SPORTS

The Man with the Meaningful Moniker

Buddy Mathews reflects on four decades of coaching

Buddy Mathews

Story and photos by Jim Hague

The 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 fl ashy 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 fi eld in the middle of a practice. It was devastating.”

But he recovered.

At fi rst, 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 fi rst 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.”

Coach Matt

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.

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 fi rst 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.”

The Boys of Summer

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 fi rst-ever Hudson Reporter Male Athlete of the Year, were major members of that Ambassadors team.

They went on to play for Matthews at

Hoboken High, turning the Red Wings into a New Jersey powerhouse.

In 1988, Matthews’s team won the Hudson County Tournament championship, the first of nine he would win as head coach. The Red Wings won five NJSIAA North Jersey state sectional championships and moved on to the Group championships, playing for the Group IV, Group III and Group I state titles. Matthews’s teams won 459 games and lost 234, for a winning percentage of 67 percent.

“There was never any complacency,” Matthews said. “Bruce and I pushed the kids pretty hard. We worked on fundamentals all the time.”

At one point, the Red Wings won an astonishing 60 straight games.

“There weren’t any big heads among them,” Matthews said. “All they cared about was winning. “We had a saying, ‘Respect is something you have to earn.’ Another saying we put on T-shirts: ‘No excuses.’”

On the Boards

In 2003, Matthews replaced the retiring Maureen Wendelken as the head boys’ basketball coach, and the Red Wings won an additional five HCIAA Seglio Division championships in 12 seasons.

In an era when athletic departments encouraged coaches to focus on one sport, Matthews coached championship teams in two sports.

But Matthews’s body started to give out. He had two hip and two knee replacement surgeries that sidelined him.

“I couldn’t concentrate on what I was doing,” he said.

Life after HHS

Matthews retired from Hoboken High, but he was still longing to coach and went on to become baseball coach at St. Anthony and then athletic director, working closely with the school’s Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame basketball coach Bob Hurley.

“I learned things from him on a totally different level,” Matthews said. “I saw the way he treated people fairly and honestly.”

The Matthews family suffered a major loss in 2012, when their summer home in Normandy Beach was ravaged by the fires of Hurricane Sandy.

“I lost all of my baseball shirts and championship jackets,” Matthews said. “I lost all of the memorabilia I collected from both sports.”

St. Anthony closed four years ago. Now 66, Matthews hopes to enjoy the rest of his days traveling with Janice.

“We spent a lot of our days away from each other,” Matthews said. “Now, it’s time for Janice and me to be together.”

Matthews is now enjoying life as Hoboken’s Buddy—as he was fittingly named nearly seven decades ago.—07030

Coach Buddy Mathews