Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Heady Days at Albany B y Pau l G r o n d ah l
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“He played hard, but not dirty,” said Michael Hutter, a professor at Albany Law who played on an intramural squad called the Geriatrics.
Albany Law Magazine
Spring 2011
nobody messed with Cuomo.” “He played hard, but not dirty,” said Michael Hutter, a professor at Albany Law who played on an intramural squad called the Geriatrics. Hutter recalled Cuomo as much from the classroom as the basketball court. Cuomo took Hutter’s Unfair Trade Practices course and stood out in a class of 40. “He came to every class, which is more than I could say
for a lot of his classmates,” Hutter said. “He didn’t try to hog the discussion or to speak just to hear himself. When he had something meaningful to contribute, he would. He was also his own person. We knew he was the son of the lieutenant governor. But he never threw his father’s name around.” What really turned heads at Albany Law was when Andy drove to school in a Corvette, painted a flashy metallic blue.
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o drill down to the essential Andrew Mark Cuomo, a bedrock layer is the gymnasium of Albany Law School on New Scotland Avenue, a sweaty pit of testosterone and ego on weeknights during the intramural basketball season. The tough kid from Queens, known as Andy, a muscle-bound, 6-foot, 200-pounder who played on the law school’s rugby team and rebounded the basketball as if trying to control a scrum, was the captain of a powerhouse team whose name captured its swagger: Gonads. “He was as tough as they come, with very sharp elbows,” said Kevin Luibrand, an attorney with a Latham law firm. The 1983 Albany Law School graduate competed against Cuomo in the intramural hoop league. “His game was all about rebounding. He couldn’t dribble and didn’t have much of a shot. But nobody challenged him in the paint.” He earned a reputation as an enforcer under the basket, a player in the vein of Rick Mahorn, the muscle behind the Detroit Pistons’ bad boys. “He never backed down and wasn’t afraid to mix it up,” Luibrand said. “There were some high-strung law students playing, with a little pushing and strong words after an elbow to the mouth. But
Andrew Cuomo ’82 with Raymond Corbett, AFL-CIO president, and Theresa Hammer of Saratoga Springs, N.Y., in Kamesha Lake, N.Y., in 1982.