FROM CHESTER WITH LOVE

On that gloomy day in 2007 when the body of Jameer Nelson’s missing father was found floating lifeless in the Delaware River, a state medical examiner later ruled it an accident, Phil Martelli sat silently on a dock with the greatest player he ever coached.

“There were no words then,” Martelli recalled last week. “There are no words now.”

Floyd “Pete” Nelson had been a tugboat-company welder in Chester, the troubled city that was visible through a hazy mist just a few miles north from where his son now sat absorbing the news of his father’s death. Chester was Jameer’s hometown. He’d been shaped by its powerful tides — the force of its basketball passion and the perils of its deadly streets. Pete and Linda Nelson immersed their son in the former, carefully navigated him through the latter.

The journey they charted for him, laden with sports and love, imbued the boy with such maturity, focus, and determination that he always seemed to play and behave beyond his years.

“The job Pete and Linda did in raising Jameer was remarkable,” Martelli, the former St. Joseph’s coach who is now a University of Michigan assistant, said last week. “Let’s face it, Chester is a city that time left behind. And for him to be raised there, to become the player he was, to become the man he was at such a young age, that was something.”

Somehow, this young man who grew up in a poverty-torn city with a murder rate that annually was among America’s worst, who stood a few inches below the 6 feet always listed in programs, who until he was a teenager preferred baseball and football to basketball, became a Philadelphia sports legend and arguably the most accomplished player in Big 5 history.

Nelson starred four years for Martelli at St. Joseph’s, finishing as the school’s all-time leader in points, assists, and steals. As a senior in 2003-04, his Hawks finished the regular season undefeated, were ranked No. 1 in the country and were a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament. He swept the postseason accolades, winning the Wooden, Naismith, and Oscar Robertson awards as college basketball’s outstanding player.

“Open the basketball textbooks and where it says your point guard should do the following, he did all those things and he did them when he was 16,” Martelli said. “And he did it with all the pressure that comes with representing Chester. The way he did it was so impressive. He was a grown man at 16.”

Curiously, at 16, Nelson was also a fairly recent convert to a sport he eventually mastered. In Chester, he played Biddy Basketball, but he also starred as a pitcher-outfielder in baseball and as a quarterback-cornerback in football.

“Honestly, basketball was like my third-favorite sport,” Nelson, 40, said. “Until high school, I was a baseball player first and football was second. But around ninth grade, I gravitated to basketball. I was a hyper kid and I liked basketball because there was action on every single play. The other sports didn’t have that.”

By the time he got to Chester High, he’d practically abandoned baseball. Nelson played freshman football there, but because his father feared his undersized son might be too easily injured, he declined the coaches’ invitation to join the varsity.

Soon he succumbed completely to the chronic, raging basketball fever that has long infected Chester, where the high school’s trophy cases are teeming with District One and state championship hardware, and where the level of play on its playgrounds is always rim-high.

“I knew the tradition in Chester,” Nelson said. “One of my mom’s first cousins is Herman Harris [a Chester High star of the early 1970s who went on to play at Arizona]. There’s a long, long history. Too many teams and names to remember.”

As a young Chester assistant coach, Larry Yarbray saw Nelson’s potential and attitude and along with head coach Fred Pickett, mentored him relentlessly. Pickett also let him hang out at his home which, according to Nelson, “gave me another option, another safe place to go.”

Soon, he was a regular in the cauldron of the Delaware County city’s legendary Seventh Street Courts.

“People always talk about Rucker Park and those other historic places to play basketball,” Nelson said. “In Chester, Seventh Street was similar. There were thousands of people there. People hanging on the trees. That was our Rucker Park. Even though I was never a crowd pleaser, I liked playing there, in front of those crowds. I just went about my business, played the game the way I knew how to. And once my work ethic kicked in, I started getting a lot better.”

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Through the kind of community osmosis that’s part of Chester’s heritage, he picked up the style of guard play associated with the city.

“It’s not necessarily pretty,” he said. “All of us had a little flash, but normally we’re strong and athletic and see the floor well.”

Nelson was a junior point guard when Martelli got his first look at him, during Chester’s win over Pennsbury in 1999′s District One championship game at Villanova.

