Boulder – This muscular young man now stands over 6 feet tall and takes the basketball strong to the hoop. But the first time I saw Robby Hanzlik, a guard for the Mullen High School team that now owns a trophy as the 2006 Class 5A state champion, he was wearing diapers.
Seems like only yesterday. But the time was the late 1980s. And the place was Nuggets practice. This baby boy and his sisters arrived at the gym with their mother to pick up Dad from work.
“Hey, look at this,” Denver coach Doug Moe said on that day long ago, as a mischievous grin creased his face. “It’s a whole family of little no-hopers.”
Of all the tough assignments in his working life, from pestering all-star center Hakeem Olajuwon to enduring constant grief from Moe, what could cause more indigestion than the duty that Bill Hanzlik pulled on Saturday night?
“I can’t think of any better way to see my son’s last high school basketball game than sitting at courtside,” Hanzlik said before Mullen played Cherry Creek in the finals of the state tournament.
And we had the seat right next to the anxious father.
Hanzlik worked as a color analyst for the cable TV broadcast of the game. You could feel the tension in living color.
What made the scene priceless was not the presence of a well-known father, but the family ties that are shared and recognized by every parent who has ever sat nervously in the crowd and watched as a teenage son played a trumpet solo at a prep band concert or a daughter gave the valedictory speech at graduation.
In the 54-40 victory by the Mustangs, the heroes were center Ray Hall, who will make more headlines as a college player, and Devin Aguilar, who scored a game-high 18 points. Hanzlik never once peeked at the sideline for approval from his father. “I forget my dad was there,” he said.
When Hanzlik drove the baseline for Mullen early in the fourth quarter, crashing wildly into a defender and getting whistled for a charging foul, his father bluntly informed the TV audience, “Not a very smart play there.”
And it was not always easy parking your sneakers under the same roof as a father who played and coached in the NBA. What is among Robby Hanzlik’s earliest recollections of his dad’s sporting life? “People made fun of the size of his nose,” he said. But this kid got hopelessly hooked on hoops in kindergarten, when Bill Hanzlik took a coaching job down in North Carolina, and the office was a basketball arena where thousands of people stood up and cheered.
“It has been tough on Rob, really mentally tough on him, to be a basketball player, because of all the expectations,” Bill Hanzlik said. “If I could have a do-over in life as a parent, I’d look back and think I was probably too hard on him when he was a young teenager, as far as putting the hammer down in terms of grades or whatever. And he’s not that kind of kid. I finally figured it out, and this past year we’ve become real close.”
Want to know a secret about the senior Mullen guard that you would never hear Hanzlik admit to TV viewers?
“Is my son a better shooter than me? Yeah. But don’t tell him that,” the proud father said.
The son scored nine points, grabbed seven rebounds. He gladly did the grunt work and led the game in one statistical category: time spent mopping the floor with his uniform from scrappy effort. Guess it’s in the genes.
Hugging that gold trophy after the final buzzer sounds is the dream of every prep athlete. “I was kissing it, I was loving it,” the young Hanzlik said.
But 30 years down the road, that image will fade and a more powerful memory will be engraved in the hearts of a father and his son.
“It’s not so much the basketball. It’s the time we’ve spent together through the game. Catching his rebounds, talking,” Bill Hanzlik said. “That is what is invaluable. That one-on-one time is what we’ll remember.”
Staff writer Mark Kiszla can be reached at 303-820-5438 or mkiszla@denverpost.com.
