GROTON — He was my brother’s new varsity basketball coach and my fourth-grade gym teacher in the autumn of 1962.
Six years later, he was my coach, when I was a not-very-good sophomore basketball player at Groton High School.
Eleven years after that, he was a pallbearer at our dad’s funeral at Badger Funeral Home on School Street in Groton.
We never lost touch. We talked regularly on the phone, got to visit occasionally when he’d come to spring training, and had lunch at “The Fours” when Groton-Dunstable’s basketball team advanced to a state final game at the Garden. Coach and his wife, Mary (married 60 years), even stayed at my house recently when they had important hospital business in Boston.
He was John P. Fahey, known to me only as “Mr. Fahey” or “Coach.” Never “John” or “Jack.”
Funny how that doesn’t change. There’s a level of respect established when you are a young student or ballplayer under the direction of a teacher/coach. Mr. Fahey was only 23 when he first came to Groton. But he was an adult and I was 10, and that never goes away. (Remember Jesse Pinkman calling Walter White “Mr. White” in “Breaking Bad”?)
Mr. Fahey was a humble, ever-truthful man who died last week at the age of 87, surrounded by his loving family at Concord Hospital in New Hampshire.
Born and raised in Manchester, N.H., Mr. Fahey grew to be only 5 feet 7 inches but was an outstanding athlete at West High School and played varsity basketball while earning his physical education degree at Plymouth Teachers College in 1962.
Driving a white Ford Falcon, sporting a flat-top haircut, young Mr. Fahey arrived for his first teaching job brimming with confidence, command, and character.
There was a Norman Dale (“Hoosiers”) flavor to his first months in Groton, which had a population of around 4,000 in 1962. He inherited a team that went 0-14 one season earlier. My brother, a freshman, started on that team only because the upperclassmen weren’t very skilled.
Practices were rigid. No shooting or scrimmaging for the first week. All conditioning. He sometimes made players wear 5-pound ankle weights. It was OK if we threw up. There was a brutal drill where players lined up on opposite sides of the floor and — when Coach blew his whistle — raced to center court to fight over a basketball that Coach rolled into the circle. He wanted to know who was hungry.
Mr. Fahey noticed his senior lettermen seemed secure in their roles even though they hadn’t been able to win a single game. The new coach with the Irish mug decided he didn’t need most of them.
“I had to cut seven senior lettermen and go with underclassmen willing to adapt to a new style,” Mr. Fahey recalled later. “I almost lost my job right away.”
Mr. Fahey always held a white towel while coaching during games. His first team went 12-7 and tied for first place in the old Wachusett League. A year later, Groton went 21-1, beating Lunenburg in the league championship game.
There was no state tournament for tiny schools from Central Mass. in those days. A gold trophy went into the glass case outside the gym entrance and there was a celebration supper in the school cafeteria where Boston Patriots quarterback Babe Parilli gave a speech. It was a small-town big deal.
But Groton’s breakthrough season was not without sorrow. Two deaths by suicide rocked the town and the team in the early winter months of the 1963-64 season.
On Monday, Nov. 18, Groton police chief Elliot Clark came to the school gym, pulled senior forward Jimmy Richardson from practice, and informed the young man that his dad had died by suicide in the family basement earlier that day. James Richardson’s wake was held at Badger Funeral Home three days later, and Jimmy was one of his dad’s pallbearers.
One day after the funeral — the day that four Richardson siblings returned to school — President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.
A month later, three days after Christmas, Kenny Hill, a popular, red-headed junior in his second season as Mr. Fahey’s student manager, died by suicide. It was back to Badger Funeral Home, and the Hill family asked Mr. Fahey if six of his players would serve as Kenny’s pallbearers.
Coach called a team meeting, asking for volunteers. When every player, including Jimmy Richardson, raised his hand, the coach winced.
“I had them all write their number on a piece of paper and told them I’d pick six out of a basket and they’d be pallbearers,” Mr. Fahey told me decades later. “I threw Richardson’s number into the trash. I wasn’t going to put that kid through any more grief. You know?”
Coach was 24.
…
John P. Fahey was something of a town legend by the time I got to high school. The team won most years and the warm gym was full on cold Friday nights. All my friends wanted to play for him.
