WHEN LAST WE SAW THE CENTAURS ON THIS MULTIPART MOVE THE BUS METAPHOR, THEY had slowly rolled from Center Valley, Pennsylvania, to Cape May, New Jersey, in an old yellow school bus painted blue and red, for an away game against Shelton College. They’d arrived only minutes before tipoff, played (and won!) the game, then hopped back on the bus for the trek home. Along the way they had to push the bus twice around a Jersey traffic circle to jumpstart the engine (with everyone then running to get on board) and later one of the players had to take over for the bus driver, who’d fallen asleep and nearly driven off the road.
The bus wouldn’t move? We moved the bus. The perfect metaphor for what life was like at a brand-new Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales making itself up as it went along.
(“The Bus Wouldn’t Move? Part 3” continues below — )
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WELCOME TO CENTAUR SEASONS. “The Bus Wouldn’t Move? Part 3” here on HoopsU.Com appeared originally on CENTAUR SEASONS, a “memory blog” of the basketball beginnings of the half-good, half-bad, all-new Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales Centaurs in Center Valley, Pennsylvana. Steve McKee played on four of the school’s first seven teams, was MVP senior year and in 1974 graduated in the sixth class.
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In those Parts One & Two of this Move The Bus Metaphor, my Centaur teammates told this story themselves. It is as much their story as mine, after all.
Chris Cashman, a sophomore starting center/forward on that team and the leading rebounder the year before, had contributed his share to the telling (as well as to the win over Shelton: 16 points, 13 rebounds). But recently when we were talking on the phone about it all and I posited this move-the-bus metaphor, Cash demurred.
No, he said, he doesn’t see it that way at all, and he didn’t see it that way back then, either.
“I don’t know that I can make the bus analogy unless I’m making it as the bus that carried me across the bridge of my young naïve life to the point in my life where I became who I am today,” he told me.
Even if to get that bus across that bridge we had to push it ourselves.
And with that Cash, ever the leader, was off and running, taking me way beyond that Cape May night, the bus push, the drive for home. Everything I’ve been trying to say here in CENTAUR SEASONS, about our experience at Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales – back then, right then – at this brand-new school in the middle of some cornfields, Cash said it for me, and better than I ever could.
I don’t remember that I interrupted him at all.
“For me,” Cash said, “the value of the experience was both fraternal and instructive. And I don’t mean educational or classroom instructive.”
It was, he said, for all of us our first real experience of being individuals finding our way as part of a larger whole, which in our case also just happened to be at a brand-new school finding its way. A confluence rife with possibility.
“The things I learned, the values I learned — sometimes in the face of adversity, sometimes in the face of fun, sometimes in the face of competition – I learned them there. The basketball was very important. The education was very important. But it’s the collection of friendships and experiences that helped me define who I am. That’s what those four years were.”
They were also this, and Cash volunteered it unabashedly. “I have the added blessing of having found my life partner and best friend there.” Marianne Salines, a freshman with me; she was in the school’s first class of women – 15, maybe 17 strong. Mr. & Mrs C. have been married now forever. “When I went there,”Cash said, “it was an all-male school. My second year we went co-ed. I had no idea that I was, you know, going to find that treasure, that gem I so cherish and value now. I can’t underscore the importance of that enough.”
Let me interrupt. First: thanks, Cash, for leaving me pale by comparison in the husband department. Geesh! Second, you two aren’t, uh, the first kids who ever met in college, got married, lived happily ever after. You know?
No, Cash said, they aren’t. But that’s not his point anyway.
It’s the fact, he said, that we were all new at a school that was new. Do the math on that and it equals the reason why Allentown College was that special place, a different place. Including Marianne.
“The things I learned, the values I learned,” Cash said, “I learned there” – and then.“I don’t know if I would have learned it at Villanova. I don’t know if I would have learned it at St. Joe’s or Harvard or Yale or Fordham.”
A lot of colleges, he said, offer a lot of similar experiences. But with Allentown being so new — and we new to it — it was like we were “born there and grew up together.”
And that, Cash said, “that was the catalyst for so many things.”
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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