The Dunnes: ‘Stronger than ever.’
Twenty years ago today, Tim Dunne made a quick dive into a friend’s pool and woke up hours later in an intensive care unit, partially paralyzed. He has been an inspiration to his family, friends and everyone who’s known him ever since. Here’s a story I wrote about Tim and his family in 2005, as his sister, Kelly, was helping lead Northport’s girl’s basketball team to a county championship.
A passion than strengthens family ties
The Dunnes: Seven-and-half years after accident and ‘stronger than ever.’
Northport Record, Jan. 20, 2005 — Kelly Dunne gritted her teeth and curled her face into a slight sneer as she lay on the floor in front of the Northport bench, the victim of a shirt-grabbing, arm-flinging intentional foul late in an ugly game against Sachem North, last Saturday.
Kelly, the junior who starts at guard, collected herself, stood up and reacquired the stoic look, the wide-eyed straight stare that she nearly always maintains as part of a quiet, unassuming na-ture on the basketball court. The teeth and the facial contortion were gone with a flashbulb.
Only family noticed. Kelly’s mother and father, John and Eileen, and brother Tim, all veter-ans of on-the-court battles and far greater off-the-court obstacles, were watching from the stands and on the sideline.
“I don’t think she meant to hit you that hard,” John told Kelly after the game.
“I don’t know, I felt like I was Superman,” Kelly said. “Someone said to me, ‘I was getting ready for you to get up and deck that girl.’ I was like, ‘Um, no.’”
Therein lies the character, the determination and the sportsmanship that is embodied by Kelly, in continuation of a tradition set forth by her parents and her brothers — Greg, Richard and Tim.
Greg, 27, played basketball on the 1995 Long Island championship team at Northport and at Nazareth College in Rochester. He led the team to the NCAA tournament and was selected as an All-American while earning the nickname “the Magic Johnson of Division III.” He current serves as the assistant head men’s basketball coach at the State University of New York-Brockport and works as an investment professional in Rochester.
“I’m busy all the time, I’m working all the time, but it’s fun,” Greg said from Rochester, be-tween his shift at the investment firm Pics Telecom and an evening practice.
Richard, 21, also played basketball at Northport and maintained academic dexterity with nightly trips to the library and late study sessions. He is in his senior year of pre-med studies at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. He works at a homeless shelter and last year interned in the emergency room at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York. Kelly calls him a genius.
“I live my life on the go. I’m nonstop,” Rich said from South Bend, following a walk across the campus where 10 inches of snow has fallen in the last three days.
His hectic pace is similar to that of Greg and Kelly, who balances basketball, performance in the school choir, study and a social life. Following a game against Walt Whitman, the week before Christmas, Kelly rushed to the locker room, changed into a sweater and skirt and dashed to the choir room to prepare for a concert performance.
“We’re very active people and we don’t like sitting around and waiting for things to happen,” Rich said. “We’re proactive people and maybe that’s why we work so well as a family. Being active keeps us going and it makes our lives exciting.”
Tim, 25, is an inspiration. It has been seven-and-a-half years since the steamy early summer afternoon, the week before graduation from Northport, when he made a quick dive into a friend’s pool and woke up hours later in the intensive care unit at Huntington Hospital, partially paralyzed.
During his recovery, and the years of adjustment since, Tim has inspired Kelly, who was nine at the time, to a precocious emotional maturity and Rich, who was in eighth grade, to a career in medicine.
“I spent months and months in the hospital and I saw how my brother and my family reacted to tragedy and turned it into a positive,” Rich said. “I saw myself being able to help people in a similar way, helping people who were sick.”
Tim has influenced friends, more than any paid inspirational speaker ever could, to grumble less about their own insignificant misfortunes and to live each day with a positive outlook. And he has motivated the Northport community to philanthropy, evoking donations to fund hundreds of thousands of dollars in needed renovation costs for his parents’ home, for the van that is used to transport him, for the motorized wheelchair that has become part of his visage and for other victims of spinal cord injury.
