Phil Martelli coaches a St. Joe's game during the 2013 season. (Photo: Aaron Bracy)
By AARON BRACY
December 28, 2023
Big5Hoops.com
On campus at Saint Joseph’s University in the late 1990’s, Phil Martelli was not Coach Martelli. He was either just Phil, or Martelli the Magnificent.
Not Carnac the Magnificent.
Martelli the Magnificent.
They made T-shirts and handed them out to the Student Section. It all came from a silly, but hilariously funny and effective television show that Martelli hosted that was modeled after The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
Martelli hosted the show alongside Joe Lunardi, who was Carson’s Ed McMahon for Martelli. And then-St. Joe’s sports information guru Ken Krsolovic was behind the scenes in the creation and production of Hawk Talk.
The subject of Hawk Talk came up on Wednesday night during our first-ever Spaces for which Krsolovic was kind enough to join us. (ICYMI, Krsolovic was a feature of our Friday column last week.) As Krsolovic and I were talking, I was Tweeting out some of the conversation. The crowd for our first attempt was small, and we had maybe seven or eight listeners. I was a little disappointed with the turnout, but it was our first try at this. And I knew we were recording and would share out what I thought was really great content, especially for St. Joe’s fans.
Then, out of nowhere, Phil Martelli’s X profile popped into our Spaces. Martelli, now an assistant coach at Michigan who was watching film in preparation for Friday night’s home game against McNeese State, had gotten word from a family member that we were talking about Hawk Talk. The next 25 minutes or so was just pure gold, with Krsolovic and Martelli going back and forth on one of the most glorious times in recent Saint Joseph’s basketball history.
HERE is the recording. (Martelli joined us unannounced at the 53:47 mark.)
The backstory of Hawk Talk is that St. Joe’s had gotten sponsors for TV games that it no longer was able to broadcast due to a contractual arrangement with the Atlantic 10. Krsolovic went to then-AD Don DiJulia with the idea for a coaches’ show with Martelli.
“I didn’t want it to be a boring, ‘So, coach, when did you switch from man to man to the zone?’ I wanted it to be different,” Krsolovic said last night before Martelli joined. “Phil was a funny guy. I thought, ‘How are we going to use his funniness, his quirkiness? I’d been interviewing people to host the show. Should we get a name person? It just kept feeling like another one of those coaches’ shows. I kept thinking, ‘How do I make Phil the focal point?’ It hit me, ‘He is the focal point. I’ll make him the host. I’ll have him ask the questions.’ I called Phil and was like, ‘I got it. Here’s what we’re going to do.’”
Martelli loved the idea.
“Hawk Talk was the highlight,” Martelli said on Spaces last night. “Ken came to me and said, ‘We have money to do a coaches show.’ He didn’t tell me it was above a paint store in Roxborough. I said, ‘OK, but we’re not doing it like (everyone else) does it.’ That show has legs to this day. People will say to me, ‘Did this really happen?’ I say, ‘Some of it I forget, but, yeah, that happened.’”
For one episode when the Hawks were struggling, Martelli rose from a casket to say he was still alive. They critiqued Arizona coach Lute Olson for not flying to Philadelphia for a game at the Palestra with a minor snowstorm.
There were many other off-the-wall skits.
“That was really worth it,” Martelli said. “You know what, I enjoyed the heck out of that.”
Krsolovic said Martelli’s personality made the show click.
“We had it cooking for a while. You made it work,” Krsolovic told Martelli. “It wouldn’t have worked with any other coach, in any other setting, at any other time.”
Martelli said it was all about selling Saint Joseph’s and the basketball program.
“What we wanted to do was have people that were messing with their remote say, ‘What are they doing?’” Martelli said. “They might not even have known us, how the team is doing, any of that stuff. All we wanted them to do was stop playing with the remote and just watch. To me, it was always about free advertisement for the school, not for me. I had the job that I wanted. It was never about a self-promotion.
“It was the same reason I called WIP for all those years. They would never say college basketball. Today they have all these metrics to figure out how much that is worth. That show was invaluable to the university, not just to the basketball program, or Ken or I.”
Martelli sometimes got knocked for Hawk Talk and his humorous personality. In fact, I don’t think he always got credit for how great of a coach he was – and remains today — because of how media-friendly he’s always been.
“The year when we took a downturn and people would say to me, ‘You’re not serious enough,’” Martelli said. “And I would be like, ‘Aw, please.’ Like, ‘You should watch more film.’ Like, my eyes bleed I watch so much film.”
Graciously, Martelli took a break from his latest film session on Wednesday night to join us on Spaces.
And it was magnificent.
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Aaron Bracy has been covering Philadelphia sports since 1996. His byline regularly appears on Associated Press stories. Big5Hoops.com is his second website dedicated to Philadelphia college basketball. Follow Bracy on X: @Aaron_Bracy and like his Facebook and Instagram pages.