Ron Naclerio had a feeling something might go wrong that Saturday afternoon in December, so on his way to coach a game, he stopped off at the 107th police precinct in Queens. He needed advice.
The New York City public high school basketball season was just underway, and it was supposed to be a glorious march to the New York State record for career coaching wins, an honor he desperately coveted.
But several weeks earlier, Mr. Naclerio was suspended for improperly recruiting players. In his 45 consecutive years coaching the Benjamin N. Cardozo High School boys basketball team, this was not the first time he had faced such allegations, and as before, he was prepared to fight. He denied the charges, but if the suspension held up, it could result in his termination, just short of the record.
So his longtime lawyer petitioned the Queens Supreme Court and a judge granted Mr. Naclerio a temporary restraining order. He could continue to coach, for now.
As he prepared for the game at John Bowne High School in Flushing, Queens, a thought struck him: What if school officials at the game weren’t aware of the judge’s ruling? That’s why he stopped into the station house. Dressed in his signature game-day uniform — 40-year-old bright blue polyester pants and a neon orange Cardozo golf shirt — Mr. Naclerio strode to the sergeant’s desk and explained the situation.
The somewhat bewildered cops shrugged and told him that if anyone tried to bar him from coaching, he should dial 911.
Sure enough, as his players started their warm-ups, school safety officers escorted the 68-year-old coach from the gym and sat him in another room. He could stay, they said, but he could not coach. Mr. Naclerio watched quietly, contrary to his usual demeanor. He never called 911.
“I didn’t want it to get even more ugly than it already was,” he said. “But it was like the worst feeling in the world.”
In the highly competitive, much celebrated, sometimes contentious and always entertaining world of New York City high school basketball, the longtime Cardozo coach is a throwback: chatty, volatile, abrasive, loyal and highly successful.
He has won two city championships with Cardozo and later secured the record for most wins in the city’s public school league (723.) He also coached and played at the legendary Rucker Park summer tournament in Upper Manhattan, where he earned the rare distinction of a nickname — The Teacher. In March, he will be inducted into the New York City Basketball Hall of Fame.
Anyone who knows New York City basketball knows Coach Naclerio.
“Ron Naclerio is the logo of high school basketball,” said the rapper Fat Joe, who for years coached against Mr. Naclerio at Rucker. “He is the stitching in the fabric.”
He started this season needing 12 wins to surpass Jack Curran, who amassed 972 basketball wins at Archbishop Molloy, a Catholic school in Queens. But what began as a quest for a record has also turned into a fight for his job. New York public school coaches are not allowed to recruit students to their schools for sports, and Mr. Naclerio insists he never has.
But in January, a month after his initial suspension by the Education Department, his own principal at Cardozo called the allegations credible and retroactively suspended Mr. Naclerio for the game he sat out at John Bowne. In a letter to him, she warned that a further review could lead to “termination” from the job that defines him.
Mr. Naclerio is practically embedded in the school’s masonry. Not only has he steered the basketball program since 1981, he grew up in Bayside, Queens, less than 10 blocks from Cardozo, where he was also a student. He still lives in the same single-family home he did as a child.
“It hurts,” he said after beating August Martin High School, for career win 971 — two games away from the record with seven games left in the regular season. “I know there are people at Cardozo who want me out.”
‘Life Has Disappointments’
Mr. Naclerio played basketball at Cardozo, but baseball was his best sport. After graduating from Cardozo in 1975, he starred on the St. John’s University baseball team and was good enough to play two years of minor league baseball in the Chicago White Sox organization. When that dream ended, Mr. Naclerio returned home to his parents’ house and got a job at Cardozo, first as an assistant basketball coach, then its head coach in 1981. He has been there ever since, pacing the sidelines, yelling his signature, “Come onnnnn,” while waving derisive arms at whatever misfortune just occurred on the floor.
“He’s the Statue of Liberty, because that’s been in New York forever and so has he,” said Lawrence Pollard, the coach of Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn. “If you come to visit New York and see the Statue of Liberty, you’ve also got to go see Ronnie Naclerio hollering up and down the sideline.”
His first teams were head-bangingly terrible. The first squad went 1-22, and in his second year, Cardozo suffered such a memorable loss that in the locker room afterward, the disconsolate coach leaned a shoulder against a wall and repeatedly pounded the side of his head against it.
The alarmed players implored him to stop, reminding their coach that it was just a game. The next day, Mr. Naclerio wore a head bandage in practice.
“Minus bashing his head in, I still see the same guy,” said Curtis Bryant, a guard on that team who now owns a construction company in New York. “Same passion, same desire to win.”
His first run-in with administrators happened in the 1980s, when the Cardozo principal at the time tried to suspend Mr. Naclerio, also for recruiting violations. But Mr. Naclerio’s longtime lawyer, Tom Rome, a man as measured as Mr. Naclerio is volatile, fought it in court, allowing his client to continue coaching. Mr. Naclerio has also been suspended for organizing a scrimmage against an unsanctioned team and for petulantly throwing a runner-up plaque on a gym floor. It landed with a loud clang.
