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CENTAUR SEASONS: In a ‘Carnival of Opportunity,’ One of Our Own Shines in an All-Star Game

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Posted on May 14, 2013

My junior year at Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales — forty years ago this year — we Centaurs ended our season at 6-and-11. A brutal campaign, as chronicled here at HoopsU.com, it boasted, so to speak, a nine-game losing streak and defeats by … 2 … 12 … 7 … 2 … 15 … 15 … 5 … 29 … 36 … 6 and 18 points.

(Click a number, any number, to read about each at CENTAUR SEASONS. Time for just one? “I CRIED FOR 15-20 MINUTES” tells all you need to know.)

The saving grace is that we went 4-and-2 over the last six games. Our coach, Jack Saboda, somehow convinced us at 2-and-9 to put the ghastly opprobrium of the first eleven games behind us – forget it, fellas —  and look only forward, our season begun anew. And so we did.  It was one of Jack’s best mentoring moments in the three years I played for him. His guidance allowed us to end the season on an improbable up note – 4-and-2! — feeling good about ourselves and looking forward already to next season.

That next season coming, of course, will be my senior year, 1973-’74, my last chance to get it right, to be a player, to prove – though to whom I was never sure (myself, most likely) – that all 6-feet-8-inches of me should have played basketball in high school. Last chance.

There was however one more basketball game played that ’72-’73 year at Billera Hall, and it must be mentioned. With spring upon us a team of Lehigh Valley college all-stars – featuring our own Centaur, Dennis Ramella, the school’s first 1,000-point scorer, and Jack Saboda as coach – squared off against the Big 5 All-Stars, up from Philadelphia, in the first-ever Lehigh Valley Collegiate Classic to Benefit Multiple Sclerosis.

The Philly draw was Tom Ingelsby, a recent second-round NBA draft pick of the Atlanta Hawks, the Villanova star who’d played against UCLA in the 1971 championship game, and the high school best friend of Centaur senior co-captain  Chris Cashman, who’d been the manager of the Philly Catholic prep team on which Tom had starred.

For added glamour, the Big 5 contingent was to be coached by one of our Oblates, Bob Devine, himself a Philly school-boy hoops legend and a three-year ironman for a Top 10 Notre Dame team.

But before we get to the game, a word about our sponsor.  Because the All-Star tilt was, in truth, a fairly small part of a much wider campus extravaganza: the Allentown College Multiple Sclerosis Carnival in Center Valley, Pennsylvania.

Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales  — and I’ve said this before – was a make-it-up-as-you-go-along place back then, right then. Brand new, out there somewhere in the middle of some cornfields. A couple of buildings. That’s it. In the absence of everything else a college is supposed to have, the only resource the school really had was its handful of students, and so we were tapped into constantly to find the next idea.

What-d’-ya-wanna-do?

I dunno, what–d’-YA-wann-do?

I KNOW! — let’s do a carnival!

That, more or less, or at least kinda-sorta, is how the MS Carnival happened, as remembered by John Cooper (the guy who played me onto the bench this junior-year season now ended, although that’s another story).

Says Coop: “I still remember sitting in Zeke’s room, and he was talking about how he wanted to do something and he’s saying, ‘What do you think about having a carnival on campus?’ I said, ‘I can get us rides and amusements.’ Zeke says, ‘What’re you talking about?’ I said, “I’ve been doing this stuff since I was a kid; my dad used to run the carnival for the Catholic War Veterans and stuff. He knows the carnies.’ Zeke says, ‘You think we can do that, a carnival?’ “I said, ‘Sure!’ ”

It was more complicated than that. But it was also just that simple.

“It was the Center Valley phenomenon” that made the MS carnival (and pretty much everything else) happen at the school back then, says Bob Zeccardi, the “Zeke” in Coop’s remembrance. Our ability to make something out of the nothing was unique to time and place.

“I saw a group of people come together to make things happen in a way that I think defies logic,” Zeke wrote me in an email about “our tenure” in Center Valley — or, as he calls the place, “Never-Never-Land.”

And so, all but pulled from that Center Valley soil appeared a carnival with rides and betting booths and food stands and dunk tank and all-star basketball game and Todd Rundgren concert one year, everything squeezed into less than a week, virtually everyone at the college involved somehow.

“What made the place so great was our ingenuity, our creativity, our spontaneity,” Zeke told me. And it was unique to where we were, and why we were there, the place just getting started.

“It all comes back to the same thing: We were given this opportunity. There was an environment created that allowed us to do things that I don’t think happen at a lot of other places. I look back on some of the crazy stuff we asked people to do. In the environment I work in today? People’d say, ‘What are you, Bob, NUTS?’ But I never experienced that there. From the people above us or our friends around us.”

And now, back to the Lehigh Valley Collegiate Classic to Benefit MS.

It was a foregone conclusion, of course, that the Big 5 All-Stars would win. They had Inglesby, after all. And Craig Littlepage, the star from the University of Pennsylvania — Ivy League Penn still being a ranked power. Plus some other guys who had to be good because, well, we’d seen them play on television. The Lehigh Valley All-Stars had players no one had ever heard of — and they comprised the home team in the white jerseys.

So of course the Lehighs came out like gangbusters and took immediately control of the game. At one point in the first half Jack Saboda had them up by seven, 45-38. At the half they still led, 58-56.

And showing the way was the Centaur Dennis Ramella. Of course.

Dennis had 14 points in the first half. I see him hitting deep over a surprised Ingelsby. I see him at the basket, in traffic, getting ball on backboard and through the rim. I hear Billera buzz ever time he bounced the ball.

“[T]he crowd favorite was Denny Ramella, Allentlown College’s only representative on the Lehigh Valley squad,” the Morning Call wrote the next day.

It gets better.

“Although the smallest player on the floor at 5-7, he proved himself more than capable of being with the ‘big guys’ as he hit with great success from long range and scored a couple of times because of quickness and great moves.”

Dennis finished with 18 points. Had the Lehigh team held on to win – the Big 5ers of course won inevitably, 123-107 – Dennis (and not the inevitable Inglesby and his 26 points) would’ve been the MVP. And exactly how spectacular would that have been?

So what that he wasn’t.

I was genuinely, unselfishly thrilled for Dennis that night. (A new experience for me, unselfishness.) The spotlight was all his and it was wonderful to see him in it.  Allentown College had granted him one more of those opportunities unique to the school that Zeke recalled, and Dennis had grabbed hold and made it work.

Nearly a thousand people had come out, an insane number at Billera. In front of the largest crowd of his college career and against the best competition – TV-certified big guys — Dennis had come through, shown them all. Shown us.

He made our 6-and-9 season seem just a little less awful.

And he made the next season coming seem laden with opportunity.

 

Steve McKee
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