This older man stepped away from a group at an outdoor bar in North Wildwood and introduced himself simply as Hank’s junior varsity basketball coach at North Catholic High.

In this crowd, Hank did not need his last name, even 56 years after that JV season.

“I was such a great coach, he was my 13th man,” Fran Dougherty mentioned.

“I was 15th man,” Hank said. “I deserved it. I did not deserve to play.”

This was no chance bar meeting. When word got around that Hank Siemiontkowski was coming in, arrangements were made, a crowd gathered. Hank no longer takes such get-togethers for granted. He hadn’t been back from Sweden in half a decade. This trip seemed important and glaucoma in his right eye, Siemiontkowski has been told, is irreversible. The internal trauma in his other eye is severe. Hank, now 72 years old, said he let it all go too long. If he looks you straight in the eye, he said, he does not see you. If he gets up too fast, he might lose balance.

A layman’s diagnosis: He’s going blind.

“I’ve got to see people when I can see,” Hank said the next morning, sitting on the front porch of his friend and old Villanova teammate Tom Ingelsby’s house in Avalon.

You could read Hank’s life as a basketball fairy tale, embedded with some cautionary tales. (Get your eyes checked, and certainly don’t play rough-touch football on a cinder field in Fishtown when your NBA dreams are about to come true).

Hank isn’t just some neighborhood legend. He’s one of two players in Villanova history to score more than 30 points in a Final Four game. Imagine a group of ‘Nova players from the recent national championship team getting together in 50 years … telling tales about Donte DiVincenzo, who scored 31 in the 2018 NCAA title game.

Except Siemiontkowski’s story has more twists, even as he tells it all matter-of-factly. Whether he was 13th or 15th man, Hank was barely on the North Catholic JV as a sophomore … yet was Catholic League MVP as a junior and senior. Suddenly LSU coach Press Maravich was showing up at the Palestra, trying to get Hank to head for the Bayou to play with the coach’s son, Pete.

“Bigger than life back then,” said another North Catholic graduate, Dennis Seddon, who went on to coach Roman Catholic High powerhouses. “Everyone knew him. But he never forgot himself. He still was the kid from Port Richmond.”

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This group didn’t turn any heads in the back corner of the Seaport Pier. A bunch of old guys who obviously had some connection to one another, which mostly involved a ball and a net. All levels of the coaching game were represented. Nobody had standing. They all just told tales, a lot of them about Hank.

“I can’t emphasize [enough] the bigger-than-life perception of Hank in the Port Richmond, Fishtown, Juniata, Frankford neighborhood back in the ‘70s,” said Jim O’Connor, another organizer of this gathering.

Much of the legend of Hank, at least the neighborhood tales, came on the softball field.

“Cohox playground — he used to hit the ball from one street to the other,” Seddon said. “They used to come out and scream when he came to bat because they were afraid of their windows getting broken.”

They raised the fence in left field so Hank’s blasts wouldn’t hit the basketball courts so easily, games in progress. When Hank used to show up at another field, that rec center would get calls asking when Hank was going to take batting practice.

Where Hank lives now, nobody knows any of it. He even played in Sweden under an assumed name, since his given one would not fit so easily on a jersey. His given name is Henry Robert Siemiontkowski, so he called himself Hank Roberts. He played professionally until he was 46 old, surprising nobody back in Philly.

Eventually a 6-foot-7 forward at Villanova, Hank was five or six inches shy of that as a North Catholic JV ballplayer. For this son of a truck driver, muscling in for rebounds was a given.

“I never played on fiberglass backboards,” he said. “I shot that ball and it wound up at halfcourt. I’m standing there in awe watching these guys go in there and make a layup.”

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When the games began, he’d think to himself, hope Coach doesn’t put me in.

“You’re not supposed to hope you don’t get in the game,” Hank said. “But that’s how bad I knew I was.”

That summer changed everything. Yeah, he grew some inches. But that wasn’t all of it.

“I played like 16 hours a day,” Hank said. “As soon as I woke up, I went to the schoolyard. I’d go home, eat, go back out, and play. That’s where my neighborhood comes in, because we had different age groups playing, and some guys would switch to other sports. I stuck with basketball all day. I was playing in older leagues. Doubleheaders, tripleheaders. Besides the 16-hour-a-day stuff.”

Legend had it that he went up against a former North Catholic player every day for hours. Did he pick up that he was getting better?

“No, no, you don’t know,” Hank said.

But junior year, he remembers North Catholic’s first game.

“I got my name in the paper,” he said, remembering he had dunked on a fast break, something like that. He’d scored enough to make the roundup. His guards noticed and said something like, “Hey, we do the shooting here.”

That didn’t last, though. Those guards liked to win. Getting Hank the ball became the thing to do.

