Posted On April 8, 2013
To start this CENTAUR SEASONS post — brought to you here on HoopsU.com — we need first to go to Madison Square Garden. It is the mid-1980s. I am there watching a St. John’s basketball game. The whistle sounds, and I follow the ball as it gets thrown to the ref.
Wait! I know that guy! The referee! I mean, I know who he is. His name comes immediately. Jody Silvester. He used to ref our Centaur games at Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales.
The game in the Garden from there on becomes mere backdrop. I spend the rest of my time watching Jody, this guy who used to ref our games in Billera Hall in Center Valley, Pennsylvania, our college of cornfields, and now here he is … at Madison Square Garden.
When I decided to do this post a few days ago, I sent an all-points email to members of these Centaur Seasons asking whether they too still remembered Jody Silvester. P.J. Brennan, a well-coached CYO kid from Pottsville, Pa., got back to me right away. “Absolutely,” he wrote, and explained that for a while when he was still in the Lehigh Valley area he became a high school ref to stay with the game. He belonged to the Bethlehem. Pa., chapter of the PIAA.
“Every Chapter had a President and an Interpreter,” P.J. wrote in his email. “The Interpreter was the most knowledgeable ref, the best referee in the Chapter. Jody was the Interpreter. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the game, but more importantly he had a command of the game. His games were well and fairly called and orderly. No confusion, no questionable calls. Always confident. Coaches and players respected him.”
After my St. John’s game in the Garden, when watching college games on TV I’d always check to see who the referees were. Jody appeared regularly. He reffed until 2000, worked 22 NCAA tournaments, four Final Fours and two Championship Games – Indiana-Syracuse 1987, Duke-Arkansas 1994. All told he probably called well more than 2,000 games.
When Jody retired, Seth Davis of Sports Illustrated wrote a terrific valedictory: “…[T]here may be no greater testament to him than the fact that most coaches respect him, but fans have never heard of him.”
Yeah, well, we Centaurs sure have heard of him, this ref who used to blow the whistle on us back at Billera Hall.
“The guy to get info from is Maz,” Jerry Wilkinson wrote me, referring to his senior year roommate and co-captain, the fiery, tempestuous, give-no-quarter Tony Mazzeo. “As P.J. said,” Wilk continued, “Jody controlled the games with his calm, knowledgeable demeanor. He reffed a lot of our games and we were happy to see him walk in the gym. But when you controlled our games that means you controlled Maz.”
Ironically, or perhaps not, Maz himself became a well-regarded soccer referee. So maybe he knew better than the rest of us when he said in his email: “In some small way, I am convinced that we helped him in his craft. You can’t get to the top without experiencing the bumps, bruises and ‘school of hard knocks’ referee knowledge that our scrappy, do-or-die-effort teams offered him.”
Maz claims Jody worked at least 25 of his games — nearly half the home-game schedule. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, Jody got one of his first big-time calls, working the hallowed Palestra of Philadelphia, the year after Maz graduated.
We need now to go to December 1992, to an alumni game at the college celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Centaurs’ first-ever collegiate game, in 1967, against King’s College. “The Quarter-Century Centaurs.” Of the 40 or so players from the Centaur Seasons era, nearly 30 show.
And they’re talking.
Hey, you ever see Jody Silvester on TV doing games?”
Yeah! He cut his teeth on us!
Yeah! We got him to the Garden!
And now it is Sunday, yesterday, and I am on the phone telling these stories to Jody Silvester. He retired nearly 20 years ago from his job as the postmaster of Emmaus, Pennsylvania, over the mountain from Center Valley., where he still lives with his wife, Helen. This being NCAA Final Four weekend, it seemed an appropriate moment to see if I could locate him and tell him that however silly it may sound, seeing him on TV, in the big-time, always a produced a thrill.
I don’t know if this will make any sense, I tell him, but it does to me, and I think it does, in a way, to all of us who played back then, were reffed by him, at tiny little Allentown College. It’s like Maz said. It was us who got him there — the Garden, the big time. He used to work our games and then he went Big East, Atlantic 10, eventually BIG 10.
At Billera Hall we got maybe 65 people at our games. He reffed a title game in the Superdome in front of 65,000. And still it’s like there is a part of us that was out there with him, running the floor with the most talented college ballplayers in the country.
I stop, the gushing over. Then: “I don’t know if you can understand that,” I say, “but there’s just no other way for me to say it.”
A silence on the phone. Finally, Jody says, quietly, “That’s really nice. I appreciate it.”
So of course, now I try to push the ball, force the action. “Do you remember working our games?” I ask. Do you remember the Centaurs?
I recite the games with his name in the scorebook. Including this game from the recent diary-blog of the 1972-73 season, one of my more humiliating performances — though no, I did NOT get fouled out!
I also mention a few players. I say the name Tony Mazzeo. “That one rings a bell, yeah,” Jody says.
But mostly, no. “Wow,” he says, laughing “you’re really testing my memory! It’s easier for you guys to remember me. There’s been thousands of players.”
But here’s the thing, he says, perhaps sensing my disappointment. “My philosophy was this. No matter whether there were two people in the stands or 75 people in the stands or 25,000 people in the stands, my philosophy was that those kids had been practicing every day of the week and to go out there and lollygag around, that wasn’t my style. Every game to me was important — a 25,000 Division I big-time game, or DeSales – that’s the way I always refereed. That’s the only way it can be, no matter who’s playing.”
Even when “just” the Centaurs?
“You gotta start somewhere,” he tells me. “And you never forget where you came from.”
* * * * * * * * * *
TO LISTEN TO THE FINAL INSTALLMENT IN THE EXCLUSIVE CENTAUR SEASONS FEATURE “TALKING WITH JOHN WOODEN” — TODAY’S CONVERSATION: “WILL THERE EVER BE ANOTHER UCLA?” — click here … … and then here.
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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