“My coaches told me there was this kid from Chester, but because he was so tiny they weren’t really sure about him,” Martelli said. “So I went there and watched him play. Jameer took no shots and he dominated the game. Afterward, I called each assistant and said, `You know that little kid from Chester? He’ll be the best guard that ever played at St. Joseph’s. So you’re fired.’”

Nelson’s final college choices were clustered in the Atlantic 10 — Temple, UMass, and St. Joseph’s. He crossed off Temple when John Chaney, who had Lynn Greer at the time, told him he’d play part-time for two years. And coach Bruiser Flint’s precarious status at Massachusetts eliminated that school.

“But more importantly, Phil and his staff recruited the hell out of me,” Nelson said. “They made me and my family feel comfortable from Day 1.”

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When he arrived on Hawk Hill, St. Joe’s previous point guard, Larry Jennings, quickly read the tea leaves and transferred to Stony Brook. What followed were 98 victories in 126 games for Martelli’s teams. Teaming Nelson with Tyrone Barley, Pat Carroll, Dwayne Jones, and especially Delonte West, the Hawks won all 27 regular-season games in Nelson’s senior year.

“When people think about that team, they think about myself, Phil Martelli, and Delonte West,” Nelson said. “But those other guys didn’t get enough credit. They actually deserve more credit. They made it work. To have two guards dominate the game the way Delonte and I did, to have a coach with a big personality like Phil, you had to have a group of guys that knew their role and were comfortable in their skin. They allowed us to be who we were by being who they were.”

For all of Nelson’s individual achievements, he seems destined to be linked forever with the mercurially talented West. They were, their coach said, the yin and yang of backcourts.

“Jameer was cool and calm about the game,” Martelli said. “Delonte was maniacal about it. The biggest thing, though, was that they had no egos. Look at the stats from the 2003-04 season. Halfway through, Delonte West led us in assists. Not Jameer. They let each other be. Then you factor in Tyrone Barley because he was this tremendous defender. The three of them would just go at it as if it was their first day trying out for a basketball team.”

That dream season, of course, ended with a gut-wrenching loss to Oklahoma State on the brink of what would have been St. Joe’s first Final Four appearance in 43 years. As time expired that day, Nelson had a 15-footer to tie. It bounded off the rim. Months later, he was a first-round draft pick of the Denver Nuggets (20th overall) and was subsequently traded to the Orlando Magic. But through 14 NBA seasons, he never really forgot that painful missed opportunity.

Not long after his NBA career ended in 2018, Nelson watched a video of that Elite Eight loss. Alone.

“It was like the perfect matchup for both teams,” he said. “It could have gone either way. It was such a good game, maybe one of the best in NCAA history. I remember those last seconds. It all slowed down and you were trying to process it, to figure out what you could do. I remember on that last shot I was between shooting a two or a three. I came up short. I got a good open look. It wasn’t like their defense stopped me.

“But I don’t regret anything about that game. Obviously, I wish we’d won to see what would have happened at the Final Four. But it wasn’t in the cards. And honestly, every time afterward I had a shot like that I made sure I knew exactly what I wanted to do. It helped me grow. If I had to guess, I took like 15 to 20 game-ending shots in the NBA. And, on all of them, I told myself I was going to get to my shot and shoot it. And I made a bunch.”

It was in 2018, when his family was gathered in Orlando for his daughter’s softball tournament, that Nelson decided that after all those years and all that work he was through.

“I just felt this vibe,” Nelson said. “And I felt like it matched my family’s. I probably could have gotten on another team. But I knew I was done. I’d gotten all the juice out of the orange.”

Now, aspiring to become an NBA general manager, he’s watching more basketball, most of it as the assistant GM of the Sixers’ G League team, the Delaware Blue Coats. But he’s also monitoring — at a distance usually — his namesake son’s career at Delaware.

“I try not to go to all his games because he needs to figure things out, and the world needs to figure out that he’s his own man,” Nelson said. “We have the same name, but he’s going to have to make his own path.”

And every once in a while, Nelson is drawn to the past. He’ll drive east from his home in Haverford until he reaches Chester. There, at the Seventh Street Courts, he’ll shake a few hands, listen to a few stories, and, from as inconspicuous a vantage point as possible, watch another generation of Chester basketball players.

“Basketball’s a joy,” he said. “It’s been such a joy.”