment and my student loan.