HAPPY NEW YEAR!
With the “HISTORY OF THE EVENTS OF THE ALLENTOWN COLLEGE’S 1972-1973 B-BALL SEASON, AS CHRONICLED BY, AND WITH THE PERSONAL MEMOIRS AND OCCASSIONAL PHILOSOPHIZING OF THE AUTHOR, ONE STEPHEN J. McKEE” still on Christmas break (next game January 18) this seems an opportune moment to look back on where CENTAUR SEASONS has been, and where it’s going, with a couple of MidSeason Reports.
This first report is a list of and links to all the CENTAUR SEASONS posts leading up to the beginning of the diary of the 1972-1973 campaign — in chronological order.
You regular CENTAUR SEASONS readers here at HoopU.com can pick and choose. New CENTAUR SEASONS readers can start at the top!
COLLEGE OF CORNFIELDS. Enrolling at Allentown College in the early years required a giant leap of faith.
CENTAUR REASONS. I didn’t play basketball in high school. All 6-foot-8-inches of me. A brand-new AC held promise of a second chance.
(“MidSeason Report #1” continues below.)
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WELCOME TO CENTAUR SEASONS. “MidSeason Report #1” 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 History of the Events. …” A blog before its time then, it is now an e-diary at CENTAUR SEASONS and here on HoopsU.com.
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WHERE’S THE CENTAUR? UCLA dominated the college basketball picture during these CENTAUR SEASONS. So to find the tiny Centaur, you needed to know where to look. Part I
SECRETS OF THE CENTAUR: Searching for that … “Something Else.” The first of my attempts to explain why AC –right then, right there — was a singular experience. Part One of six (so far).
WHERE’S THE CENTAUR? UCLA dominated the college basketball picture during these CENTAUR SEASONS. So to find the tiny Centaur, you needed to know where to look. Part II
LEGENDS OF THE FIRST: The Original Centaurs Original Gift. CENTAUR SEASONS encompasses the six graduating years 1969 through 1974. But the Class of 1969 will always be first among equals.
SECRETS OF THE CENTAUR: Why Us? Why First? The second of my attempts to explain why AC –right then, right there — was a singular experience. Part Two of six (so far).
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FIRST DAY: MADNESS, NO, DESIRE, YES. Relflections on the first day of preseason practice, and what it meant to commit to a Centaur Season playing for a no-name, no-where college basketball program.
CENTAUR ONE: First Among Us. From this Centaur basketball player all the rest have sprung.
WHY CENTAUR? Exactly how is it that a half-man, half-beast creature whose role in mythology was to get virgins drunk so as to ensure that they were no longer virgins come sunrise wound up the mascot of a small, liberal arts Catholic college?
SECRETS OF THE CENTAUR: Bricks and a Birthday. The third of my attempts to explain why AC –right then, right there — was a singular experience. Part Three of six (so far).
THE FIRST RIVALRY. What the brand-new AC team needed was a great rivarly, a team to hate. Quickly, it got one. Did it ever.
CENTAURS RECRUITED. The admissions guy responsible for getting many of the first Centaur basketball players to show up at AC was better than all of us. Way better.
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JACK KLUGMAN’S PASSING LAST WEEK TRIPPED IN STEVE THIS CENTAUR SEASONS “ODD COUPLE” MEMORY.
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TO EVERYTHING THEIR SEASONS. “The less said about my freshman year, the better.” But I say it anyway.
THE HEART OF THE MATTER. At a small school like AC, everyday everyone wound up together in “The Atrium,” where the whole place could be in one space. An uncredited “Secrets of the Centaur.”
THE NIGHT THE CENTAURS MOVED THE BUS: Part One of a Metaphor in Three Parts. An away-game road trip explains exactly what it was like to go to AC back then, right then. As told by the Centaurs on the bus.
THE NIGHT THE CENTAURS MOVED THE BUS: Part Two of a Metaphor in Three Parts. An away-game road trip explains exactly what it was like to go to AC back then, right then. As told by the Centaurs on the bus.
UCLA CENTAURS; A.C. BRUINS: An exclusive Interview with John Wooden. Only here at CENTAUR SEASONS, a never-before-heard two-hour audio conversation with the UCLA coaching legend. And what the two schools shared in common.
THE NIGHT THE CENTAURS MOVED THE BUS: Part Three of a Metaphor in Three Parts. An away-game road trip explains exactly what it was like to go to AC back then, right then. Only in this installment a particular Centaur finds completely different meaning in that long day’s journey into night.
AT THE END OF THE BENCH: What a Centaur-Turned-Coach Learned at Allentown and Shares With Coaching Legend John Wooden. More from the exclusive CENTAUR SEASONS John Wooden interview.
A THANKSGIVING HARBINGER. With the holiday upon us it could mean only one thing: The new season would tip off the next week.
MAKING A LIST. The basketball schedule! “Here was my school year — my life, really — as I would come to know it, listed for me game by game.”
THE FIRST RIVALRY. What the new Centaur program needed was a rival. A team to hate. Then it got one. Then it beat one.
THE YEAR THE CENTAURS WERE HALF-GOOD, AND THE TWO WHO MADE IT SO. The one year we had real on-court leadership is the one year we weren’t half bad.
Check back for CENTAUR SEASONS MidSeason Report No. 2, coming soon.
CENTAUR SEASONS can also be found at www.centaurseasons.com. The centerpiece will be the posting in "real time" of the diary that Steve kept of his 1972-1973 junior-year season, beginning on November 30. Prior to that (and after), Steve will be posting regularly about his freshman, sophomore and senior seasons, as well as about what it was like to be there at the beginning to help get a struggling college basketball program off the ground.
Steve was the original writer of The Wall Street Journal's popular sports blog, "The Daily Fix" in 2001-2002, and was even dubbed "The Unwitting Father of the Sports Blog" by Gelf Magazine, the online publication of the "Varsity Letters Reading Series. Steve was the Journal's sports editor for its original Weekend sport section and was involved in all of the Journal's Olympics coverage, Winter and Summer, from 1996 through 2008.
He is the author of three books, most recently "My Father's Heart: A Son's Reckoning With the Legacy of Heart Disease," which he is adapting as a one-man show. For his first book, "The Call of the Game," Steve traveled the country in search of sports events -- including the famous N.C. State Wolfpack victory over "Phi Slamma Jamma" of the University of Houston. For his second book, COACH, among the 150+ coaches Steve interviewed are/were college basketball coaches John Wooden (UCLA), Pat Summitt (Tennessee), Frank Layden (Niagara), Bobby Cremins (Georgia Tech), P.J. Carlesimo (Seton Hall), Bill Guthridge (North Carolina), Abe Lemons (Texas), Stan Morrison (USC), Kathy Rush (Immaculata), Jim Satalin (Duquesne), Charlie Thomas (San Francisco State), Butch Van Bredda Koff (Princeton), Bill Whitmore (Vermont) and LaDonna Wilson (Austin Peay).
For more, you can click on www.steve-mckee.com, where you can find a TODAY show appearance and an NPR interview.
- CENTAUR SEASONS: A new Inductee to the DeSales University Hall of Fame recognizes the contributions of the school’s orginal athletes … - September 18, 2013
- CENTAUR (OFF) SEASONS: A dozen ways to read the 97 posts in the scorebook thus far — until a new roster begins taking the floor in the fall - June 13, 2013
- CENTAUR SEASONS: In a ‘Carnival of Opportunity,’ One of Our Own Shines in an All-Star Game - May 14, 2013
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