I pitched JV baseball for Mr. Fahey when I finally got to high school, and once tossed my glove in disgust while coming off the mound after a bad first inning. Coach knew I was blaming my teammates — not my own crappy pitching — for Westford Academy’s six-run outburst. He pulled me aside.
“Don’t do that, Danny,” Mr. Fahey said. “Your teammates are trying just as hard as you. Worry about your pitching and I’ll worry about their fielding.”
Got it, Coach.
Got it, forever.
I was a full-time bench-warmer in 1970, when we again advanced to the league championship game against Lunenburg.
The big game was scheduled for a Saturday in late February, but Lunenburg’s best player (Rick Hillman played at Division 1 Maine) rolled his ankle in a vacation holiday tournament, and their coach asked Mr. Fahey if the championship game could be postponed three days so that Hillman could play.
Mr. Fahey said OK, and I don’t remember anyone making a big thing out of it.
Hillman went off for 31 points and they beat us, 73-68.
“Jack Fahey was a very honorable man,” the Lunenburg coach told me decades later. “He said, ‘I don’t want to play anybody for a championship game unless they are at full strength.’ ”
“It wasn’t an easy decision,” Mr. Fahey remembered. “I just felt it was not right to insist on playing. We wanted to beat them at their best.”
Can you imagine something like that happening in 2026? It might spark a community riot. Youth sports today are taken way too seriously to make room for sportsmanship. But it made an impression on us — perhaps more memorable than any championship or jacket, or a celebration supper in the school cafeteria.
Coach had a sense of humor, too. Like most teachers, he’d work multiple second jobs in the summertime, and one July evening he was stocking beer from the back of a cooler in the town liquor store when he noticed a Wachusett League referee nemesis approaching. The ref was in full zebra uniform, evidently working a nearby summer league game. Knowing the ref could not see him, Fahey waited till the official reached for a six-pack of Bud, then snatched the ref’s hand from the back of the freezer and said, “I hope that’s for after the game!”
Mr. Fahey coached 12 seasons (174-85) at Groton, then served the school until 1994 as teacher, guidance counselor, athletic director, and principal. Groton’s class of ’72 dedicated its yearbook to him, and today there’s a John Fahey Sports Award presented annually to a deserving athlete at Groton-Dunstable.
After retiring from education, Mr. Fahey became a professional bus driver — like humble Phil Woolpert, who drove a bus in the Bay Area after coaching Bill Russell and K.C. Jones to back-to-back NCAA titles at the University of San Francisco. Coach logged more than a million miles for Greyhound, serving for several years as a personal driver for the J. Geils Band. He got to hang out backstage and pour white wine for actress Faye Dunaway, who was then married to J. Geils lead singer Peter Wolf.
Wow. Flat-top Fahey on the road with the J. Geils Band. Almost famous.
But he wasn’t famous, like Red Auerbach or John Wooden. He was just a coach. A teacher. Never in headlines. Never on television. A humble sculptor of young souls, doing his job, showing us the way.
Like Auerbach, Wooden, and Woolpert, Mr. Fahey kept in touch with his guys after we were done playing. He golfed with some, went to games with others, and tracked down family members when something unfortunate happened.
Jimmy Richardson, the brave boy who’d lost his dad to suicide in Mr. Fahey’s second season, graduated from the University of Alabama and served an 11-month tour in Vietnam in 1970. When Richardson died in Florida at the age of 71 in 2018 — 55 years after Groton’s championship/tragic season — his widow received a sympathy note and Mass card from John and Mary Fahey.
My coach was not a singular sensation. There are Mr. Faheys changing lives in every corridor of every school and gym across America. They are teaching and coaching your kids, enlightening and maybe sometimes annoying you. But if you are a parent or grandparent, or perhaps an athlete who will one day become a dad or mom to a young ballplayer, try to metaphorically embrace your coach, ignore the noise, and say, “Thank you.”
Thank you, John P. Fahey, who will be waked Tuesday, April 7, from 4-7 p.m. at Badger Funeral Home in Groton.
Dan Shaughnessy is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at daniel.shaughnessy@globe.com. Follow him @dan_shaughnessy.