(Click a number, any number, to read about each. Time for just one? “I CRIED FOR 15-20 MINUTES” tells all you need to know.)

The saving grace is that we went 4-and-2 over the last six games. Our coach, Jack Saboda, somehow convinced us at 2-and-9 to put the ghastly opprobrium of the first eleven games behind us – forget it, fellas –  and look only forward, our season begun anew. And so we did.  It was one of Jack’s best mentoring moments in the three years I played for him. His guidance allowed us to end the season on an improbable up note – 4-and-2! — feeling good about ourselves and looking forward already to next season.

That next season coming, of course, will be my senior year, 1973-’74, my last chance to get it right, to be a player, to prove – though to whom I was never sure (myself, most likely) – that all 6-feet-8-inches of me should have played basketball in high school. Last chance.

There was however one more basketball game played that ’72-’73 year at Billera Hall, and it must be mentioned. With spring upon us a team of Lehigh Valley college all-stars – featuring our own Centaur, Dennis Ramella, the school’s first 1,000-point scorer, and Jack Saboda as coach – squared off against the Big 5 All-Stars, up from Philadelphia, in the first-ever Lehigh Valley Collegiate Classic to Benefit Multiple Sclerosis.

The Philly draw was Tom Ingelsby, a recent second-round NBA draft pick of the Atlanta Hawks, the Villanova star who’d played against UCLA in the 1971 championship game, and the high school best friend of Centaur senior co-captain  Chris Cashman, who’d been the manager of the Philly Catholic prep team on which Tom had starred.

For added glamour, the Big 5 contingent was to be coached by one of our Oblates, Bob Devine, himself a Philly school-boy hoops legend and a three-year ironman for a Top 10 Notre Dame team.

But before we get to the game, a word about our sponsor.  Because the All-Star tilt was, in truth, a fairly small part of a much wider campus extravaganza: the Allentown College Multiple Sclerosis Carnival in Center Valley, Pennsylvania.

Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales  – and I’ve said this before – was a make-it-up-as-you-go-along place back then, right then. Brand new, out there somewhere in the middle of some cornfields. A couple of buildings. That’s it. In the absence of everything else a college is supposed to have, the only resource the school really had was its students, and so we were tapped into constantly to find the next idea.

What-d’-ya-wanna-do?

I dunno, what–d’-YA-wann-do?

I KNOW! — let’s do a carnival!

That, more or less, or at least kinda-sorta, is how the MS Carnival happened, as remembered by John Cooper (the guy who played me onto the bench this junior-year season now ended, although that’s another story).

Says Coop: “I still remember sitting in Zeke’s room, and he was talking about how he wanted to do something and he’s saying, ‘What do you think about having a carnival on campus?’ I said, ‘I can get us rides and amusements.’ Zeke says, ‘What’re you talking about?’ I said, “I’ve been doing this stuff since I was a kid; my dad used to run the carnival for the Catholic War Veterans and stuff. He knows the carnies.’ Zeke says, ‘You think we can do that, a carnival?’ “I said, ‘Sure!’ ”

It was more complicated than that. But it was also just that simple.

“It was the Center Valley phenomenon” that made the MS carnival (and pretty much everything else) happen at the school back then, says Bob Zeccardi, the “Zeke” in Coop’s remembrance. Our ability to make something out of the nothing was unique to time and place.

“I saw a group of people come together to make things happen in a way that I think defies logic,” Zeke wrote me in an email about “our tenure” in Center Valley — or, as he calls the place, “Never-Never-Land.”

And so, all but pulled from that Center Valley soil appeared a carnival with rides and betting booths and food stands and dunk tank and all-star basketball game and Todd Rundgren concert one year, everything squeezed into less than a week, virtually everyone at the college involved somehow.

“What made the place so great was our ingenuity, our creativity, our spontaneity,” Zeke told me. And it was unique to where we were, and why we were there, the place just getting started.

