Off Campus: Nod to the past at the Palestra
The noise didn't stop at the locker room door. Two teams would be playing, two would be waiting underneath the stands, which often seemed to shake, the vibrations carrying right into the room.
The noise didn't stop at the locker room door. Two teams would be playing, two would be waiting underneath the stands, which often seemed to shake, the vibrations carrying right into the room.
"You'd be peeking out, trying to see who was playing well," Fran Dunphy said this week. "Because you knew every player."
Wednesday night at the Palestra, four teams will play basketball and also offer a nod to the past. Temple will face La Salle, and then St. Joseph's takes on Penn, and Dunphy hopes the fans for the second game get there early and the fans for the first game stay to the end. Because there is nothing exactly like this anywhere else in college basketball.
Dunphy is a good person to check with, since he is the only head coach who has played in a Big Five doubleheader. They were a regular event in his day. Wednesday is a celebration of those days, a 60th anniversary one-off for the Big Five.
"You remember 9,208 every night," Dunphy said of his La Salle playing days, referring to the official capacity at that time. "That really wasn't the case, but the electricity in the building made it feel like it was."
For him, Wednesday will offer a basketball game, but also a kind of This is Your Life episode. Past Big Five notables will be honored throughout the night. Dunphy will see greats he helped coach as an assistant at La Salle, and some of his top Penn players, and Temple players he competed against, and Aaron McKie from his current staff.
He'll see Jim Crawford, a Dunphy teammate on a Cherry Hill team in the old Eastern League, and the Penn great Ernie Beck, who used to sit in the row in front of Dunphy's mother every Sunday at church.
When former Temple player and assistant coach Jay Norman is introduced, Dunphy will go back to the years he first started following basketball. "He was the power forward at 6-2 and change, and seemingly got every rebound."
Others to be introduced, like Harold Jensen from Villanova and Rashid Bey from St. Joe's, Dunphy remembers seeing them both this season at local basketball events. This night inside the old gym is about all of these men as much as the current players who have joined their ranks.
"A nice payment to the past, of what college basketball was," Dunphy said Monday about this Wednesday night at the Palestra. "I'm nervous just thinking about the night."
Stars representing all Big Five schools from six decades will be introduced at timeouts Wednesday during the La Salle-Temple opener and the Penn-St. Joseph's nightcap at the Palestra.
They are:
La Salle: Charlie Greenberg, Frank Corace, Jim Crawford, Lionel Simmons, Doug Overton, and Yves Mekongo Mbala.
Penn: Ernie Beck, Stan Pawlak, Corky Calhoun, Paul Little, Ira Bowman, and Ibrahim Jaaber.
St. Joseph's: Joe Spratt, Clifford Anderson, Pat McFarland, Rodney Blake, Rashid Bey, and Marvin O'Connor.
Temple: Jay Norman, John Baum, Ollie Johnson, Mark Macon, Aaron McKie, and Lynn Greer.
Villanova: Joe Ryan, Jim McMonagle, Keith Herron, Harold Jensen, Eric Eberz, and Tony Chennault.