Before Tom Emma wore Duke blue, another Manhasset basketball legend wore every color they had. Jim Brown — the Jim Brown — had set the Long Island scoring record at Manhasset High School in the early 1950s, averaging 38 points per game while also dominating in football, lacrosse, baseball, and track. Two decades later, a 6-foot-2 guard from the same school broke Brown's scoring record.
Tom Emma was born on August 1, 1961, and grew up on Long Island's North Shore in the small, affluent village of Manhasset. He scored 1,983 points at Manhasset High School between 1975 and 1979, surpassing Brown's mark to become the all-time leading scorer in Nassau County — a record that would stand for more than a decade, until David Mascia of Lynbrook broke it in 1991.
Fritz Mueller, who coached at Manhasset from 1953 to 1982, had seen them all. He remembered Emma not for the scoring records but for the person. "Tom was just a very polite young man," Mueller said. "Never had a bad word to say about anybody. And just loved basketball. He just enjoyed being around everybody. Never a curse word. Never hollered at anybody. Just went about his business. They enjoyed playing with him. Just a fine, fine, fine young man."
The scoring record, Mueller noted, never went to Emma's head. "The fact he became the scoring leader in Nassau County really never affected him at all. He never thought in that light. He just played each game as they went. He was just a prolific scorer. With the three-point line, he would have been even better."
Emma was a two-time New York State Sportswriters Association first-team All-Star and committed to Duke under head coach Bill Foster, whose 1978 Blue Devils had reached the national championship game behind Gene Banks, Mike Gminski, and Jim Spanarkel. Emma arrived in Durham for the 1979-80 season and played on an ACC championship team that reached the Elite Eight — the last team Bill Foster would ever coach at Duke.