Embracing Father’s Day With the Brunsons: Where Basketball Meets Civil Rights

I’m a basketball guy.

I played for my high school team a million years ago, back in the Paleolithic Era: the time of short shorts, high socks, and no 3-point shots.

My late father, Alan Dobrow, took this photo of his most fashionable son.

I covered college basketball for years and wrote my first book about it (Going Bigtime: The Spectacular Rise of UMass Basketball).

At Madison Square Garden on the night in November 1993, when UMass knocked off top-ranked North Carolina. [Photo by Joe Dobrow.]

And I teach journalism at Springfield College, the place where the sport was invented by Dr. James Naismith, the guy I call the Original Dr. J.

I also grew up in New York and remember the Knicks’ championship teams from 1970 and 1973. Although I have lived in New England for more than half my life now, the old allegiances remain, so I absolutely reveled in the Knicks’ amazing championship run earlier this month.

That tip-in by OG Anunoby to cap off a comeback from 29 down in Game 4? Come on, man, it still seems incredible.

For me, though, the best part of the series was the embrace between Knicks’ star Jalen Brunson and his dad (and assistant coach of the Knicks), Rick Brunson, immediately after another stirring comeback in Game 5. Jalen had completely taken over the game in the fourth quarter, a championship close-out performance among the very best in the history of the sport. To share it with his father, the man who taught him the game and cultivated his passion for it, was just beautiful.

It came eight days early, but this was a Father’s Day hug for the ages.

It came eight days early, but this was a Father’s Day hug for the ages.

(I’m old enough to remember Rick Brunson from his playing days at Temple University in the early-mid ’90s. Their rivalry with UMass was — bizarre as it might sound to modern fans who regard those two teams as peripheral players in the college game — as intense and riveting as any in the sport. Don’t believe me? Check out this video from February 13, 1994, a nationally televised game UMass won by one point with a basket by Mike Williams in the closing seconds. Brunson played in that game, and I covered it — so I was in the postgame press conference when this happened ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQNQiE4niDM

But I’m also a civil rights guy. That’s most of the writing I do these days.

Here, too, there is a heartwarming father-son story to be told about the Brunsons — in this case the late Charles Brunson and his son, Irwin Brunson.

Here I am with Irwin Brunson in St. Augustine in April 2025. [Photo by Missy-Marie Montgomery.]

Back in June of 1963–63 years ago — Irwin was 8. He had just completed the third grade at Excelsior Elementary School in the Lincolnville neighborhood of St. Augustine (a neighborhood settled by freed slaves and named after the Great Emancipator). Excelsior was an all-Black school. St. Augustine, like so many places in the South, had still not integrated its schools, despite the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 that had declared “separate but equal” inherently unequal.

Irwin’s father, Charles, was deaf, as was his mother, Ruby. They had met at the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind, a school that still exists in St. Augustine today. Charles was a hard worker, and he was exceptionally proud of his family.

He knew that the white schools had vastly better resources, so he signed up Irwin and two of his other children to be among the five pioneer integrators at Fullerwood Elementary School for the 1963–64 academic year.

Registration took place on August 28th. Irwin told me that he remembered being mesmerized that day by all of the books in the library as he waited to meet his teacher and have his mom sign the registration forms ahead of the start of school the following week.

That evening, the family gathered round the small black-and-white television in their tiny house on unpaved Gault Street and watched the news. Martin Luther King was taking the nation to church in front of the Lincoln Memorial as a huge crowd gathered by the reflecting pool.

A clear and beautiful reflection of America at its best at the March on Washington. [Photo from the African American Museum of History and Culture.]

Dr. King talked about his dream that one day “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”

Irwin looked up and saw his father, Charles, looking at the television in wonder — even though he couldn’t hear a word.

**

The year ahead would prove an anguished one for both Charles and Irwin Brunson. It’s a story that I chronicle in my new book, Original City, Original Sin: King, the Klan and the Fight for Civil Rights in St. Augustine, Florida.

This is what Ken Burns says about it:

“Woven with journalistic rigor and lyrical wonder, this is a timely and beautiful book.”