THIS “LEGENDS OF THE FIRST” HERE ON HOOPSU.COM APPEARED ORIGINALLY ON THE BLOG CENTAUR SEASONS UNDER THE HEADLINE “LEGENDS OF THE FIRST: THE ORIGINAL CENTAURS ORIGINAL GIFT.”
CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE CENTAUR SEASONS WEBSITE.
The future is not a gift; it is an achievement. Every generation helps make its own future. This is the essential challenge of the present.” — Robert F. Kennedy, 1962*
I have mentioned this before but it bears repeating. By the time I arrived at Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales in September 1970, the school itself was already five years old, there had been a basketball team for three and two senior classes had graduated.
In other words, as brand-spanking new as Allentown still was when I got there, the place already boasted history and legacy, each with stories to tell.
Wide-eyed, open-eared, a total freshman, I inhaled every one of these twice-told tales.
In three seasons, the Centaurs had already played 56 games. The wins had been few (15). But the victories did include a buzzer beater and a double-overtime, one-point win on the road, against a four-year college.
The 41 losses? Well, they’d come by every imaginable method. Heartbreakers by a point or two. A couple where, in truth, the Centaurs might have won had they been more familiar with the concept. There were more than a few bone-crushing, soul-numbing, character-zapping obliterations, one by 70 – yes, 70! — points. Some were of a pattern: overmatched Centaurs fall behind early, then hang in to lose by less than, say, 20, bestowing a certain respect.
There had been more than a few fights. (What is it about Catholic teams that fights are such a shroud of honor?) There’d been long bus trips to nowhere. There’d been too many away games played in junior high gyms. Too many home games played in front of too few fans.
And there had already developed a nasty, nasty rivalry, providing the Centaurs with a team to hate, despise, want dead.
And it had all started with that first-ever team, in ’68-’69. Much is owed them.
For me, taking it in, it was all ancient history – wonderful, aura-filled, awe-inspiring stuff. What did I know? I was a brand-new freshman off to college hearing it all for the first time. I could have been listening to the story of James Naismith’s original nine and the game they played at the Springfield, Massachusetts, YMCA 65 years (nearly to the day) before the Centaurs took the court.
It all seemed that long ago and at least that important.
Wait. It was that important.
Never once in the telling of these stories did I ever hear a narrator not take it serious. Which isn’t to say there wasn’t plenty to laugh about. There was plenty to laugh about.
Truthfully? There was as much about that first Centaur team that was pretending to be a college basketball team as actually being one.
But here’s the thing: in pretending to be real they became real. Some of the secret to the success of Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales in those early days.
This was the ’69 Centaur team’s gift to Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales. This is their gift to DeSales University, even to this day.
In my research for CENTAUR SEASONS I dug through the school archives in an effort to reconstruct the narrative of each of the Centaurs’ first seven campaigns.
I read the clips from that first intercollegiate season, 1968-’69. Thirty-three guys tried out. Coach Walt Dreyfoos kept 17 and suited 12 a game. No one over 6-foot-3; six no more than 5-foot-10. One — 1 — with significant high school experience.
I paged through the hand-lined mimeographed score sheets, checked out the typed-up two-game, four-game and ten-game stats reports (alas, there is no end-of-season wrap-up). There being no S.I.D., the players did all this themselves.
Find me college players willing to do that today. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
I lived their season through the yellowed papers and hand-typed sheets. And came to appreciate that they were doing their damndest to be a real college team.
It would have been so easy for them not to have gone after it as best they could. But no. They weren’t just a bunch of guys down Billera Hall playin’ hoops. This wasn’t just an intramural run. They were basketball players telling the story of their season even as they created it – just like any other college team.
Jack Sabota, senior, had 29 in the first game on some slick 14-of-24 shooting. He broke a hand in the second game and never got the touch back. Tom Junod, junior, averaged 18.4 points through the first 10 games. A mark which had it stood would still rank him third on the all-time single-season list. Then he, too, must have got hurt, as the rest of the year was something of a struggle. Freshman Tony Mazzeo got carried off the court (by the handful of fans in attendance) after that game-winning, buzzer-beating Billera bucket.
And so it went — these stories, these tales, these myths, these epics (what a freshman I was, listening!) — through to the end of that first season with its 3-and-14 reecord.
Were they a college basketball team? Sorta. Did they act like one? Totally. And because that first team acted like one, so then did the second and the third and the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and and and … all the way to this new season’s forty-fifth.
Legends of the first, indeed …
Bob Koch, Tom Junod, Jack Sabota, Tom Paolini, Joe Leary, Joe Schieber, Tim McGowan, Tony Mazzeo, Bill Ford, Larry Copes, Bill Durnan, Mike Dowd, Tony Hoppe, Jim Van Horn, Bob Blewis, Jerry Wilkinson, Andrew Torma. (I think that’s everybody.)
*SOURCE: “Robert F. Kennedy Quotations,” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum
CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE CENTAUR SEASONS WEBSITE
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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