“We’re playing these teams, I’m saying to myself, ‘This can’t be the same guy I was kind of afraid to go into — he’s just standing there,’” Hank said. “It was the same guys [as the year before] and I’m going through them like water.”

“Definitely Rocky-like,” former North Catholic teammate Joe Rapczynski said of Hank’s rise.

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Dougherty still remembers a visit to Villanova to see Jack Kraft, driving a Volkswagen bug, Hank unfolding himself out of the car. That became his school. He was ill as a freshman, maybe with mono, they’re still not sure. He had to go home. Sophomore year, he got spot minutes.

“I didn’t become a real shooter until junior year of college,” Hank said. “Even I didn’t know I was a shooter. We opened the season against [Philadelphia] Textile at home. They were, I think, ranked number one in the country in small colleges, so they were good. I happened to hit four or five [jump shots] in a row. That never happened. That was the beginning, That was like, evil had begun.”

Suddenly, Villanova’s opponents had matchup problems. You had better put a top defender on Howard Porter, “or he’d take you apart,” Hank said. But drift away from Hank, more problems.

“They’ve got to stop me because I’m loading up,” Hank said. “It didn’t matter, because I’m me now, and I know it. I didn’t care who they guarded me with, I’m getting my stuff one way or another.”

He averaged 15.8 points as a Villanova junior, the Final Four year. Then 19.1 points as a senior. Remember, no three-point line.

Back to those guys at the bar …

“This guy is making shots from the top of the key …”

“He’s draining shots with his foot [almost] out of bounds in the corner. Drilling them, drilling them, drilling them.”

“By the way, who’s going to block it?”

“I’ve got one,” Fran O’Hanlon said.

He meant a Hank story. O’Hanlon, just retired as Lafayette’s coach, had been two years ahead of Hank at ‘Nova. He made it to North Wildwood.

His story: Hank had been drafted in the fourth round by the Cleveland Cavaliers, but, battling some nagging injuries, was cut just before the season. O’Hanlon arranged for Hank to join a team traveling in Italy. It was basically a showcase team. If a pro team liked you, they could sign you. A plane ticket was purchased for Hank. He flew to Rome.

O’Hanlon got a call the next day. Where the (bleep) is Hank? “In Rome, with you,” O’Hanlon said. No, he’s not. “I watched him get on the plane,” O’Hanlon said.

“He’s not here,” the fuming tour director said.

Here’s Hank’s version of the tale:

“I get to the airport [in Rome], I’m sitting there for like 11 hours, and nobody comes for me,” Hank said.

Maybe it was 11 hours, maybe it was three hours. Whatever, nobody in that airport was speaking English. Nobody knew a thing. And there was a flight back home. He brought his ticket to the counter, they let him on the plane.

After he got back to Philly, Hank said, he got a call trying to straighten things out. You want to come back?

“No, I’ve got jet lag,” he remembers saying.

He went to a rec center game that night. No communication problems there.

“I thought you were supposed to go to Italy?”

“Yeah, I came back.”

He’d already been to Rome once, with St. Joseph’s, of all teams.

“In 1972, my coach, Jack McKinney, put together a State Department tour of Europe for 3½ weeks,” said Lou Peltzer, who competed against Hank for Archbishop Ryan and St. Joe’s. “All expenses paid. We were going to Italy, to Sicily, to Austria and Romania. But we were short a big man because Mike Bantom was on the Olympic team. I said, ‘Coach, Hank’s around.’ He was rehabbing. He’d had some injuries.”

Siemiontkowski was in.

“A Villanova guy playing for St. Joe’s in Europe,” said Peltzer at the North Wildwood event. “In fact, I have a picture of him and I ‘wrestling’ in the Coliseum in Rome. One of my favorite pictures.”

A few years later, the NBA dream looked like it was going to become a reality. The Buffalo Braves, coached by St. Joe’s legend Jack Ramsay, brought Hank into camp.

“I didn’t have one bad practice the whole time,” Siemiontkowski said. “I was just on my game the whole time, because I was comfortable.”

This was Bob McAdoo and Randy Smith and Ernie DiGregorio playing for the Braves.

“I made the team,” Hank said.

He thought he had. Just one hang-up. They were trying to trade a veteran. Buffalo’s owner wanted a little more money in the deal.

“A perfect team for me,” Hank said. “They were like an ABA team in the NBA. I fit in with that team. That was my style. Coach Ramsay was telling me what they had planned.”

You can still buy an official Hank Siemiontkowski Buffalo Braves photo for $12 on eBay. He was that close. In his memory, teams kept only 11 players that year. If there were 12, “I would have been on the team automatically.”

He stuck around for a few days, he said, then was told the deal could take awhile, he should go home.