“It all comes back to the same thing: We were given this opportunity. There was an environment created that allowed us to do things that I don’t think happen at a lot of other places. I look back on some of the crazy stuff we asked people to do. In the environment I work in today? People’d say, ‘What are you, Bob, NUTS?’ But I never experienced that there. From the people above us or our friends around us.”

And now, back to the Lehigh Valley Collegiate Classic to Benefit MS.

It was a foregone conclusion, of course, that the Big 5 All-Stars would win. They had Inglesby, after all. And Craig Littlepage, the star from the University of Pennsylvania — Ivy League Penn still being a ranked power. Plus some other guys who had to be good because, well, we’d seen them play on television. The Lehigh Valley All-Stars had players no one had ever heard of — and they comprised the home team in the white jerseys.

So of course the Lehighs came out like gangbusters and took immediately control of the game. At one point in the first half Jack Saboda had them up by seven, 45-38. At the half they still led, 58-56.

And showing the way was the Centaur Dennis Ramella. Of course.

Dennis had 14 points in the first half. I see him hitting deep over a surprised Ingelsby. I see him at the basket, in traffic, getting ball on backboard and through the rim. I hear Billera buzz ever time he bounced the ball.

“[T]he crowd favorite was Denny Ramella, Allentlown College’s only representative on the Lehigh Valley squad,” the Morning Call wrote the next day.

It gets better.

“Although the smallest player on the floor at 5-7, he proved himself more than capable of being with the ‘big guys’ as he hit with great success from long range and scored a couple of times because of quickness and great moves.”

Dennis finished with 18 points. Had the Lehigh team held on to win – the Big 5ers of course won inevitably, 123-107 – Dennis (and not the inevitable Inglesby and his 26 points) would’ve been the MVP. And exactly how spectacular would that have been?

So what that he wasn’t.

I was genuinely, unselfishly thrilled for Dennis that night. (A new experience for me, unselfishness.) The spotlight was all his and it was wonderful to see him in it.  Allentown College had granted him one more of those opportunities unique to the school that Zeke recalled, and Dennis had grabbed hold and made it work.

Nearly a thousand people had come out, an insane number at Billera. In front of the largest crowd of his college career and against the best competition – TV-certified big guys — Dennis had come through, shown them all. Shown us.

He made our 6-and-9 season seem just a little less awful.

And he made the next season coming seem laden with opportunity.

Well, I am certainly glad someone has! (And yes, one of the goals I’ve been aiming at here with this blog is to find the book in these Centaur Seasons.)

Those dozen italicized words that tip-off this post were written in an email to me by a friend, Kathryn, who pens her own blog at RAGGED RECOVERY. Kathryn was reacting – quite viscerally, you’ll see — to an interview she read that I had done about CENTAUR SEASONS for the “Varsity Letters” sports-reading section of the online site GELF Magazine.

In response to a ‘VL’ question posed by interviewer Justin Adler, WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO GO TO ALLENTOWN COLLEGE OF ST. FRANCIS DE SALES?, I answered: “It was kind of by accident. I planned on attending Niagara University, but my father passed away in September of my senior year of high school, and [after that] I wanted to go to a school that was closer to my hometown of York, Pennsylvania. … … [E]verything just clicked—it all felt right.”

Got chills as I thought about this driving home …  wrote Kathryn, as always passionate and enthusiastic as she typed.

Regular readers are aware that another objective here for CENTAUR SEASONS has been to try to divine what it was exactly about Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales (full name, always full name) in Center Valley, Pennsylvania, that made this tiny-little brand-new nothing-there place in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by cornfields such a unique and special opportunity for a post-secondary education.

“The Secrets of the Centaur,” as I’ve called them.**

As you know, Kathryn wrote me, sports plays a bit part in my life, outside of tennis and skiing. … but when the interviewer was grilling you about what made your experience special. … and you said, ”I’m trying to articulate that” ….

