CENTAUR SEASONS: "I Cried for 20 Minutes" — Entry #14 from "A history of the events of the Allentown College’s 1972-1973 B-Ball season …

… AS CHRONICLED BY, AND WITH THE PERSONAL MEMOIRS + OCCASSIONAL PHILOSOPHIZING OF THE AUTHOR, ONE STEPHEN J. McKEE”

This CENTAUR SEASONS post was written 40 years ago.

PREVIOUS GAME: Centaurs 56, Wilmington College 71, three days ago

NEXT GAME: at Philadelphia Pharmacy, six days

CENTAUR SEASON: 2-5

We lost to Wilmington, 71-56. The score doesn’t tell the whole story. They picked up a lot of their points in the last 45 seconds – eight, to be exact. We were down five at halftime, and although we never let up, we were never ever able to really put the pressure on them.

Big crowd at the game. Why not? Everyone’s back but classes hadn’t started yet.

I only played about nine minutes. All in the second half. That’s the first time since freshman year that I sat out for an entire half. It really hurt. A lot. All this just days after Coach told me that for us to win I will need to get more playing time.

(“I Cried for 20 Minutes” continues below)

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WELCOME TO CENTAUR SEASONS. “I Cried for 20 Minutes” 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, “A History of the Events …” is now an e-diary at CENTAUR SEASONS and here on HoopsU.com.

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After the game I hemmed and hawed. I took my time, to say the least. I was all right for about the first 10 minutes after the game. But slowly I started to brood about my performance. I got down, farther and farther. Joey Thompson and I were the last to leave the locker room. Right as we were leaving I said, “I suppose it’s rather obvious that I don’t really care to show my face to anyone tonight.”

Joey asked, “Why? Do you think you played that bad?” I laughed a little.

By that time we were at the top of the steps leading down into the gym. I could see some people up in the lobby at the other end. Not too many, but enough. I turned around, already crying, and walked directly back into the locker room, sat on a bench and cried – 10-15, maybe even 20 minutes.

I doubt that I have ever been more ashamed of myself than I was right at that moment. Not for crying, but for why I was crying. I finally left, by a side door of the gym. The last thing I wanted was to see anybody – anybody.

I walked back to the dorm, through the dorm, with a towel over my head, up to my room and got the keys to my car. I felt that I had to get away from the whole scene. All of it. I passed P.J. Brennan, who was talking to his dad, all but ignored him, and as I got into my car I heard Bobby Stormes ask me where I was going. “For a ride.” My roommate Dave Glielmi and his girlfriend were sitting in the car next to me as I drove out. I gave them a cold wave.

I’m rather proud of what happened after that. I suppose I could romantically tell how I went out by myself, and with “God as my witness” pledged that from this moment on I would be the very best basketball player I could be, hungry for the ball, skyin’ for the rebounds, blockin’ everyone’s shot. At the end of the year, after having completely ripped apart the opposition, people would whisper as I passed and furtively tell how “he became a new man” when he went off by himself and with the cosmos as his only witness changed his entire life.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, none of the above took place. This is not to say that such thoughts didn’t cross my mind. But I am a wiser man thanks to experience. My junior year in high school, I got up every morning at six a.m. and ran and trained for the track team in the spring. I trained seven months, four days a week. When track practice started I blew everyone off the map. Nobody could catch me. Until they finally got to be in as good a shape as I was. The first track meet I watched from the sidelines. I was a sprinter. In high school you only need four sprinters to take care of the two sprints and the one relay. I was number five sprinter. So I would sit.

Seven months of genuine hard work out the window? Not me, no sir. The night I learned I was not to run the first track meet I fumed, I fussed, I swore. Incensed, I wrote catchy phrases and pasted them in my room, at the foot of my bed. That way, I figured, every morning I would be inspired by these “one for the Gipper” catch-all phrases. I think that it was within three weeks of this episode that I quit the track team.

[I WROTE ABOUT THIS HIGH SCHOOL TRACK EXPERIENCE IN GREATER LENGTH IN THE BOOK “MY FATHER’S HEART: A SON’S RECKONING WITH THE LEGACY OF HEART DISEASE.”]

That high school experience had made me just a bit wiser. The situation now was the same: all the frustration, disappointment, anger, resentment, all-for-naught feelings, the surrender attitudes, were revisited from my junior year in high school. Only this time the feeling of frustration was ten times as strong. But this time, I knew better than to pledge – in that keyed up, adrenaline high – myself to conquering all mountains.

I simply hoped that I could always remember that terrible feeling of frustration and disgust. At that moment, I hoped I would always be incensed, keyed-up, ready to play.

Twenty minutes later, as I sat in Mr. D’s restaurant, I honestly felt like a fool, sitting there all by myself like a complete idiot.

But I’m glad that I finally wrote it all down. Maybe now that feeling of frustration will be forever captured, as I wanted it to after the game.

PREVIOUS GAME: Centaurs 56, Wilmington College 71, three days ago

NEXT GAME: Philadelphia Pharmacy, in six days

1972-73 CENTAUR SEASON Schedule and Results:

12/1 — at Lehigh CCC — W/81-71 — 1-0

12-4 — at Northampton CCC — W/87-50 — 2-0

12-6 — EASTERN BAPTIST — L/73-75 — 2-1

12-12 — SPRING GARDEN — L/54-66 — 2-2

12-16 — PHILLY BIBLE — L/72-79 — 2-3

1-18 — at Baptist Bible — L/82-84 — 2-4

1-19 — WILMINGTON — L/56-71 — 2-5

1-25 — at Philly Pharmacy

1-30 — at Spring Garden

2-3 — at Messiah College

2-6 — at Wilmington

2-13 — RUTGERS, S. JERSEY

2-16 — LEHIGH CCC

2-20 — MESSIAH

2-22 — NORTHAMPTON CCC

2-24 — PHILLY PHARMACY

2-27 — BAPTIST BIBLE

About
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Steve McKee

Steve McKee is the author of CENTAUR SEASONS, a memory blog about his basketball-playing days at Allentown (Pa.) College of St. Francis de Sales in the early 1970s (a good excuse for using his college yearbook picture -- though there's NO excuse for that mustache and hair!).

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.