Posted May 3, 2013
I figured out why your blog and book will be a winner.
Well, I am certainly glad someone has! (And yes, one of the goals I’ve been shooting for with this blog is to find the book in these Centaur Seasons.)
Those dozen italicized words that tip-off this particular CENTAUR SEASONS post here on HoopsU.com were written in an email to me by a friend, Kathryn, who pens her own blog at RAGGED RECOVERY. Kathryn was reacting — quite viscerally, you’ll see — to an interview she read that I had done about CENTAUR SEASONS for the “Varsity Letters” sports-reading section of the online site GELF Magazine.
In response to a ‘VL’ question posed by interviewer Justin Adler, WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO GO TO ALLENTOWN COLLEGE OF ST. FRANCIS DE SALES?, I answered: “It was kind of by accident. I planned on attending Niagara University, but my father passed away in September of my senior year of high school, and [after that] I wanted to go to a school that was closer to my hometown of York, Pennsylvania. … … [E]verything just clicked—it all felt right.”
Got chills as I thought about this driving home … wrote Kathryn, as always passionate and enthusiastic as she typed.
Regular readers here on HoopsU.com are aware that another objective for CENTAUR SEASONS has been to try to divine what it was exactly about Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales (full name, always full name) in Center Valley, Pennsylvania, that made this tiny-little brand-new nothing-there place in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by cornfields such a unique and special opportunity for a post-secondary education.
“The Secrets of the Centaur,” I’ve called them.**
As you know, Kathryn wrote me, sports plays a bit part in my life, outside of tennis and skiing. … but when the interviewer was grilling you about what made your experience special. … and you said, “I’m trying to articulate that” ….
Well, my take away, and my ENVY, is that you took what life handed you and you engaged and embraced and reveled in it. … Here you were, losing your Dad senior year in high school, having to shift gears and go to a nearby college — one without much to offer, on paper. But you plunged in and made it matter. There’s a huge lesson here about acceptance and attitude and … I’M HERE AND I AM GOING TO MAKE IT SPECIAL….
Kathryn then went on to write … you will fill in the rest … as if there was something I needed to add to the perspicacity she had so observed, and yes, divined about Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales in its right-then/right-there moment forty years ago.
Hardly.
Thanks, Kathryn, for saying so well for me what I’ve been trying to say now about the Secrets of the Centaur for lo these past six months.
You should know her words on my behalf have come hard-wrought.
In the “About Me” section of her RAGGED RECOVERY blog Kathryn declares: Addiction drives people to do things they truly don’t want to do. I realized: THIS IS ME AND FOOD! For more than thirty years, prompted by my first binge at sixteen, I’d been up and down the scale twenty-five pounds at least ten times. I’d always pegged myself as your garden-variety yo-yo dieter. In truth, I used food the way a drunk scarfs Ketel One: too eagerly, too often, in amounts too large and to no good end.
It would seem an interesting or even impossible leap from girl with eating disorder to boy on basketball team at a barely-there college in eastern Pennsylvania, but for Kathryn, no. Did you notice earlier when she wrote, Well, my take away, and my ENVY … ? Well, here is MY envy: that she indeed could make this jump so effortlessly, especially without ever having, you know, BEEN to Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales in Center Valley, Pa. That’s leaping ability. The woman must have like a 38-inch vertical.
It is one of the great regrets of my life, Kathryn continued in her email, that my father’s dying (yes, we share that) triggered my eating disorder that then derailed the end of high school and my college career.
Instead of doing, I conclude she means in leaping, what I and so many of us at Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales did by being there then during the school’s make-it-up, try-it-out formative years: plunged in and made it matter, as Kathryn says. There’s a huge lesson here about acceptance and attitude. …
And then Kathryn ended by saying, perhaps concerned that she had wandered too far afield into a world she thinks she doesn’t understand: In my humble opinion.
Yeah, right. As I said: If only I could have thought to have thought of that about these CENTAUR SEASONS.
** Links to previous “Secrets of the Centaur” posts:
SEARCHING FOR THAT … SOMETHING ELSE. Posted October 1, 2012.
WHY US? WHY FIRST? Posted October 12, 2012.
BRICKS AND A BIRTHDAY Posted October 22, 2012.
THE NIGHT THE CENTAURS MOVED THE BUS: Part Three of a Metaphor in Three Parts. Posted November 6, 2012.
AT THE END OF THE BENCH: What a Centaur Turned Coach Learned at Allentown and Shares with UCLA Coach John Wooden. Posted November 19, 2912.
KEEP YOUR FOOT IN THAT BUCKET, STEVE! Posted December 10, 2012.
ON THE PASSING OF JACK KLUGMAN Posted December 28, 2012.
THE YEAR THE CENTAURS PLAYED THE FIGHTING IRISH (yes — in football!) Posted Janaury 7, 2013.
SLEEPING IN THE GYM, or “The Process of Becoming a Basketball Team” Posted January 17, 2013
CENTAUR SEASONS, DAVID BROOKS OF THE NEW YORK TIMES, AND LOOKING TO THE FUTURE… Posted February 15, 2013
CENTAUR SEASONS POSTS UP … ON D3HOOPS.COM Posted March 5, 2013
THE GIANT SHADOW THAT IS JOHN WOODEN Posted on March 25, 2013
What CENTAUR SEASONS Can Teach the Scarlet Knights of Rutgers U. … Seriously Posted April 5, 2013
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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