Well, my take away, and my ENVY, is that you took what life handed you and you engaged and embraced and reveled in it. … Here you were, losing your Dad senior year in high school, having to shift gears and go to a nearby college — one without much to offer, on paper.  But you plunged in and made it matter.  There’s a huge lesson here about acceptance and attitude and … I’M HERE AND I AM GOING TO MAKE IT SPECIAL….

Kathryn then went on to write … you will fill in the rest … as if there was something I needed to add to the perspicacity she had so observed, and yes, divined about Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales in its right-then/right-there moment forty years ago.

Hardly.

Thanks, Kathryn, for saying so well for me what I’ve been trying to say now about the Secrets of the Centaur for lo these past six months.

You should know her words on my behalf have come hard-wrought.

In the “About Me” section of her RAGGED RECOVERY blog Kathryn declares: Addiction drives people to do things they truly don’t want to do.  I realized: THIS IS ME AND FOOD! For more than thirty years, prompted by my first binge at sixteen, I’d been up and down the scale twenty-five pounds at least ten times.  I’d always pegged myself as your garden-variety yo-yo dieter. In truth, I used food the way a drunk scarfs Ketel One: too eagerly, too often, in amounts too large and to no good end.

It would seem an interesting or even impossible leap from girl with eating disorder to boy on basketball team at a barely-there college in eastern Pennsylvania, but for Kathryn, no. Did you notice earlier when she wrote, Well, my take away, and my ENVY … ? Well, here is MY envy: that she indeed could make this jump so effortlessly, especially without ever having, you know, BEEN to Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales in Center Valley, Pa.  That’s leaping ability. The woman must have like a 38-inch vertical.

It is one of the great regrets of my life, Kathryn continued in her email, that my father’s dying (yes, we share that) triggered my eating disorder that then derailed the end of high school and my college career.

Instead of doing, I conclude she means in leaping, what I and so many of us at Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales did by being there then during the school’s make-it-up, try-it-out formative years: plunged in and made it matter, as Kathryn says. There’s a huge lesson here about acceptance and attitude. …

And then Kathryn ended by saying, perhaps concerned that she had wandered too far afield into a world she thinks she doesn’t understand: In my humble opinion.

Yeah, right. As I said: If only I could have thought to have thought of that about these CENTAUR SEASONS.

** Links to previous “Secrets of the Centaur” posts:

SEARCHING FOR THAT … SOMETHING ELSE. Posted October 1, 2012.

WHY US? WHY FIRST? Posted October 12, 2012.

BRICKS AND A BIRTHDAY   Posted October 22, 2012.

THE NIGHT THE CENTAURS MOVED THE BUS: Part Three of a Metaphor in Three Parts. Posted November 6, 2012.

AT THE END OF THE BENCH:  What a Centaur Turned Coach Learned at Allentown and Shares with UCLA Coach John Wooden. Posted November 19, 2912.

KEEP YOUR FOOT IN THAT BUCKET, STEVE! Posted December 10, 2012.

ON THE PASSING OF JACK KLUGMAN Posted December 28, 2012.

THE YEAR THE CENTAURS PLAYED THE FIGHTING IRISH (yes — in football!) Posted Janaury 7, 2013.

SLEEPING IN THE GYM, or “The Process of Becoming a Basketball Team” Posted January 17, 2013

CENTAUR SEASONS, DAVID BROOKS OF THE NEW YORK TIMES, AND LOOKING TO THE FUTURE… Posted February 15, 2013

CENTAUR SEASONS POSTS UP … ON D3HOOPS.COM  Posted March 5, 2013

THE GIANT SHADOW THAT IS JOHN WOODEN Posted on March 25, 2013

What CENTAUR SEASONS Can Teach the Scarlet Knights of Rutgers U. … Seriously Posted April 5, 2013

It is by the film maker Rory Karpf and it is called “Silver Reunion.”

