AT THE TIME I DIDN’T GRASP THAT IT WAS THE PERFECT METAPHOR. I DO NOW.
My first road trip freshman year at Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales was to Shelton College, in Cape May, New Jersey. We left Center Valley, Pennsylvania, at three in the afternoon, everyone piled into our blue-painted old yellow school bus with ALLENTOWN COLLEGE in red block letters on the side. By the time we got back, at maybe four the next morning, we had gotten lost, pushed the bus to get it started any number of times, yelled at the bus driver to keep him awake and then, that failing, finally, one of the guys on the team drove the rest of the way.
(“The Bus Wouldn’t Move? Part 2” continues below — )
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WELCOME TO CENTAUR SEASONS. “The Bus Wouldn’t Move? Part 2” 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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The blue bus metaphor: That trip, says John Cooper, “says exactly what we were about back then.”
The bus wouldn’t move? We made it move.
The bus couldn’t drive itself home? One of us drove it home.
“You have to have people willing to take the risk,” says Nick Nardo.
Imagine that today.
“Lawsuit city,” Coop says.
“People will hear this story and go, ‘YOU DID WHAT?’ ” says Jim Naccarato. Well, he says, “Everything in our lives – everything — happens in a particular time and place.”
Welcome to the Centaurs’ time and place.
In Part One, the Centaurs got from Allentown College in Center Valley, Pa., to Shelton College in Cape May. N.J., getting lost along the way and occasionally stopping to push-start the bus. We arrived just in time to change and take the court — in the ballroom of the old, turn-of-the-now-last-century Admiral Hotel. Here, in Episode Two, the Centaurs play the game … then we try to get back home.
CHRIS CASHMAN (sophomore forward/center): I just remember feeling how bizarre it all was.
TONY MAZZEO (junior guard): We got there at five to seven for a seven o’clock game.
JERRY WILKNISON (junior forward): We played in the ballroom, right? We take two layups and they start the game.
From the Allentown MORNING CALL, December 2, 1970: “CAPE MAY, N.J. – Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales didn’t let a five-hour bus trip hamper its play Wednesday night as the Centaurs defeated Shelton College 90-84 and even[ed] its seasonal record at 1-1.”
WALT PFIEL (sophomore forward): That season we didn’t win a whole lot.
CASH: I do recollect that we won. Did I have 16 points?
From the Morning Call: “… Allentown’s Chris Cashman (6-3) more than held his own under the boards and grabbed 13 rebounds and chipped in with 16 clutch points.”
JIM NACCARATO (junior guard and Oblate seminarian): My family came to the game because they lived in Wildwood right up [the New Jersey Garden State Parkway]. I used to deliver bread and rolls to Cape May for the Wildwood Italian Bakery. It was the first time, maybe the only time, they saw me play. Did I have a big game?
From the scorebook: NACARATO [sic]. Number 31. X/0 (two points/one missed foul shot). P/P/P/P/ (four fouls).
NAC: Just call me Tommy Heinsohn!
From the Morning Call: … Allentown never lost the lead after Jerry Fleming [14 for the night] snapped a 25-25 tie with a jumper with 5:30 left in the opening half. In the second half the Centaurs – 36 for 95 from the floor – opened up a 10-point lead with four minutes left and then went into a slowdown. Shelton had no other choice but to commit fouls and Allentown took advantage by making 13 of 17. …
WALT: It was a good night, because we won the game.
DENNIS RAMELLA (sophomore guard, scoring leader with 27 points): I remember after the game standing out on the rocks and looking out at the ocean. I always wanted to be down at the ocean in the middle of the winter. And I remember thinking: This is awesome.
NICK NARDO (senior statistician): I’d never been down the shore with snow. It snows in Cape May? You’re kidding me! Funny what imprints on your mind.
WALT: We showered up and headed out. A lot of us are from Philly, so we had Ike [the bus driver] pull into the Somers Point Diner [on the mainland, across the bay from Ocean City, N.J…. I was delighted to have my two-buck allowance to spend on snapper soup.
JOHN COOPER (freshman center; 2 points): One of the things I’ll never forget. Walt’s looking at the menu and he says he’s having the snapper soup. What’s snapper soup? You never had snapper soup? You gotta try it.
