TAMPA, Fla. — If anyone had questions about Speedy Claxton’s place in the history of Hofstra basketball, the sweatshirt he wore into the NCAA Tournament on Thursday answered them.
He walked onto the court for a workout with his team at Benchmark International Arena wearing a black hooded garment with a Pride logo and swoosh, a custom-made one-of-one that he had designed for him this week. The words across the front proclaimed him simply as: “The Guardfather.”
“It speaks for itself,” he said of the hard-to-miss outfit and the moniker he can’t refuse.
Hofstra has become a school known for producing star players at that position. Claxton rattled off a few of those names, from Justin Wright-Foreman, Desure Buie and Aaron Estrada to Tyler Thomas, Charles Jenkins and the two current ones who are maintaining the tradition, Cruz Davis and Preston Edmead.
“We’ve raised good guards,” he said. “I’m the one who kind of started that. So I’m The Guardfather.”
He’s been going by a nickname most of his life (he said he can’t remember the last time someone called him “Craig,” which is his actual name). Now he has a new one.
That certainly would have been an apt honorific if Claxton, who last played at Hofstra in 2000, had never again set foot on the Hempstead campus.
After leading the Pride to the NCAA Tournament in his senior year, going on to play in the NBA for a decade, winning a title there with the Spurs and still holding the Hofstra records for steals and assists, his legacy already was etched in marble. Some of those who followed him topped his production, sure, but none has been able to eclipse his stardom or his standing.
This callback of returning to coach Hofstra and bring it to the level he reached as a player puts him in a totally different stratosphere. Perhaps the latest phase of his time at the school should rightly be called something else.
It’s more like The Guardfather Part II.
Better than the original? We’ll find out Friday when Hofstra faces Alabama in the first round with a chance to earn its first tournament victory.
No one seems more surprised than Claxton that this second act is taking place, although two Hall of Famers seemed to have a pretty good idea it was possible.
The first was Don Nelson, his coach with Golden State during his final season playing in the NBA.
“One day after practice he pulled me to the side and he asked me if I ever thought about coaching,” Claxton said on Thursday. “Up until that point, I hadn’t. He was like, ‘You should think about it. I think you would make a hell of a coach.’ That’s what prompted the idea. Here I have a Hall of Fame coach tell me that I should think about coaching, so I said, all right, let me start thinking about coaching.”
Claxton worked briefly as a scout for Golden State after retiring as a player, but in 2013, he returned home and joined Joe Mihalich’s inaugural staff at Hofstra. For eight seasons, he was in the background, helping to recruit and develop players at the position who would try to measure up to him. In the beginning, however, he said he had no idea what he was getting himself into.
“I’m not going to lie; my first years it was kind of rough,” he said. “It’s different, going from being a player to being a coach and being in the office from 9 a.m. to 6 or 7 p.m. It was a change in lifestyle for me. But once I got used to it, I loved it.”
The other Hall of Fame believer in him was Jay Wright, who coached Claxton at Hofstra.
“He was always, and even to this day, one of the smartest players I ever coached in terms of basketball IQ,” Wright told Newsday. “And he also had great leadership qualities, very quiet leadership qualities . . . Once he got in it, I knew he’d be great. But before he got into coaching, I thought he was so quiet that I didn’t think he would want to do it.”
Wright was so impressed by Claxton’s eye that he said when they were together at Hofstra — and even during his time at Villanova — he would rely on Claxton’s assessments.
“He is the only player I ever truly trusted when I evaluated an incoming recruit,” Wright said. “I would always ask him before I would offer a guy a scholarship: What do you think? And he was always dead on. To the point where when he became an assistant at Hofstra and I was at Villanova, I would sit with him at events and ask him to look at players because I had such a great respect for his evaluation. It’s really unique. He has an amazing clear ability to assess players without the interference of emotion or hype. I think that has shown in the teams he has put together at Hofstra every year.”
In 2021, after Mihalich suffered a stroke and Mike Farrelly served as acting head coach for one season, Claxton was given Hofstra’s head-coaching job.
During those five years, he has won 105 of his 167 games, and his .629 winning percentage is the highest among anyone at Hofstra with more than one season running the program (Jack McDonald, who coached in 1943, went 15-6 during his one year). If he maintains the pace he is on, he should surpass Tom Pecora (155) as the program’s winningest coach in two or three years.
And isn’t it nice to see a mid-major coach reach the NCAA Tournament and know he’ll be back simply because there is no place he’d rather be?
“He has ‘it,’ ” said Mihalich, who made the trip to Tampa with the team. “He is real.”
His players — his basketball descendants, really — seem to think so, too.
“He’s a guard, I’m a guard,” Edmead said. “He gives us the most confidence you can play with. Coming here, it was the best decision of my life.”
Added Davis: “He developed me a lot as a player. He’s helped me be the best version of myself on and off the court. He’s just changed my life, helped me out a lot.”
Claxton said there is “extra meaning” for him to be here at this tournament representing the school for which he played. He is not just coaching but winning and continuing a tradition that he essentially started.
“Hofstra is a very special place, always will be a special place,” he said. “We’re talking about legacy right now . . . It means so much more to me.”
It’s hard to imagine anyone meaning more to Hofstra than Claxton.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday’s Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