“It was unbelievable, the outpouring of support that people showed to me,” Tim said. “If there was a day that I didn’t feel like getting out of bed to go to physical therapy, I just sat there and would think about all the people who sent letters, who sent donations and it really motivated me.”
Tim graduated from Hofstra University in Hempstead in 2003 with a double major in journalism and psychology. He wrote feature stories during an internship with the local weekly newspaper, the Northport Observer, but had to back away from those duties when health woes and back pain from typing limited his productivity. He plans to apply to law school — his friend Joey DiPalo, the young man whose cardio pulmonary resuscitation helped revive Tim after the accident, is a lawyer in Queens — or a Master’s program.
“I’m really kind of indecisive about what I want to do next,” Tim said. “I’d like to go to law school, but I’m worried that with some health issues that I have it might be too difficult. I know that I would be able to do the work, once I get in there, but physically I don’t know if I’d be able to handle it. It took me five years to graduate [from Hofstra] and it really took a physical toll on my body. Even just to write a two-page paper it’s difficult on my back. ”
For now, he remains committed to being a fixture at Northport girls basketball games, cheering Kelly and sharing his observations with her, whether she likes it or not.
“Kelly gets frustrated because I try to tell her little too much, sometimes,” Tim said.
“Too much, every time,” Kelly interjected.
John and Eileen were introduced to basketball while growing up in the Boulevard Gardens apartment complex in Woodside. They were friends, but did not begin a formal courtship until they reached their 20s, Greg said. The game was their first love and the infatuation grew through play in high school. John crashed the boards at Brooklyn Tech in Fort Greene and Eileen honed her shooting at Mater Christi in Astoria.
As John and Eileen drove toward professional life and marriage, basketball remained as much a constant as strong religious values and the strength and determination that have carried them through tragedy and triumph. It is a kinship that has been passed to each of their four chil-dren, that Greg, Kelly and John continue to foster and that Tim, Rich and Eileen support from the sideline with praise, critique and affection.
“We just all love it, it’s a passion,” John said. “Basketball is our first love.”
Between Greg, Tim, Rich and Kelly, and the leagues of the Amateur Athletic Union, the CYO and the Eaton’s Neck youth program, John has coached more than 600 games. He has attended well over 1,000, including battles at Northport long before he ever knew his children would play on the varsity squad.
“We started coming to the games long before our kids were even of age to play,” Eileen said.
“I probably came to girls games before Kelly was born,” John said. “I would watch Rich Castellano coach before I knew we would even have a girl.”
The Dunnes’ early development helped aid their success on the teams at Northport High School. Tim, Rich and Kelly have each appeared in the county semifinals.
Greg, playing in the veritable glory days of Northport boys’ basketball, reached that level of the playoff labyrinth twice. In his senior year, 1995, he led the Tigers to 23 straight wins and a berth in the state semifinals in Glens Falls.
Along the way, the Tigers scored a 50-35 win over Bridgehampton for the county championship, before a capacity crowd at Stony Brook University. Several of the Bridgehampton fans, Tim noted, took exception to his brother’s razzle-dazzle style and, more notably, his overweight appearance. They drew a sign and hung it from a railing.
“Pillsbury Dunneboy,” it said, complete with a doughy caricature of Greg, who had been shaped rounder than the prototypical point guard.
“When I saw that sign from across the way, I got so mad,” Tim recalled.
Tim sneaked around to the Bridgehampton section of the stands and stood near the sign, a sophomore from Northport amid rows of enemy territory.
“I waited for the right time,” Tim said. “[Greg] made a really nice move and scored on a nice driving layup.”
Tim ripped the sign and screamed wildly at the fans that he suspected had made it.
“I hated to see anything like that about my family,” Tim said. “I just wanted to stick up for him.”
Nearly a decade later, the story of Tim’s self-guided seek and destroy mission still provokes smiles and a sense of appreciation.
