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CENTAUR SEASONS: Player Profile — “Basketball Had Been My Art Form”

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By the time I was a junior, this CENTAUR SEASONS diary year, it was plainly evident what kind of high school players Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales needed to attract if the Centaurs were to get to the next level.

Type No. 1 was Dave Glielmi (pronounced GELL-me; announcers at away games always mangled it). Dave was easily Allentown’s best player those first six, seven years of the basketball program: A kid from the Philadelphia Catholic League – 6-2, a solid 190 – a player on  a successful program who had mixed it up with bigger-time talents.

Type No. 2 was P.J. Brennan, the necessary compliment to Dave, less-heralded but just as important.

(“Basketball Had Been My Art Form” continues below.)

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WELCOME TO CENTAUR SEASONS.  “Basketball Had Been My Art Form” here on HoopsU.Com appears also on CENTAUR  SEASONS, a “memory blog” of the half-good, half-bad,  all-new Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales Centaurs in Center  Valley, Pennsylvana. Forty years ago Steve kept a diary of his junior-year season. A blog before its time then, it is now an e-diary at CENTAUR SEASONS and here on HoopsU.com.

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P.J. Brennan grew up in Pottsville, in the Pennsylvania coal region, the town made famous (and infamous) as “Gibbsville” by novelist and native son John O’Hara.

P.J. wasn’t big (5-8, maybe), nor was he particular strong. But he had played four years of high school at Nativity BVM, and before that another six of CYO. He was one of those classically trained kids: all fundamentals, well-schooled, wonderfully coachable. He could defend and he could shoot.

Oh my, could he shoot! In high school he’d gone for 2,000 plus, and once he got to AC, even as a freshman, he was not afraid to let fly. “I never thought twice about taking the shot,” he says. (Really?) And yet somehow he wasn’t a gunner.

That he wound up at the Cornfield College in the fall of 1972, my junior year, was perfectly natural, maybe even pre-ordained. He’d been hearing about the place since he was a kid sitting in the pew at Our Lady of Angels Catholic Church. Before the new college in the valley could be built, the money had to be raised — making the diocesan campaign a regular plea from the pulpit. As a high school senior he also received a diocesan scholarship, which surely helped.

That he made the basketball team was probably just as natural, though P.J. says he certainly didn’t think so at the time.

Unlike Dave Glielmi — who went to St. Joe’s Prep and played with Mo Howard, who would go to Maryland, and, in the Philadelphia City Championship Game, against Andre McCarter, who would win an NCAA championship at UCLA — for P.J. Brennan the basketball at Billera Hall was the best he had ever seen. Serving to ratify, as if it needed to be, that basketball-playing kids from Nativity BVM didn’t take their game to the next level.

So who was P.J. to think he could?

“I knew it was going to be a stretch,” he says. “I actually had a strategy for making the team. I decided I’d prove myself as a defensive player and let the offense come, not worry about the shots dropping. ” Counterintuitive (have I mentioned that P.J. could shoot?) but brilliant (of course it was).

He made the team.

“I still remember when Coach posted the list outside the cafeteria,” he says. “It was late at night and I was so excited I made the team I ran to the phone and called my parents. It was a big deal.”

And soon enough the polite, self-effacing kid was starting.

CLICK HERE FOR ANOTHER ‘PLAYER PROFILE,’ AN OCCASIONAL FEATURE AT CENTAUR SEASONS.

P.J. played only one Centaur season, his freshman year, the year of this ’72-‘73 diary. He wanted to be a doctor, it was a killer major, and the on-court time was taking its toll. We Baby Boomers were in full, demanding number: “It was a very competitive time to try to get into medical school,” P.J. says, serious about it even now.

So he stopped playing.

Not to make this about me, but.  I took the news badly, selfishly, immaturely. He told me in the library. I remember I looked at him and stormed away. PJ. was a good friend and I knew immediately his absence would diminish my senior year, my season, me. And the team would miss his points; he would have been good for 15, 17 a game, easy, with the occasional 30-plus burst. We needed everyone of those baskets, and we never really found them.

For P.J. it was the right decision. An Allentown College still wet behind the ears had no track record for getting students into med school. Indeed, it was students like P.J. who were themselves being asked to lay the track. Not an unexciting honor of going to a brand new school, but not exactly a benefit either.

Fast forward. Today Dr. Brennan is Chief Medical Officer for the University of Pennsylvania Health System.

Take that, me.

But when we talked, I still had to ask. Couldn’t he have played and got into med school anyway? You know: kept playing ball.

Well, he said, a few years after he quit, when he realized his skills had eroded and he’d never again play the way he once had, he got to thinking he could have, or maybe should have.

Leaving the game, he said, had been terribly, terribly wrenching. “I felt the immediate loss of something that was very important to me.” But no, he said no. “I honestly don’t think it would have worked out.”

So Patrick Joseph Brennan, M.D., cherishes a single hoops season at Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales that was likely more than a Pennsylvania coal-crackin’ kid had any right to expect.

“As I grew older and did more things with my life, I began to see that basketball had been my art form,” he says. “The best thing I ever did in my life, that I feel I was the most accomplished at, was play basketball. It was the one thing in my life that I understood best. There was just something about me and basketball that was a very natural thing.”

We all bought windbreakers at the end of that ’72-’73 season, P.J.’s only Centaur season. Cheap navy blue things with white lettering.

Last time we talked, P.J. said he still has his.

IN THIS CENTAUR SEASONS POST, P.J. TALKS ABOUT ONE PARTICULAR COMPLIMENT HE RECEIVED ABOUT HIS GAME, AND WHY HE TREASURED HEARING IT.

P.J. ROOMED WITH TOM SHIRLEY, A FOUR-YEAR CENTAUR. TODAY TOM IS THE WOMEN’S BASKETBALL COACH AT PHILADELPHIA UNIVERSITY. THE TEAM IS CURRENTLY 8-6 AND TOM HAS MOVED INTO  5TH PLACE ALL-TIME AMONG WINNINGEST DIVISION II WOMEN’S COACHES.  IN THIS CENTAUR SEASONS POST, TOM TALKS ABOUT WHAT HE — AN END-OF-THE-BENCHER —  LEARNED WHILE PLAYING AT ALLENTOWN THAT HE HAS IN COMMON WITH UCLA COACH JOHN WOODEN, THE SUBJECT OF AN EXCLUSIVE CENTAUR SEASONS INTERVIEW.

Steve McKee
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