Paul Gripper left his big mark on Philly hoops | Mike Jensen

Paul Gripper didn’t mind you parking next to him on a summer morning as he sat watching many of the top players in the region. Gripper was happy to keep up a running commentary, which players could do what, right in front of him.

This was a couple of years ago, at Girard College. Gripper wasn’t in the best health, on some medication, his friends say now. At one point, he dozed off. Even that was commentary. There wasn’t much on the court at that moment to get him excited. This man knew exactly what he was watching.

You also knew why he was there. One of his guys was out on the court. Chris Ings, Neumann Goretti High, now at Rider.

“Best player out there,’’ Grip would say. “You’ll see.”

An overworked heart gave out over the weekend at 50 years old, and Philadelphia basketball kind of stopped in its tracks. Paul Gripper, who had played ball himself at Frankford High in the mid-1980s, had woven himself deep into the fabric of Philly hoops. His youth teams, starting at the middle school level, were known for an abundance of talent, and for taking no prisoners.

“I remember playing against Unk P teams coming up,’’ tweeted former Penn State guard D.J. Newbill, from Strawberry Mansion High. Newbill has played professionally in seven countries. He mentioned how if Gripper yelled “Kentucky,” you knew what was coming, and good luck getting the ball past halfcourt. “RIP UNK.”

A 2-2-1 press would change a game in a heartbeat, said Gripper’s son, Joey, or a 2-3 zone would morph into a ferocious trap as soon as Gripper whistled from the sideline.

"Every player remembers that whistle,'' said Joey Gripper, who went on to play at Coppin State and now is an assistant at Conwell-Egan High.

“He wanted us to press all the time,’’ said Neumann Goretti assistant coach Pat Sorrentino on Monday morning over the phone. “We just didn’t do that. He’d say, ‘You’ve got the horses, you’ve got the horses.’"

Gripper had 4,995 Facebook friends. Which meant at least 4,994 were into hoops, and ready upon log in to have Gripper spread his gospel. How many times did those friends see Gripper’s face talking to them live? If Grip was driving, he was probably filming and talking. It wasn’t all hoops. It was just all Grip.

“I mean, he loved to talk,’’ Sorrentino said.

A lot of remembrances include phrases such as, “Everyone knew me and Paul had issues throughout the years.” All those kinds of remembrances make it clear, nobody questioned his motives. Do right by his players, it boiled down to, over and over.

“He wasn’t hard to deal with,’’ Sorrentino said. “He was so fierce for his guys. He wanted to make sure they got treated right. Once you understood him, it was easy.”

Ings was going to be sixth man as a sophomore for Neumann Goretti. Gripper wasn’t buying what the Neumann Goretti coaches were saying about Ings getting starters’ minutes but they needed his energy off the bench. Then Quade Green, a senior that year, got hurt and Ings had the ball against a bunch of Power 5-bound upperclassmen guards and now Grip was saying, “You know, I think you might be rushing him into this.”

The whole memory made Sorrentino laugh.

“He always found a way to protect his guys,’’ Sorrentino said.

His social media was always a tour of Philly hoops. A Facebook post on March 31, 8:44 a.m.: All Philly Teams.

First Team All Forever

1 Kyle Lowry/Pooh Richardson

2 Kobe Bryant

3 Lewis Lloyd

4 Rasheed Wallace

5 Wilt Chamberlain

(Philly born)

What was noteworthy about that — in addition to stating clearly, Kobe was Philly — was that elevating Lowry to starting point guard still meant Gripper couldn’t leave Richardson off the squad. His team, his rules.

Tor Harrison remembers when he got an assistant-coaching job at Archbishop Carroll. Get to know Gripper, he was told. All the best middle school guys were with him. So Harrison made his way to a gym in Cobbs Creek.

“Everybody who was anybody was in the gym,’’ Harrison said. “We’re talking about middle school kids. I was floored. To this day, I’m a tough critic in evaluating talent. This is the reason, seeing what I saw in those days. It was a different brand of basketball.’’

Harrison started ticking off names. Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, Tony Chennault, Aaron Brown, Devin Coleman, Maurice Watson, Juan'ya Green, Jaylen Bond, Tyrone Garland.