He often fantasized about coaching the Knicks or a college program. Nothing ever materialized, leaving him at Cardozo, year after year, win after win.
“Maybe I was too abrasive,” he said in his thick Bayside brogue. “Life has disappointments. And when my dad died, I just couldn’t leave my mom.”
As much of a jock as he was, Mr. Naclerio did not get his athletic drive from his parents. His mother, whose paintings adorn his house, studied architecture at Columbia. His father was Dr. Emil Naclerio, a celebrated thoracic surgeon who saved the life of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1958 after Dr. King was stabbed near the heart by an emotionally unstable woman at a book signing in Harlem.
Mr. Naclerio is immensely proud of the friendship the two men forged, and he tells of the time, when he was about 6, that he answered the phone and reported to his father: “There’s someone on the phone who says he is a king.”
Several books written by Dr. Naclerio on chest medicine sit on shelves across from a poster-size blowup of the letter Dr. King wrote to his father after the surgery. He keeps photocopies of the letter in a manila folder in a drawer in his father’s old office, and insists visitors take one home.
“In case any of the haters say, ‘Oh, Naclerio is full of it, he’s just exaggerating,’” Mr. Naclerio said. “Well, here’s the proof.”
Mr. Naclerio never married and has no children, but he says he considers his hundreds of players adoptive sons, many of whom speak admiringly of their manic coach.
“He’s nuts,” said Francisco Williams, a star for Cardozo in the 2010s, who has since been making a career in reality television. “You’re like, ‘Who is this guy screaming on the sidelines, biting his knuckles and all his movements?’ But I loved it.”
Mr. Williams had a tumultuous adolescence, not unheard-of in New York high school basketball. Mr. Naclerio bears a scar on his hand, the result of standing between the knife-wielding sister of a former player and the father she was trying to stab. One parent punched Mr. Naclerio in the face at a game.
In the case of Mr. Williams, he had fallen in with a gang. In order to extricate him, Mr. Naclerio met with the gang leader in the middle of a city playground to negotiate his freedom.
“When he got me back to school, he said, ‘I’m putting my name on the line for you,’” Mr. Williams recalled. “That finally sunk in. From then on, I was focused.”
In 2014, Mr. Williams led Cardozo to the city championship. He later attended Armstrong State and Bluefield University. Mr. Naclerio boasts that 93 of his players have gone to Division I colleges and countless others to Division II and III programs.
But his volatility could also be alienating. Some of his former players made the anonymous accusations of recruiting that landed him in trouble; Cardozo’s principal, Meagan Colby, did not respond to emails seeking comment.
But Mr. Naclerio keeps on coaching.
Stumbling to Win No. 973
Before the season started, Mr. Naclerio projected that he would get the record in early January. But Cardozo suffered some early losses and he took them hard, retreating to the stands to cool off while his players and assistant coaches wisely granted him space.
He had recently marveled that he had already managed to surpass other New York City legends at other levels of the sport. He has more wins at Cardozo than Red Holtzman did with the Knicks (613) and Lou Carnesecca at St. John’s (526). By late January, he was tantalizingly close to Mr. Curran’s state high school mark. In a game at the packed Francis Lewis gym in Fresh Meadows, Queens, just when it looked as if the title would be his, Cardozo lost on a last-second shot.
Three days later, he took his players on the subway to Manhattan for a game against Julia Richman Education Complex, a team coached by one of Mr. Naclerio’s former players, Melvin Robinson. A couple of local television stations and a few dozen fans were on hand.
As he closed in on the record, Mr. Naclerio found it hard to articulate his excitement and anxiety and instead channeled another New York icon. “I’m starting to feel like Jackie Gleason in ‘The Honeymooners,’” he said. “Homina, homina, homina!”
But after all the drama and anguish of the season, it turned out to be an easy win. Mr. Naclerio hardly yelled at all and spent much of the game playfully slapping hands with his players.
When it ended and victory No. 973 was his, the students jumped up and down and patted their coach on his shoulders. Mr. Naclerio gathered them in a semicircle and spoke philosophically while Mr. Robinson, the Julia Richman coach, put on his old Cardozo jersey and gathered his own team to hear Mr. Naclerio’s speech.
Later, Mr. Naclerio could barely contain his glee. He thought about his father, who he said was once on the summit of New York City surgeons. Decades later, he had reached a pinnacle in his own profession.
“You can look up at Mount Rushmore,” he said, “and then you see. You are the Mount Rushmore.”
For days afterward, Mr. Naclerio ’s phone buzzed. Rick Pitino, the St. John’s coach, checked in, as did Kenny Anderson, the former N.B.A. star who played for Molloy under Coach Curran, the man whose record Naclerio had finally beaten. He never heard from administrators at Cardozo.
He will, eventually. After the season, there will be a further investigation into the recruiting allegations. In the meantime, Mr. Naclerio’s plans are the same as they were in 1981.
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
David Waldstein is a Times reporter who writes about the New York region, with an emphasis on sports.
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