CENTAUR SEASONS: What I should have learned from the teammate who played me onto the bench …

Posted March 7, 2013

Meet John Cooper. The anti-Steve McKee.

If you’ve been a regular reader of CENTAUR SEASONS, especially the “History of the Events of the Allentown College’s 1972-1973 B-Ball season …,” the diary of my junior season, you already know him.

With our 6-and-11 campaign now mercifully over, I looked around for a way to wrap things up in a CENTAUR SEASONS post or two. From outside the box Coop came immediately to mind.

John Cooper is the 6-foot-4 big guy who played me onto the bench that ’72-’73 year, had me sitting for long stretches (of games and the entire season), left me crying by myself in the locker room after one of my particularly humiliating games. He’s the guy who made it seem I’d never get the chande to prove that I should have played basketball in high school for the York Catholic Fighting Irish. My very raison Centaur d’etre. He’s the guy at the beginning of the season about whom I wrote so condescendingly — my wondering what it was like for him to have to cheer for me, the starter, as he waited his turn to be subbed in. And then soon enough he had me cheering for him, waiting my turn to be subbed in.

Well, OK, that’s not exactly what happened. John Cooper played and Steve McKee didn’t because he played very well and I … you know … didn’t. Simple as that.

(“What I Should Have Learned … ” continues below)

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WELCOME TO CENTAUR SEASONS.  “What I Should Have Learned … ” 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. Steve played for the Centaurs 40 years ago. The blog is available at  CENTAUR SEASONS and here on HoopsU.com

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John Cooper had himself a heck of 1972-1973 Centaur season. No other way to say it. I know I still sound condescending, but I’m trying not to, honest.  Coop got out of the chute with 10, 18 and 22 points in our first three games. He averaged 11 per for the season, third best on the team. He played hurt (chronic shin splints, as I recall) and he never missed a game.

All the while never seeming to care. I wrote words to that effect in my diary forty years ago. I didn’t mean it in a good way. I do now. And I should have then, too. It would have helped me be a much better player.

Coop played basketball because he liked to play basketball. What a concept. I liked to play, too. But I could turn any practice, any game – any touch of the ball, really – into a referendum on whether I should have played for my high school team.  Coop had no agenda. He just … played.

He started in eight grade, growing up in Philadelphia. The classic story. “My dad put up a half-moon rim out back,” he told me. “If I wasn’t eating or sleeping I was shooting. Snowed, the first thing to get shoveled was the court. So cold the ball wouldn’t bounce.”

He went to high school at Cardinal Dougherty, one of those industrial-size schools educating the Catholic boomers of Philadelphia. Junior year he was the last man cut from the basketball team. (Coop wasn’t the only Cardinal Dougherty Centaur, and he wasn’t the only Centaur to be the last guy cut from his high school team.)

Welcome now to the anti-Steve McKee.

“Not making the high school team was a blessing,” John Cooper says.

Can you imagine? I can’t.

Not playing high school ball (and likely sitting the bench anyway) meant Coop could play in CYO, rec, city and Y leagues. “I ended up playing on four different teams, playing whole games. It got me a lot of experience, and with experience comes confidence. I just got a lot better at it, real quick.”

Better enough, in fact, that he started thinking maybe he could go to St. Joe’s or LaSalle and walk on.  But with no grand plan in place he ended up at Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales when a high school friend, Tim Kelley, said he was going up to check the place out and did Coop want to come along? Sure. They roomed together all four years.

As for the basketball team once he got to Allentown, well, that “just happened,” he says. “I didn’t go up there to play ball, let’s put it that way. I got up there, and when I saw what was going on I said, ‘Geez, I can play with these guys.’ ”

I find this all very instructive now.  I just wish I’d found it when it could have done my game some good.

Coop played his four years in Center Valley and then just kept on playing. Top-notch  industrial and rec leagues around Philly, teamed with guys who’d played in the Big 5, at Philly Textile**, well-coached high schoolers and guys like him. Played into his late 40s — at the end against kids 20 years younger.

“I got in with an unbelievable group of guys. Six-eight, Six-nine, six-eight across the front. Lots of positive reinforcement. And we won. It was fun. One by one leagues asked us not to come back. There was no screwing around. Slack off and everybody’d call you on it. Everybody had their role. I had my role. When I got in they couldn’t double team anybody else because they couldn’t leave me alone. ‘Who’s covering the fat guy? Who’s got the fat guy? Can’t leave the fat guy alone!’”

Coop just liked to play.

“Shooting was my forte,” he says. “I’m a six-foot-four slow white guy. I wasn’t a leaper. I tried to do everything. Box out, defend. But I could shoot, you know? And I took pride in that. I could shoot my butt off.”

Yes, he could. Coop had soft hands, a feathery touch. He was “money,” in a way I could never be. Even my senior year, when it came together for me, when we needed a basket, it was Coop we looked to.

Coop understood what I never did: The shot you’re taking right now isn’t the last shot you’re going to take.

“Yeah, that’s true,” Coop says. “If I missed a shot, I never got down.” His teammates in the Philly leagues, he says, told him the same thing: “ ‘Nothing seems to bother you.’ ” I could see Coop shrug phlegmatically through the phone. “That’s just the way I played. I never got too high or too low. I kept an even keel.”

Coop and I went at each other in practice all the time. It left an edge between us. Though I’m thinking now the edge was more on me than him. Because, you know, Coop just played. It wasn’t for him life and death.

He still gets on me for how he could get me to bite on his pump fake, jump to the ceiling, with little more than an arch of his eyebrow. Yeah, fell for it every time.

In the junior year season just ended in the diary, I averaged five points, and in 12 of the 17 games I scored six points or fewer. I did my best to cheer for Coop but, well, you know how that goes.

I let the game get in my head. I could never dial it down. Just play. I had SO MUCH to prove, and only four Centaur Seasons to do it. When the game gets in your head like that, you got yourself outside your own game. Once that happens you’re sitting in the stands, watching yourself play, criticizing every … single … move.

And for me, once THAT happened, I was sitting on the bench watching Coop take his next shot, just playing the game.

** PHILLY TEXTILE IS NOW PHILADELPHIA UNIVERSITY, WHERE CENTAUR TOM SHIRLEY IS THE LONG-TIME WOMEN’S BASKETBALL COACH.

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Steve McKee

Steve McKee is the author of CENTAUR SEASONS, a memory blog about his basketball-playing days at Allentown (Pa.) College of St. Francis de Sales in the early 1970s (a good excuse for using his college yearbook picture -- though there's NO excuse for that mustache and hair!).
 
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.

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