Last summer Karpf brought together all twelve men from that team and filmed them as they talked about the game — the disappointment, the hurt, the anger — and had them vote to “accept, or forever refuse” the silver medal they had walked away from in the immediate aftermath of that Munich game. The decision would need to be unanimous.

“Silver Reunion” is a terrific dozen minutes with a dozen men who once were boys.

For as Frank Gifford, the ABC game announcer in 1972, reminded his audience too many times: At an average age of 20.6 years, this was the youngest hoops team the U.S. had ever sent to the Olympics, with scant international experience. The Russians, meanwhile, had been playing together for years: five had won bronze in 1968; Gennady Volnov was at his fourth Olympics.

It is also worth noting that Bill Walton, the dominant player of that U.S. basketball generation, opted not to participate. His UCLA back-up, Swen Nater, made the team but then quit. And Ernie DiGregorio, the wizard-like passer from Providence College, wasn’t asked to try out, near as I can ascertain. I know Friars basketball people who still shake their heads over that.

None of which is to cast aspersions upon those who did play. The opposite, in fact. These were the guys who raised their hands, wore the colors, took the court. These are the guys who have lived with the outcome now for forty years. All best to them:

Michael Banton (going alphabetically), Jim Brewer, Tom Burleson, Doug Collins, Kenny Davis, Jim Forbes, Tom Henderson, Bobby Jones, Dwight Jones, Kevin  Joyce, Tom McMillen, Ed Ratleff. All of them still alive.

Here they are in “Silver Reunion,” bound together at the same table, inextricably bonded by the same experience. “We went through a lot together,” Doug Collins says. And doesn’t he know best?

It was Collins, of course, who made the now-iconic pair of free throws with three second remaining to give the U.S. its first lead in the game, at 50-49.

And then it was all chaos.

*The distracting horn from the scorers’ table during Collins’s second shot.

*The timeout the Russians wanted but either didn’t call for correctly or was botched by the officials.

* The sudden stoppage after the Russians inbounded the ball.

* The hand-of-god appearance by the head of the international basketball federation – who later conceded he had no authority to do so — demanding three seconds be put back on the clock and the play run again.

* The Who’s-On-First routine when the referees restarted the game before the clock was reset to three seconds.

* The insistence that it all be done … again.

* The overlay of American-Soviet Cold War politics.

*The referees waving the 6-foot-11 Tom McMillen back from the baseline, clearing the way for the Russian’s try at a full-court inbounds pass.

* Aleksandr Belov’s lay-up.

That’s a lot to get into a 12-minute film (the massacre of the Israeli athletes is given proper context, too)  but Karpf expertly fits it all together, the story fully told. Oh, for such efficiency when the team could’ve used it!

Karpf bills his film as a hoops version of “12 Angry Men,” and he sits in as a sort of jury foreman. The vote to accept or refuse must be unanimous. This part is forced and artificial.

Karpf gets much closer to his hoped-for angry men when Tom McMillen, ever the politician, suggests his pet project: A duplicate set of gold medals be struck for the U.S. team. Mike Bantom, for one, is among a few who seem O.K. with that. A few more seem noncommittal. The rest do NOT want to hear it. Kenny Davis looks as if he wants to get up and leave the table. As Jim Forbes says: “Why would we accept dual ownership, when we won the gold medal?” And don’t miss the final comment on this subject from Bobby Jones.

Where Karpf does succeed, he succeeds wonderfully: In the details. He has the players watch the game, and we watch them watching (or, now and again, not watching still).

A grimmace from Doug Collins. A quick shake of the head from  Jim Brewer. Tears from Dwight Jones and Jim Forbes. Stone silence from Kevin Joyce. It’s great stuff.

Karpf juxtaposes pictures of the men at the table with photos of the players they were immediately after the game. Bobby Jones wears the same thousand-mile stare in both portraits. And they all share the identical look – hurt, disappointment, anger. Then and now. Forty years later.

