Benefield: Cardinal Newman boys basketball coach Tom Bonfigli at 800 wins and counting

Eight hundred and sixteen wins. That's 68 dozen and more than 62 baker's dozens. It's almost six gross. It's nearly 41 score. It's legion, it's large, it is multitudinous.

In short, it's a lot.

The number of high school basketball coaching wins Cardinal Newman boys coach Tom Bonfigli has racked up in 38 years in the business is a lot. In fact, only eight people have put together more wins in the history of boys basketball in California, according to records kept by Cal-Hi Sports.

After falling to Piner in the North Bay League-Oak Division tournament title game Friday night, the Cardinals moved to 21-7 overall. They, along with Montgomery, finished 6-4 in the NBL-Oak and await their seed in the North Coast Section Division 2 tournament, which will be announced Sunday. Heading into the weekend, they were ranked eighth.

Bonfigli and his Cardinals hit milestone win No. 800 on Dec. 12 with a 70-50 win over Maria Carrillo in the opening round of the Rose City Tournament. At that juncture, he was 11th on the all-time state leaderboard. He has since advanced to ninth.

After that win, there was confetti, there were former players mingling with current students, many of them holding “800” signs. But by the next night, the win total moved to 801. And so on and so on.

Don't for a minute think the numbers don't matter to Bonfigli. They do. Case in point: When I called some days ago to ask about win No. 800 and what hitting that milestone meant to him, he responded: “You are going to have to fast-forward a little bit; we are at 815.”

TO BONFIGLI, numbers point to something bigger.

“I think the numbers get more important as you get older,” Bonfigli, 67, said. “When I was younger, the numbers weren't as important. When I was younger, winning was really important.”

But the numbers are wins.

“A number represents something,” he said. “What numbers represent is being consistently good.

“The thing I'm proudest of in my career is the consistency - we are always good, we are almost always in the championship game and we are going to go to the playoffs,” he said.

He's had exactly three losing seasons since he started his career as head coach in 1981.

“You have to coach what you have, not worry about what you don't have, so every year is different,” he said. “How well you do that, that is how successful you are in the long run. Everybody can get a good group, everybody can get a good team.”

Bonfigli went 280-103 over 14 seasons in his first stint at Cardinal Newman. He was let go in August 1994 for breaking the no-drinking clause in his contract over the summer. He did not coach that winter but the following season he was hired by Justin-Siena High School, where he stayed until the spring of 2007, racking up a 225-120 record.

But Bonfigli, who in March will mark 25 years of sobriety, is a Newman guy. He graduated from Cardinal Newman in 1971 and he played quarterback for Ed Lloyd and point guard for John Fitzgerald - two coaches revered on the Old Redwood Highway campus almost as much as Saint John Henry Newman himself.

So when his alma mater called in 2007 and asked him to return, he did.

“WHAT I think, when I think of Tom and success, is he has continued the legacy of John Fitzgerald, his coach, the man the gym is named after,” said Graham Rutherford, also a Newman grad and the dean of student life on campus.

Bonfigli speaks of tradition, what might be called the Newman Way of playing basketball.

“The main thing is what we have built, we have built on solid ground,” he said. “We do what we do and that is why we are respected up and down the state.”

Bonfigli says other teams call Newman “old school,” but he doesn't mind that description. He's about defense, he's about team-first and he's most decidedly not about glitz.

“The game now, it's more of a show,” he said. “It used to be hard work, play as a team, play right, play fundamentally sound. Now it's got to be a reality TV show.”

Trash talking? Nope. Flashy play? He hopes not. Big displays of individual personality? That's not great, either. Bonfigli does not even go for the almost-ubiquitous hand-slaps between teammates at the free-throw line - after a miss.

“When they gotta hit hands at the free throw and the guy missed it?” he said, nearly flabbergasted. “What's the point of that?”

“The theatrical stuff? I'm against it, flat against it,” he said.

So it probably surprises no one that Newman's teams have always started and ended with defense.

RYAN VICE, a 1990 grad who played on Bonfigli's 1989 team that went 31-4 and won the NorCal Championship, said defense - and discipline - were Bonfigli's guilding principles, always. He saw plenty of sharpshooters sitting on the lonely end of the bench if they could not play defense.

“It was team defense and effort. We ran our asses off in practice - full-court press, man-to-man defense, in your face,” he said. “If you couldn't play defense, you couldn't get on the court - it didn't matter if you could make a bucket.”

And the discipline part? Real.

“It was all eyes up and on him,” Vice said. “If you took your eyes off him you were running … up and down until he told you to stop.”

Vice, who showed up to celebrate win No. 800 with his old coach, called Bonfigli a legend.

“And a winner, that's for sure,” he said.

But Bonfigli isn't all hammer and nails.

TROY BLANK was the starting center and captain on Bonfigli's first-ever team at Cardinal Newman. That squad got Bonfigli wins one through 19 that season.

“It was only 19 of them, but it was 19 hard-fought wins for him,” Blank said.

But those wins are not necessarily what Blank, a retired U.S. Marine, thinks of when he thinks of his old coach. What he remembers is a day in 2008 - 26 years after he graduated from Cardinal Newman.

On that day, Blank stood at the lectern in the chapel at Daniels Chapel of the Roses on Sonoma Avenue in Santa Rosa. As he started to speak about the life and death of his father, Tom, he looked up to see Bonfigli and the Cardinal Newman basketball team standing at the back of the chapel.

“I was just stunned,” he said. “Who would bring his whole basketball team 26 years later? That's how special he was.”

As moving as that moment was, Blank gained his composure - enough to crack wise.

“I looked up and go, ‘Wow. Hey Coach, this reminds me of playing at Montgomery, it's packed,'” he said.

“He is a special person in my heart,” Blank said.

TOM FITCHIE retired from head coaching duties at Montgomery in 2015 after winning 562 games. So Fitchie, perhaps more than just about anybody else, can appreciate how hard it is to win games and how much it takes to coach a successful season - how much a coach has to put in and how much the grind can take out of you.

“I have a lot of respect for him, for sure,” Fitchie said of his longtime friend. “You coach that long, you win that many games - you must be doing something right.”

BONFIGLI, A deeply religious man who attends Mass daily, fields the not-unexpected question of when he might walk away from the game. His brother, Jerry, his assistant through more than 1,000 games, said they talk about it.

“That is a conversation we kind of have had more in the last couple of years than before,” Jerry Bonfigli, 69, said. “That's in his mind, yeah.”

The kids, the competition - those things keep him coming back, Tom Bonfigli said. But the other things? They can be a grind.

The showboating, the trash-talking, the defense worthy of an NBA All-Star game - they wear on him.

“Parents are more challenging now than they used to be. Political correctness is at an all-time high, that's challenging,” he said.

The retirement question? He prays on it.

“I'll know when I'm done. Through the grace of God I have always been healthy,” he said. “I'll continue doing it until I don't want to do it anymore.”

And until then, the wins will very likely keep coming.

You can reach staff columnist Kerry Benefield at 707-526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com, on Twitter @benefield and on Instagram at kerry.benefield. Podcasting on iTunes and SoundCloud, “Overtime with Kerry Benefield.”