February 18, 2013
I didn’t write Friday’s post on the CENTAUR SEASONS blog about last week’s David Brooks column in the New York Times intending that the post would be the first of a two-parter. Well, now it is.
That David Brooks CENTAUR SEASONS post ended with George Kelly, a member of “the first first Centaur basketball team” that played the 1968-69 season in Allentown city industrial league, talking about how impossible it was back then to imagine what the four-building college might grow to become 40, 45 years in the future.
(“In the Year 2053” continues below)
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WELCOME TO CENTAUR SEASONS. “In the Year 2053” 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 along with occasional commentaries such as this one.
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On Saturday, that future from 40 years ago here, I took a run down to Center Valley, Pennsylvania, to the college with the now-two-dozen-plus buildings to catch the final regular-season game of the Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales Centau… I mean, the DeSales U Bulldogs vs. Eastern University.
We won, 85-74, and clinched the top seed in the Freedom Conference playoffs, which open on Wednesday at DeSales. We’re the winningest team in the D-III Mid-Atlantic Region over the past ten years. Indeed, together with the women’s team, DeSales is the only D-III Mid-Atlantic school to have both team win more than 200 games each in the past ten years, as this D3HOOPS.COM story makes plain.
(Of course, the best part about this is, the better these Bulldogs get now, the better we Centaurs get back then. It’s the way it works, ipso facto. Knowledgeable D-III hoop fans know the deal. You played for DeSales? Wow. They’re good. Yes, I say, saying nothing else. And yes, I have had this actual conversation.)
They are a fun team to watch, these Centaur-Centdog-Bultaur-Bulldogs, getting after it on defense, pushing it on offense.
Oh my, could I ever, once, like these guys?
Though it’s not their youth I envy. God bless ’em. May they run forever. The youth I envy is mine.
My senior year I chased down a fast break and swatted the guy’s layup out of the air. The ball slammed off the backboard and caromed all the way out to midcourt. On the follow through my elbow banged the rim, rattling the stanchion to the ceiling, and I got whistled for a technical foul.
I’m going to say that again: On the follow through my elbow banged the rim, rattling the stanchion to the ceiling, and I got whistled for a technical foul.
Nevermore.
I miss how important it was. The college, the team, the game, the playing. Not seemed important. Was important. Between games my knees would sometimes ache so badly they’d make me cry. I miss the ache. I miss the cry. I miss the total recall, playing the entire game again for hours later. I miss how, desperate for sleep, I still couldn’t sleep the night after. I miss that sense of purpose that pumped through me into the next day. That sense of accomplishment, even after the worst losses – probably even more so then.
Watching the game Saturday, watching these 19-, 20-, 21 year olds run the floor in their baggy-white unis with the cool red-and-blue side chevrons, I took George Kelly’s can you imagine 40 years from now one step further. I found myself thinking about the college in another 40 years. To the year 2053, for crying out loud, halfway home to the twenty-second century.
But instead of thinking about what the college might look like then, I saw these kids running the floor in front of me as the 60-year-old men they are fated to be, back at the college like I was now, watching.
Watching another edition of Centaur-Bulldogs, guys not born yet, guys whose parents are maybe not born yet. Geez. The number of missed connections, close encounters, chance meetings necessary to ensure there will be a team on the Billera Hall floor 40 years from now for this current team to watch is mind boggling.
But a team there will be. And the guys I was watching now running the court, they will be sitting in the stands then, watching.
Here’s hoping they miss what they see.
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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