The Man with the Meaningful Moniker Buddy Mathews reflects on four decades of coaching Buddy Mathews
Story and photos by Jim Hague
T
he most successful two-sport coach in Hoboken High School history had a perfect start. He was born Charles Matthews in 1954, but his mother Eileen, also known as Pinkie, nicknamed him Buddy. Pinkie had a brother nicknamed Buster. Didn’t everyone in Hoboken have a catchy moniker? Baseball star John Romano was known as Honey, and flashy basketball star Robert DuBois was called Juicy. “My mother always taught me to treat everyone the way I wanted to be treated,” Matthews said. Matthews’s father David owned Matthews Wine and Liquor on 11th and Washington streets for nearly four decades: “I learned a lot about how to treat others from that store.” His father kept a list of customers who didn’t pay on time. “The people would pay as they went along,” Matthews said. “They were our most loyal customers.”
Athlete to Academic Matthews aspired to be a baseball player: “I taught myself to switch hit like Mickey Mantle.” He was a standout lefthanded pitcher in Little League and Babe Ruth baseball and later attended St. Peter’s College. “I was cut from the baseball team my senior year,” Matthews said. “The coach made me walk off the field in the middle
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of a practice. It was devastating.” But he recovered. At first, Matthews was unsure what to major in, but that uncertainty ended when he encountered Jim Jacobson, a longtime professor of education at St. Peter’s. “Professor Jacobson grabbed me by the arm one day in the street and said, ‘Buddy, you’re going to be a teacher,’” Matthews said. “I had a lot of friends who went to New York and worked at the Stock Exchange or on Wall Street. But I knew as soon as I started, I was a teacher.” Matthews first taught at Connors School. “I formed a basketball and baseball team at Connors School and did it for six years,” Matthews said. At Connors, he met the cheerleading coach, eventually getting up the nerve to ask her out. “Janice was and still is my rock,” he said. “She helped me to get the discipline I needed to be successful in sports and in life.”
In 1986, when James’s brother Carmine left as head baseball coach, Matthews was appointed as head coach. For 28 seasons, Matthews and Assistant Coach Bruce Radigan worked side by side. When Matthews received an ejection for arguing with an umpire, Radigan was left to coach the Red Wings. Radigan had a perfect 6-0 record. “The first year, I was really nervous,” Matthews said. “We had a very good team, and I think we all had to learn from each other.” The nervousness didn’t last long, as Matthews unleashed his reign of terror on opponents far and wide. “I felt like I became a good coach because I had been around some really good coaches in my day,” Matthews said. “I was able to communicate better with the kids and their parents. Hoboken is such a small town and close-knit place that we watched all the kids develop.”
Coach Matt
The Boys of Summer
In 1985, Matthews got a call from James Ronga, Hoboken High athletic director. “He asked me if I wanted to coach the JV baseball team,” Matthews said. It wasn’t as if coaching was brand new to him. “I grew up in the YMCA,” Matthews said. Mike Granelli, who was a former St. Peter’s College women’s basketball and men’s soccer coach, was a coach at the Y. “He had me coaching nine-year-olds, and I was 12,” Matthews said.
A bunch of Matthews’s future players were part of the Hoboken Ambassadors youth baseball team that traveled to the Soviet Union in 1987 as part of a program to promote unity between the two countries. Players like Marc Taglieri, Danny Ortiz, Michael Purvis, and Jason Cassesa, the first-ever Hudson Reporter Male Athlete of the Year, were major members of that Ambassadors team. They went on to play for Matthews at