No-look passes for fastbreak dunks … this was middle school? And there was no star treatment, Harrison said. Gripper had them all in his grip, so to speak.

“It was just amazing,’’ Harrison said. “All these kids, like, gravitated toward him. Paul was loud, he was brash. He pulled no punches. For me, that’s kind of how it was growing up. It was the norm. Just to see that these kids — there was no disrespect in the gym. No kids talking back, just a bunch of kids competing and playing hard. You know these kids had names already. There was no ‘cool guy’ stuff.”

“Some of the best talent ever to come through the city,’’ Sorrentino said. “You tried to explain to him, without the financial backing, it’s going to be hard [to keep his team together]. But he always wanted to do it his way. His way was the good one, but he butted heads with everyone. You had to be resilient to deal with Paul.”

His son remembers how it started with him and Maurice Watson Jr. and their dads, how more and more players, top players, became part of it. Those players mentioned, and others such as Dion Waiters.

"He was a caring person, genuine,'' Joey Gripper said. “Very loud. But it was love. He put clothes on their back.”

And it was never easy. There was no big sneaker contract behind his team. Joey Gripper explained that his father had been "in the streets,'' but as he “gradually escaped that,” his fierce mentality remained, along with his intellect. He brought it to the courts.

Harrison’s own son, Zahree, is a point guard, now headed for Division I at St. Francis (Pa.). Gripper first saw him as a little second-grader at Carroll practices, doing all sorts of stuff with the ball. Gripper told Harrison the boy had to come to his phenom camp at West Chester. He was the youngest there — “jersey didn’t fit, had to wrap it around his neck twice” — but Gripper threw him into the fire, and Harrison stayed with him, joining Ings and others under the tutelage of Unk P. His guys.

Maybe it could have been different, everyone staying with Grip all the way through, but there’s no going back now.

“We all knew Paul,’’ Harrison said. “He was stubborn.”

“Everybody can’t do everything," Gripper would say in one of his Facebook lectures, talking about competition on the local amateur hoop scenes, everyone doing events, camps, etc. “Stay in your lane.”

“I literally talked to him three to four times a week, about anything," Sorrentino said. “When he was with you, he was with you. I’m not going to lie, last night, I cried. … Paul was like family by the end.”

Sorrentino had just been talking with Neumann Goretti head coach Carl Arrigale.

“He loved me and Carl because he wanted to be Italian so bad,’’ Sorrentino quipped. “He loved The Sopranos. He said I was Carl’s Silvio.”

Everything was war to Gripper, Sorrentino said, metaphorically speaking. He strategized, and knew his history, often offering a comparison to some old European battle.

He got how parents thought about their own children because he understood where his love started, with his son, Paul, now a skilled chef. With Ashley, now working on her doctorate in public health at Harvard. She’d been a ballplayer herself, at Central High and Arcadia. Gripper also is survived by his sister Naima and his mother Judy.

His Facebook posts stated his ground … “Coach John Chaney, the best pure coach in Philadelphia’s history any level.” He preached about loyalty and the sin of entitlement. He ticked off Jameer Nelson, Aaron McKie, and Eddie Jones as great Atlantic 10 players, to make the point that finding the right level was vital, to be able to play at your natural position.

“You better understand defense,’’ Gripper would say. “You better know spacing and how to close out on your man. All them [expletive] college coaches is on edge. They don’t want to get fired because your dumbass son is running around throwing the ball away. At the end of the day, you love your son like God. The coach … wants to keep their job. That’s why you shouldn’t take it personal.”

His own guys? He told some of you parents that these guys were legit, that it also was not personal if your child wasn’t quite them. There’s a reason, he said, Lucas Monroe is now at Penn, for instance. Monroe didn’t just have talent. He did the little things.

Talent was all right with him, too. Sorrentino remembers when Ings dunked for the first time as a sophomore. Gripper was sitting right past the basket, and while he wasn’t the quicker mover, he jumped out of his seat and offered a salute.

That cracked up the Neumann Goretti coaches, who went over to Gripper after the game and started saluting him.

Today, no laughter, but much of the city’s basketball community is offering the same.