TIMOTHY J. FINNERTY: Basketball and
Hijinks
On
Sept. 8, Timothy J. Finnerty's cousin was getting
married. Some family was up from Atlanta. He was tired.
It had been a long week. But he knew a cousin's daughter
had never seen Manhattan. So at 8:30 p.m., he and his
wife, Theresa Finnerty, did a tour of the entire city
with her.
"He wanted her to be able to go back to her friends
and say she saw it," Ms. Finnerty said. "We walked around
the World Trade Center, and he even tried to get us into
the office; at Cantor Fitzgerald on the 105th floor. But
the office was locked."
A bond trader -- and impromptu tour guide -- Mr.
Finney had one great obsession: "He lived and breathed
basketball," Ms. Finnerty said. He was a guard at the
University of Scranton in the late 1980's, and played in
the N.C.A.A. championships, Division III.
Mr. Finnerty, who was 33, loved to coach, too. At
Wagner College in Staten Island, he was an assistant
coach.
"When we moved to Glen Rock, N.J., he wanted to coach
seventh and eighth graders," Ms. Finnerty said. Last
year, he got the chance. "St. Catherine's, my church, had
a team. And those kids loved him," she said.
"He was just silly and goofy. If a kid was quiet,
within minutes he would have the kid laughing," Ms.
Finnerty said. At the wedding of his cousin, on Sept. 8,
he did goofy dances -- the lawn mower dance and the
sprinkler dance.
"I don't know where they came from," Ms. Finnerty
said. "But I was laughing so hard I had tears coming down
my face."
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