Will to win is what makes basketball lifer Joe Mihalich PSWA’s Most Courageous Sportsperson
By Dick Jerardi, Philadelphia Daily News (1985-2017)
What’s next? Where do I have to be? What do I have to do?
That was Joe Mihalich’s attitude in the summer of 2020. It is his attitude today.
His Hofstra players were going to start moving in for the fall semester on Aug. 15, 2020. It was five months and five days from Hofstra’s epic CAA Tournament win when Mihalich orchestrated a near-perfect endgame, his players scoring on 12 of their last 13 possessions, 26 points over the final 7½
minutes.
The game against Northeastern had no rhythm until it had perfect rhythm as the Hofstra team played just like Mihalich had always coached — free, joyous and smart. It was win No. 406 in a head coaching career that had started in 1998 at Niagara and continued in 2013 at Hofstra.
That August Saturday — with Joe’s wife Mary on her way to Ocean City, NJ, to help with a new grandchild and Joe getting ready to greet his players — was just an ordinary summer day… until everything changed in an instant.
Joe Mihalich suffered a life-altering stroke at his Long Island home, right across from the Hofstra campus. Mary rushed back home. Mihalich underwent a terrifying surgery in the middle of the night with no guaranteed outcome
“It was so overwhelming,” Mary Mihalich says now, speaking from her Chestnut Hill, PA, home, just a few miles from La Salle University where Joe was a student, basketball player, longtime assistant coach and now special assistant to La Salle head coach, Fran Dunphy.
“It’s a miracle. I don’t know what the percentage is, but it’s not real good of surviving. And they said that to me.”
But Joe Mihalich, his wife says, has “this will to win. It is what is really deep inside of him.”
It was nowhere near a straight road from there to here. There were clots, infections, fevers. There were six weeks of recovery from the surgery and the initial rehabilitation.
What would Joe get back? How fast would it happen? Would it happen at all?
“It was inch-by-inch,’’ Mary says. “To be where he is today is 100 percent his doing as far as working at it, working at it. He still does speech therapy a couple of times a week. He doesn’t quit.”
Joe understands everything. His mind works just fine. He drives past his childhood home on Chew Street on his way to La Salle every day. His speech has improved dramatically over the 3½
years.
“It was a long haul,” Mary says. “Any challenge, he’s going to go for it.”
There was physical therapy, speech therapy, occupational therapy, “stuff,” Mary says, “you normally don’t have to think about.”
Joe’s attitude, Mary says, “was amazing. He just never got upset. I just never saw him frustrated.”
If Joe’s head coaching career had to end, it ended in that masterpiece for the CAA championship. But that was not remotely the end.
It was April, 2022 when Dunphy was asked to return to his and Joe’s alma mater, a place where they were assistant coaches together under Lefty Ervin and Speedy Morris. He was going to take it on one condition.
Joe and Mary were on their way to see one of their sons in Connecticut when Dunphy called.
“He said he was considering taking this job, but said: ‘I’m not going to take the job unless you’re sitting in the chair next to me,'” Mary remembers.
And they all started crying.
Two days later, the man renting the Chestnut Hill home the Mihalichs had bought in 2019 told Mary he was buying a home of his own.
“It was just meant to be,’’ Mary says.
They were coming back home, back to basketball, back to La Salle.
“He moved out, we moved in,” Mary says.
And now there he is, sitting in the chair next to Dunphy.
“How he’s handled this is just extraordinary,’’ Dunphy said.
Indeed it is. And that is why Joe Michalich is this year’s Philadelphia Sports Writers Association “Most Courageous Sportsperson” Award winner. He will receive the honor at the 119th PSWA Banquet on Jan. 17, 2024. For tickets to honor Mihalich and the many other worthy award recipients, click here.