WALT: We ate, and everybody is feeling great, and as I recall it was probably about midnight and probably about 20 degrees.
COOP: I remember coming out of the diner and the bus wouldn’t start. We had to push it.
MAZ (10 points): I think we’d already had to push it a couple of times that night.
WALT: We get in the bus, and of course it doesn’t start. So I think the entire Centaur basketball team was out there pushing the bus around the Somers Point Circle while Ike was trying to kick start it with the clutch. I think on the second trip around the circle he finally got the bus running.
COOP: And then Ike was afraid to stop the bus, so we’re running along trying to jump on while the bus is moving.
Walt got first on, then he stood in the doorway pulling up everybody else, one at a time, like he’s the conductor on the last train out of Dodge. Or …
WALT: The Coast Guard: dropping the basket to pull people up into the helicopter!
Route 9 to the A.C. Expressway, through Philly. The Northeast Extension. Forty-five, fifty miles an hour.
NAC: We froze our butts off.
DENNIS: Hit the heat, Ike!
Midnight, one a.m., two …
E.J. BROOKES (sophomore manager): It took us forever to get home.
CASH (from Part One; worth repeating): I remember the coach being beside himself about all of this. This was a coach who had taken a high school team to a Pennsylvania state championship. Now here he was with this ragtag group, and he’s in a bus that we’re having to push, and I remember him with the Jesus Christs, they can’t even get a bus stuff. Beside himself. And I have this recollection that I might have said to him, something like, Yeah, Coach, I’ll bet this is the same way Lefty Driesell has to do it at Maryland. That really pissed him off.
WALT: Once we got the bus rolling again, everybody was checking on Ike.
WILK (11 points): He’s worked all day. He gets up at 6 a.m. to drive a school bus. He’s been up for 18, 20 hours.
WALT: Ike had a tendency to fall asleep. That was the legend: half the time when Ike was driving he was asleep and driving with his stomach. I remember people saying, “No way Ike is going to stay awake for this trip.”
NICK: From here it’s Wilk’s story.
WILK: Ike’s dozed off. Ike falls asleep and starts to ride off the road. And I’m, “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! I’ll drive!” I’d driven trucks in the summer. Construction. Penn Wheeler trucks with lots of gears. I said, “Look, I’ll drive this thing.”
NAC: Let’s go, Wilk!
NICK: We had Wilk say, What the heck, I use to drive a truck, let me see if I can get this thing moving. I’ll drive the bus. And nobody said, ‘Yo, Wilk, you don’t know what you’re doin’.” That never occurred to us. Wilk, you can do it? Go!
WILK: It was easier to drive than the trucks.
Time out. Seriously. Fifteen days before this Shelton College game, before this trip-turned-trope, the Marshall University football team was lost in a plane crash, on November 14, 1970. So: I am not making light here. I understand. There have been terrible, never-recover-from tragedies involving college sports teams and transportation. Maybe we were just lucky. Or maybe just too dumb to be unlucky. Someone could have fallen under a wheel; the bus could have been too much for Wilk. But nothing like that happened. All this happened, instead, and it became our story. Like Nac says: “Time and place.”
CASH: By the way. This isn’t the only game we went to where we had to push the bus. It happened at least one other time. Eventually, they didn’t use that bus anymore.
JOE SCHIEBER (captain, first four-year letterman, senior guard; from Part One, expanded and worth repeating): Any time I get a chance to tell people I played basketball in college, at this school, I take it. I was in a conversation about the school and I said, Yeah, I went there; I played basketball there. People couldn’t believe it. They relate to what the team is like today; they can’t relate to what it was. I try to explain: It was a brand-new school, just getting started. I say it was very low-key, lots of growing pains. I like being able to say I was on some of the first teams, and that I helped get the program off the ground. You had to hang in there back then. We made our own peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for lunch. Ike the bus driver. Shelton College. All the way down the pike. There was nothing glorious about those bus rides.
Later Today: Part Three of “The Night the Centaurs Moved the Bus.” An Allentown College player finds his own meaning in that night, his own lessons in the blue bus.
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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