It is – no lie – Mike Bantom who brings it all together, stating the case for all twelve of them. Mike’s afro is gone, probably long gone, but he still has his hair, going gray. His face is rounder, the sharp edges softened. He’s wearing a pale-red Polo shirt, a little thick around he middle.

But when he talks, he could still be standing tall and thin in front of us at the Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales spring sports banquet of 1973, stylishly attired in gray turtleneck and blue double-breasted blazer.

“If we had actually lost, and won a silver medal, I would have proudly walked up there and claimed the silver medal,” he says in “Silver Reunion,” echoing closely his words at Billera Hall that brought forth from us a standing ovation. “Because winning a silver medal in the Olympic Games is a great accomplishment, and I would have been proud to take that medal.” Which in “Silver Reunion” brings forth a full round table of wistful affirmation.

For these twelve men this is what it’s been for these forty years: They would take the silver medal had they earned it. But they can’t take what they didn’t earn. That is why they vote as they must.

Denied the glory of winning gold, they have been no less denied the honor of winning silver. So they have nothing to show for anything except their adamant insistence that they accept nothing short of the one thing they will never get. And so the final three seconds will play in continuous loop, the ending never ending, never changing.

They ask no one to feel sorry for them. They don’t appear to feel sorry for themselves, either. They understand what happened to them was no tragedy; tragedy is what happened to the Israeli athletes, their fellow Olympians.

That’s the final irony, of course. From their 1972 Games these members of the U.S. basketball team did not take a medal. But the nothing they came home with was — and is — certainly something more.

“Hey,” Mike Bantom says toward the end of the film,” “I’ve always said, if this is the worst thing that ever happens to me in my life, I’ve lived a blessed life.”

He handled his duties with aplomb – as written about in this previous post. Subbing at the last moment for his St. Joe’s coach, Jim Lyman, Mike Bantom was everything we in his audience were not. Athletically gifted, wondrously tall, African American, very afroed. Not to mention urbane and worldly by comparison with any of us — or at least certainly me.

So when he began his remarks by telling the exact truth: This is the most unusual experience of my entire life, it was such equal parts charming and disarming that it slowly extracted from us loud applause of appreciation.

All of this about Mike Bantom at Billera Hall in Center Valley, Pennsylvania, in 1973, has come to mind because ESPN recently posted on Grantland.com‘s “30 for 30 Short Film Series” a 12-minute documentary called “Silver Reunion” by the director Rory Karpf and First Row Films.

“Silver Reunion“ is the quickly told tale of that U.S. Olympic team when its members gathered, Mike Bantom included, in the summer of 2012, to discuss that disputatious game. With Rory Karpf serving as a sort of jury foreman, the team voted on whether at long last to accept (or not) the silver medal they had together walked away from, leaving the members of the Russian team to get their gold medals without them.  The decision would need to be unanimous.

At our sports banquet in 1973 I don’t recall that Mike Bantom gave an actual speech, inspirational-style.  (That would’ve been too weird; he was the same age as us.) He did though open the floor to questions.

What’s it like to the play at the Palestra? Who’s the toughest Big 5 player? There were questions about the recent Olympic Games, I’m sure. The Israeli massacre. The controversial U.S.-U.S.S.R. game.

And then someone stood up and asked point blank: Don’t you think it would have been a better gesture for the U.S. players to have accepted their silver medals and been on the platform when the Soviets received their golds, rather than being absent and displaying such bad sportsmanship?

It was a heck of a question, for sure – and maybe fair enough as far as it went. Mike Bantom, alone among us in the room, did not hesitate with his answer.

To write this post I rewatched the video of that Munich Olympic basketball final.

Mike Bantom played a terrific game, first off. He had a game-high nine rebounds. With eight-plus minutes to go he ran down a ball in the Russian corner and, on the ensuing play, he battled for the ball inside and then tipped it in. They were his only two points in a struggle where baskets were hard to come by. His tally brought the U.S. to within four, 34-38, and for the first time you can feel the arena come alive.