“I make it,” Hank said. “Then I don’t make it.”

Then, it happened …

“While I was waiting, I played football with my friends.”

At Newts playground, then a cinder field in Fishtown. Cue the ominous music.

“That was pretty much the end of everything there,” Hank said. “I caught a ball and I was running.”

He didn’t make it to the end zone. A tackler came in high.

“It was a horse collar before its time,” Hank said. “It was rough-touch. I was going this way, he was coming that way. He grabs me …”

Hank showed that he was grabbed by the back of his shirt.

“My spike was stuck in the ground. Something’s got to go, and it was the knee. I’m still going that way. He didn’t let go. I heard pop, pop, pop, pop, like a potato chip bag. I could feel everything crunching. And they could hear it on the sidelines.”

HIs friends remember it still. They all knew about the Buffalo Braves deal.

“A hush went over the field,” O’Connor said. “I was there.”

An ACL tear.

“They moved a tendon from up here to wrap it around the knee, or I would have nothing to keep the knee in place,” Hank said. “They had to be creative.”

He was told he was lucky in the sense that five years earlier, it would have been a career-ender. It turned out to be just an NBA-ender. Hank, still a little stiff-legged, played two decades overseas, in Finland, New Zealand, and mostly in Sweden.

“I’m one of those homebodies,” Hank said. “For people to say, ‘Oh boy, you must have liked traveling around,’ I hate traveling all the time. I don’t want to go live in another country, and that’s all I did for 20 years. I wanted to play ball. I would have rather been home playing softball with my friends …”

Life worked out in other ways. Hank met a schoolteacher in Fritsla, got married, had a daughter who, he said, got her learning abilities from her mother. What was a lonely existence originally — waiting all week for American detective shows to come on television Friday night just to hear a little English. Now, everyone in town speaks English, and his television provides the same shows and all the games he’d see in Philadelphia. He’s completely up to speed on Villanova’s recent basketball success.

There is a feeling among Villanova players of his era — including by Hank himself — that Hank’s prowess is being lost a bit to the sands of time. Howard Porter is remembered from that ‘71 team, on merit. But those 31 points and 15 rebounds by Hank in the NCAA semifinals against Western Kentucky, followed by 19 more in a close NCAA final against UCLA, a rare time when John Wooden went into a stall to get things done for his Bruins. They all get that winning it all rises to another level of history.

“Everybody dismisses us as best team ever,” Hank said. “We averaged 70 points a game, had all kinds of NBA players, did it without three-point shots.”

He knows the recent teams were great teams.

“I wouldn’t compare us to them,” Hank said. “I would say, we might lose, but you ain’t blowing us out.”

The ‘85 NCAA champs — there’s still a rivalry there.

“I just dismiss that team that beat Georgetown [for best ever],” Hank said. “There’s no way that team could play with us. I mean, they lost 10 games and had to play a perfect game to win. They ain’t playing with us. We’d crush their [butt]. That was a fluke. Great that it happened. But they ain’t beating us.”

Sounds like the trash talking between the 2016 and ‘18 ‘Nova teams. (I mean, call it a fluke if you want, but the ‘85 team did beat Patrick Ewing. The ‘71 team lost to a UCLA dynasty, with a group that had multiple NBA players, but it was just between the Abdul-Jabbar and Walton UCLA eras.)

Hank himself seems to get a bit of short shrift when talking about Villanova legends. He knows he could have held his own.

“Different eras, you get into that stuff, you can talk forever,” Hank said.

The legend of Hank is just a singular one.

“It always took awhile,” Siemiontkowski said. “Two years in high school. Two years in college. I never got two years in the NBA to see what would have happened. I was one of those that had to feel comfortable mentally and physically and feel that I belong.”

Another part of Hank’s game … getting the outlet pass out fast and far, starting the fast break. He’d be looking at his guards even before he got a rebound, seeing the passing lanes that would open up. Some coaches tried to break him of that, Hank said, “But that was my thing.”

If Siemiontkowski, pride of Cambria Street, isn’t the best basketball player ever from Port Richmond, who would it be?

“I don’t know the boundaries there in Port Richmond,” Hank said. “I think by default, I’ve got to be. Within a mile here or there, though, we had all kinds of players in that area.”

In this group just off the boardwalk in North Wildwood, there was a complete comfort zone as the stories flowed … Remember that time Hank [intentionally] threw that pass straight through the window at the other end of the gym?

Dennis Hill from the Markward Club had a plaque made for the Big 5 Hall of Famer, a framed painting of the Palestra, showing the Big 5 banners and Hank’s name, addressing it from “Your many Philadelphia basketball friends.”

Those friends making it to North Wildwood, it wasn’t just about his flickering eyesight. To them, there was only one Hank. They were there to see him while they still could.