Newly in possession of his drivers license and a hand-me-down car, Dan Cronin was given a job by his parents one Saturday in the mid-1980s: drive his younger brother, Mick, to three eighth-grade basketball games in Cincinnati. On the way to the first game, in his sky-blue Ford Granada equipped with an AM-only radio, Dan proposed a wager.
Mick, both hypercompetitive and a highly advanced player for that age, took the bet. The first game, for St. Ann Catholic School, he filled it up—more than one-third of the way to winning the bet, he recalls. The second game, for Northside Knights of Columbus, Mick stayed ahead of pace. But in the third game, which was again for the St. Ann team, the coach didn’t put Mick in the starting lineup.
He eventually got in the game and started launching shots, scoring points, only to be pulled again. With his playing time limited for mysterious reasons, Mick Cronin failed to hit the century mark.
What happened? Hep Cronin, the boys’ father and a renowned high school coach, arrived at the gym for the last game. Somehow—to this day Mick says he’s unsure how—Hep heard about the bet and told the St. Ann coach to bench his son.
“I’ll see you two at the house,” Hep told Dan and Mick afterward, in a tone that told them they were in trouble.
Chastised for the wager, the boys were sent to the room they shared. Going to bed, they argued over whether the bet needed to be paid off. But they shared the knowledge that almost nothing got past Hep, the father who always knows best.