SOPHOMORE YEAR. NEW SEASON. NEW COACH. NEW PROMISE. NEW PURPOSE.
We only had five guys, fellas … He pressed us the whole way, fellas … Subbed five at a time, fellas … AND HE STILL ONLY BEAT US BY ONE, FELLAS!
Preseason started on October 15. From the start that’s what our new coach, Jack Sabota, screamed at us. Every day, practice in, practice out.
That, and this too: And he beat us by 70, fellas … Pressed us the whole way, fellas … Subbed five at a time, fellas. BEAT US BY 70! BEAT US BY 70! BEAT US BY 70!
Jack Sabota, new coach, was talking, of course, about the coach of York College of Pennsylvania.
(“History Is Made of This” continues below)
* * * * * * * * * * * *
WELCOME TO CENTAUR SEASONS. “History Is Made of This” 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.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Let’s review. Two years before I got to Allentown, in the Centaurs’ first intercollegiate season, York College of Pennsylvania beat Allentown twice, once by one point, once by 70. In both games the York College coach subbed in three teams of five in an unrelenting wave and pressed all 40 minutes of each.
In that one-point loss, at home, the Centaurs suited only five guys, Jack Sabota included, and that five went the whole way. “I was never so tired in my life,” Jack told me when we talked recently.
Sabota also made the trip to York for that 70-point crushing. Still the largest margin of defeat in school history, even if the official record book says different. (A double-edged insult, if ever there was one.) “I don’t know what he did against other teams,” Jack said of the York coach. “All I know is against us he never backed off.”
And the memory stuck.
About a week before his first York game as a coach, my sophomore year, Sabota called us together. “I don’t care what we do the rest of this season,” he told us. “If we don’t beat York, the year’s a flop.”
Welcome to “The First Rivalry, Part 2.” [Read “Part 1” here.]
How can I put this? Jack Sabota hated York College. In case that hasn’t been made clear. “That coach has no class, fellas,” Sabota said in that pregame talk. Or, as Jack said recently, “He was an ornery old bastard.”
As luck, fate, divine providence, karma, or these days you’d say as the TV schedulers would have it, when Jack Sabota took over, the first game he would ever coach was to be against … of course … York College.
“The first thing I did when I accepted this job,” he told us in that huddle, “was check the schedule to see when we played York College. When I saw it was our first game, I thought it would never get here soon enough.”
Him and us both.
Preseason we ran, in a way we hadn’t the year before. And we listened to Coach. Only had five … pressed the whole way … seventy points, fellas, SEVENTY points.
Finally came the game. November 30, 1971, a Tuesday night.
We had a good crowd that night, first game of the season. Though a couple of our usuals didn’t show. (And we had few to begin with.) That night ABC-TV did some counterprogramming with the world premier of “Brian’s Song,” starring Billy Dee Williams and James Caan.
I luuuv Brian Piccolo. (Sports fans of a certain age, I’ll pause here to allow you to gather yourselves.)
Dennis Ramella and Tony Mazzeo started at guards, Jerry Wilkinson and Chris Cashman at forward, me at center. At half time we were down seven, 41-34. In the second half we outscored them by 14, 41-27, and won, 75-68.
With nine second left I was fouled and went to the line. I grew up in York, Pennsylvania. I hadn’t played basketball in high school there. I thought I maybe should have, and I was, quite frankly, attempting to use this brand-new Allentown College program as my way to prove it. I think I made the front end of the one-and-one, my smile so big my face hurt. I finished with 10 points and 13 rebounds. This’ll show em!
In the stands, our 100-or-so fans shouted, “We’re Number One! We’re Number One!” Minus the voices, of course, who had stayed back in the dorms to watch “Brian’s Song.” Too bad, they only missed the biggest win in school history. It works like that when a school is all of seven years old, the basketball team all of four. Everything is history, happening right now. Why wouldn’t you want to be there? When the final buzzer sounded, the fans stormed the floor and tried to carry us off the court.
The only twinge of regret? The York College coach/tormentor/bastard of the past three seasons had retired. He was, though, still the athletic director. Meaning when we played them again down at their place late in the season he was in the house.
This time we got off to an awful start, down quickly 22-12. But from there it was all us. We took the lead with 4:30 left in the first half and in the second led by as many as 12, on the way to an 11-point win, 78-67. And it wasn’t that close. Senior Jerry Wilkinson had 19 points. As a freshman four years before he’d scored a single point in that 70-point humiliation.
As for me, when the game was over I made sure to find York’s former coach and shake his hand. As I write this, it doesn’t sound like the classiest of moves, but, well, that’s what I did. Once done with him I ran the length of the court to the locker room, bathed in the adulation of about 30 of my mother’s friends who had come to the game. I’d had 11 points this time, and 15 rebounds. Tell me again, Why hadn’t I played basketball in high school?
(Then the entire team came over to my house for some of mom’s home-made lasagna. Years later, years later, my wife, Noreen and I joined with some friends whose daughter on the University of Rochester lacrosse team was back on her Albany home turf playing a local team. Her parents brought the entire UR team back to their house, too. And suddenly the York College game washed all over me. I was stunned by how transported back I was. How I remembered everything about it. How aware I was of the necessary full circle of things. How I found myself hoping our friends’ daughter and her teammates would someday remember their night as clearly as I remembered mine – even if I hadn’t thought about it for years.)
But I want this to end with Coach Sabota. It may have been the York coach who provided we Centaurs with our first rivalry. But he was more just a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float, this cartoonish thing we took shots at, than something real. It was Jack Sabota who grabbed hold of the rivalry and brought it to life – heck, made it into life itself. Precisely what was needed.
“When we finally beat them, it felt awfully good,” Jack said, in a grand bit of understatement.
And when beat them we finally did that season, York immediately dropped us from its schedule. Jack had been right all along: The guy had no class.
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
You need to login or register to bookmark/favorite this content.
Leave a Reply