If you want to get to the heart of the headlines that hit South Florida sports last week, as well as the guy who answers to “Dad” in both cases, you dial the Brookwood Camps in Glen Spey, N.Y., and ask for the owner, Ken Fiedler.
How’s his son Jay, the one who wants to be Dan Marino’s successor, doing after arthroscopic hip surgery? “Great,” Ken said Sunday. “He’s free of pain for the first time in a month. He’s already riding the bike. He’ll be throwing tomorrow.”
And how’s Anthony Mason, the basketball player who considers Ken “a surrogate father,” doing after his trade to the Miami Heat? “He’s happy,” Ken said. “He likes Pat Riley. Don’t believe all of what you read. Anthony’s going to be a terrific addition to the Miami Heat and the community.”
He says he speaks to Jay every day, Anthony every other day. Jay was an honor student and three-sport athlete from Long Island who went to Dartmouth and graduated with a degree in engineering. Anthony grew up poor in Queens, played basketball for Ken Fiedler at Springfield Gardens High and has been synonymous with trouble throughout his NBA career.
Ken Fiedler considers both family.
“I trust Anthony with all my kids,” Ken said.
He’s not just talking about sons Scott and Jay, who’ve been friendly with Mason since he was 16, but the kids who call Brookwood home during the summer, the ones who will be around Mason for five days next week. Every year for the past 11 years, Mason has helped Ken and Scott run the Prime-Time Basketball Camp, a specialized session at summer’s end. Every year for the past 11 years, he has stayed the whole time and never taken a dime.
“He doesn’t just come in for four hours and leave,” Ken Fiedler said. “He’s out there refereeing, running clinics. One time he comes up to me and says, ‘Dad, I don’t like the basketballs you’ve got. I’m going to run out and get some more.’ Then he goes over to Middletown, spends two grand on official NBA balls, the ones that go for $80 apiece.
“Or he’ll see a kid with sneakers he doesn’t like, sneakers that have cracks or holes in ’em, and the next day he’ll show up with new ones for him.”
Jay Fiedler has put in time at his father’s camp too, most recently in June for a specialized football weekend. He has been having a tougher time at Dolphins camp, where nagging pain hampered him from the start. He underwent surgery for torn cartilage in his right hip Thursday.
“First his back hurt, then his hip, then it would move down his leg,” Ken said. “He was basically throwing off one leg. He said every time he pushed off his right leg, it felt like a knife being stuck in his side. He’s more relieved than anything else, because he found out what it was and had it taken care of. Better to have it done in the exhibition season. He’s a quick healer.”
Although the Dolphins said Fiedler likely would miss a month, Ken said he wouldn’t be surprised if his son works his way back earlier. “He’s tough,” Ken said. “He tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his knee as a senior in high school, kept playing the rest of that season with a brace on it.”
As for Mason, Ken Fiedler said the reputation is much worse than the man he’s come to know. Mason arrived at Springfield Gardens as a 16-year-old junior, raised in poverty by his mother, Mary. Fiedler coached basketball at the school for 23 years and retired in 1995. When Mason filled out his application to Tennessee State, he listed Fiedler as his father.
“He sort of adopted me,” Fiedler said. “He’s a self-motivator — that’s why he’s a pro. He practices hard, plays hard, runs hard. He’ll never dog it. In all my years, I’ve never seen a kid run and run and run like he does. You never see him stop running on the court.
“Pat Riley is no fool. If he thought that Anthony was an undesirable, he wouldn’t take him. Everybody says Anthony’s got baggage and is trouble. But he’s got no baggage with coaches. Does he get ticked off if he doesn’t win? Yeah. Does he get pissed off if another player getting paid $18 million dogs it and doesn’t practice? Yeah. Does he open his mouth? Yeah, he’ll speak the truth, and that gets him in trouble sometimes. Sometimes he’s too honest, but that’s the way he is.”
Fiedler is quick to explain away all of Mason’s arrests, says it’s a combination of bad luck, bad timing, Mason’s naivete and “being too much of a softy.” Fiedler can detail all the particulars, note that Mason has been exonerated of everything except one guilty count of “endangering minors” for making the mistake of giving a limousine ride to two teenage girls (who later accused him of sexual assault at a party where he dropped them off).
Fiedler said the arrests always end up in headlines in the tabloids, but the full story, the exonerating details, always end up “buried on page 168.”
The Mason he wants you to know about, the one he hopes South Florida soon finds out about, is one that makes him as proud as his natural sons. “Just wait until he goes to some hospital and spends four to five hours with kids at a cancer ward and walks out into the night barefoot,” Ken Fiedler said. “Barefoot because he signed his sneakers and gave them to a kid who’s dying so he can be buried with them. He did that at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York once. But the papers never write about that. That’s the side most people don’t see.”
Michael Mayo can be reached at .
