Hoopster Farewell

 by Etta Sanders

IIt was a perfect day for basketball. The kind of bright and warm Sunday that Leila Constable knew would have meant one thing to her son Damian—a game on the courts in Rockefeller Park.

Through emails and word of mouth, Steve Olson, speaking at left, gathered friends and players on the Rockefeller Park basketball court on Sept. 26 to honor their beloved fellow competitor, Damian Constable. Constable died on the court earlier in the month. “The mourning is over,” Olson said. “This is the celebration.” Photo: Carl Glassman

But four weeks earlier, 26-year-old Damian Constable had died suddenly of heart failure after collapsing on those courts. And on this Sunday, his friends and family gathered in the park to remember him by sailing on the river and shooting some hoops.

“He loved to sail, he loved this park and he loved this place,” said Steve Olson, a close friend and a Tribeca resident who helped organize the remembrance on Sept. 26.

It was on these courts that Constable, a former elementary school teacher who had been working as a real estate agent for CitiHabitats, formed a team with Olson, Frank Padilla, Marko Menendez, Michael Kozek and Odin Erickson they called Grand Marnier. Last year they tied for first in the Basketball City winter league.

When he died, Constable was getting ready for a tryout with a professional basketball team in Italy. “He was a basketball junkie,” Olson said. “The week he passed away he’d played every day.”


After Sept. 11, 2001, the Gran Marnier team moved from court to court around the city. In the summer of 2002, they came home to Rockefeller Park.

So it was fitting that on Sept. 26, a few dozen of Constable’s basketball buddies played on that court, while another 30 friends and family members boarded the Shearwater, a sailboat in North Cove on which Constable and Olson had learned to sail.

“This outpouring of love makes me so happy,” said Leila Constable, as she walked from the court to the boat. “It gives me goosebumps.” Leila and Damian’s friends are also organizing fundraisers to help raise awareness of the kind of hidden heart disease that can strike an otherwise healthy young person.
Players stopped their game and faced the boat carrying friends and family of Damian Constable. Together, they remembered their basketball buddy in silence. Photo: Carl Glassman.
Damian Constable.

As the boat sailed, Tomas Marsh, one of Constable’s friends, strummed a guitar and sang some favorites—“Dock of the Bay” and “I Shot the Sheriff.”

After a while, several people said a few loving words and each cast a rose into the water. They remembered Constable as an accomplished guitarist, a devoted son, brother and nephew and a young man who made friends from Trinidad to Tribeca.

“Everybody he met just sort of bonded to him,” said Nick Pirovano, a friend who is putting together a CD of Constable’s music.

At a few minutes past five, the boat stopped at a spot opposite the courts. Across the water the game halted and the sweaty players walked silently to the promenade. As the friends on land and the friends on the river faced each other in a moment of silence, the invisible thread of their friend’s memory bound them together.

No sooner had the boat docked than Olson headed back to the court. It was, after all, a perfect day to play basketball. “This is exactly what Damian would have wanted us to do,” Olson said. “Sail and play ball and remember his beautiful life.”