“He went over there and took care of business, that’s the kind of kid he is,” Greg said. “He’s fiercely loyal to his family and his friends. If you’re doing something wrong to his family, you better watch out, even now.”
Greg connected on 4 three-pointers and led the Tigers with 20 points. He scored 19 in the Ti-gers’ Long Island Class A championship win over Hempstead and added a team-high 22 in a 57-56 double-overtime loss to Henninger in the state semifinals.
“It was a great experience because I was doing it with all of my best friends,” Greg said.
John coached several players from the 1995 Northport squad, in AAU and reached the organization’s national championship against teams from across the country, some of which featured eventual pro-fessional stars. “We grew up playing basketball in the park every single day since eighth grade.”
Tim played on the 1997 Northport team that beat Sachem to reach the semifinals and then lost to William Floyd, 34-28, in what became a battle of defense, will and perimeter shooting. Rich appeared in the semifinals in 2001 and scored a basket, as Northport lost to Brentwood 49-43. Kelly made her trip last year, while a sophomore, as the Lady Tigers made a remarkable run to a state semifinal against Ossining.
Kelly’s affinity for Northport athletics, and her intrinsic relationship with the Lady Tigers’ success, began well before she ever addressed Rich Castellano as coach. At age 3, she was an honorary cheerleader, complete with uniform, for her brothers’ teams. Later, she watched as a fan as the girls teams led by Cami and Kim Ruck charged toward the Long Island Championship.
“When Kelly was a little girl and probably when the other girls were little girls, and any little girl that likes basketball in Northport, grows up and wants to be a Lady Tiger,” Tim said. “They’ve been to the games, they’ve been to Hofstra. Kelly came with us to the games at Hofstra when Kim Ruck was playing in the Long Island Championship. These girls have grown up wanting to be a part of the Lady Tigers.”
Kelly attained her childhood dream and, shortly into her sophomore season, left an indelible print in Castellano’s mind — a three-pointer from the corner to defeat Sachem in the 2003 Suffolk Shootout tournament.
“That’s one of my favorite shots of the year,” Castellano said. Kelly hit a similar basket in the county championship game against the same Lady Flaming Arrows, last March. “Here she is a slight little blonde girl canning the three from the corner.”
Well-liked off the court and respected for her knowledge and diplomacy on the court, Kelly has assumed an unspoken leadership role. She also has one of the team’s most singsong plays named after her — Kelly Green.
“She’s one of my favorite kids on the team, she’s just positive all the time, she’s receptive all the time,” Castellano said. “She has grown as a defensive player. She’s very perceptive. She’s got one of the best shots on the team.”
After the Sachem North game, and the takedown that momentarily pulled the cover off of Kelly’s cool demeanor, last Saturday, Castellano approached her with thanks.
“I just told her, I said, ‘Listen, I appreciate what you do,’” Castellano said. “She’s a student of the game; she knows what to do to win.”
Her brother Greg, the assistant coach at SUNY-Brockport, agreed.
“As a player, she’s very skilled, she’s not the strongest, not the fastest, but she’s got a very good basketball I.Q.,” Greg said. “She does what Rich Castellano asks her to do.”
Teammate Jillian Byers, the senior guard who also plays on the girls’ lacrosse team with Kelly, concurs.
“She’s every coach’s dream player. You want to have that girl on your team. She’s very determined. She has unbelievable court vision,” Byers said. “She’s an all-around person. She’s one of the girls on the court who you think, ‘should I give this ball to her,’ and you have total confidence in her that she’s not going to turn the ball over.”
Through the tragedy of Tim’s accident and the triumph of his recovery, of basketball championships and academic success, the Dunnes have remained strong and steadfast to live in a new kind of normalcy. Kelly plays and Tim takes down mental notes.
“Seven years later, we’re still going and we’re stronger than ever,” Rich said. “We’ve become a closer family and each and every one of us is better for it. We’ve become better people, we respect one another and we really love each other. I couldn’t ask for anything more for a family life.”