As for the game, it is difficult to watch. The Russians are robotic, mechanical — and oppresively effective. The U.S. team, straining under Coach Hank Iba’s famously deliberate approach, play the same slow-ball style. “Some of the things I disgree with,” ABC analyst Bill Russell says with the U.S. down 19-9. “They don’t show enough imagination on offense — and they are capable of it.”

Late in the second half, still down 10, the Amerks staged a mini revolt on Iba’s deliberations, get imaginative, and on their own push the pace. Kevin Joyce’s three baskets get the U.S. to 44-47. At 1:50 Doug Collins hits two free throws and it’s 46-47. Two foul shots by the Soviets make it 46-49, and with 43 seconds left Jim Forbes drains an ice-water 20-foot jumper to the right of the foul circle and it’s 48-49.

There is no shot clock. The Soviets do not have to shoot. The game is theirs to win. Inexplicably, however, Aleksandr Belov, underneath, reaches up to the basket with less than ten second left. Tom McMillen blocks the attempt to the left corner, where Belov tracks it down. He lofts a hurried pass toward midcourt.

Doug Collins, lurking on the opposite side, appears out of nowhere, grabs the ball near the center jump circle and heads straight for the basket, where he gets undercut by Sako Sakandelidze. Collins crashes to the floor and winds up with his head buried under the padding of the basket support. He gets up woozily and goes to the line for two fouls shots, the U.S. down one, 48-49.

Collins takes the ball.  In the 40 years since he has always said he didn’t feel any pressure, that he was just shooting foul shots on his backyard rim. Watching it all again it is not difficult to believe him. He dribbles the ball three times, spins it in his hands and shoots. Good. 49-49. He takes the ball again. Dribbles. Spins. Shoots. Good.  U.S.A. 50, U.S.S.R. 49. The U.S. has its first lead of the game. Doug Collins may have just stepped down as the head coach of the Philadelphia 76ers, but he remains forever the owner of the two most important made foul shots in the history of basketball.

Meanwhile, three seconds remain in the U.S.-U.S.S.R. contestation

I will not attempt to explain those next three seconds, except to say that it’s forty years later now and people are still trying to explain them.

That day at Billera Hall, on the otherhand, it was only eight months later, to the day, when Mike Bantom stood before us, microphone in hand, enduring that question about sportsmanship and fair play. I’m sure he had been asked the question before. Now he’d been asked it again, and, as I said, he did not hesitate.

He would proudly wear that silver medal, he told us (I can see him with his hand on his chest, in front of his blue blazer, as if he were gently holding it), but he didn’t earn a silver medal.

The question itself had produced its own layer of nervous tension throughout the gym. Mike Bantom’s answer deflected it away. Our applause came slowly at first. Soon it was a standing ovation.

Which brings us now – in a final post to come – to Rory Karpf’s “Silver Reunion,” an ESPN 30 for 30 Short Film on Grantland.com.

Today’s CENTAUR SEASONS’ six degrees is Michael Bantom. Philadelphia kid. Legendary early seventies Hawk at St. Joseph’s College, in his own hometown. Very solid nine-year NBA veteran; seven-year Italian League player. Long-time NBA league executive.

And for purposes here, a member of the ill-fated 1972 U.S. Men’s Olympic basketball team that apparently won, then apparently won again, but then ultimately and irretrievably lost the gold medal game to the Soviet Union at those equally ill-fated Summer Games.

(Wait: “Ill-fated” barely describes those Olympics. These next three posts have been in the works for a few weeks now. Coincidentally or not, they conjure the Munich Games and the tragedy of the 11 Israeli coaches and athletes killed at that Quadrennial, in the first terror attack that targeted sports.  Now, this week, terror has again intruded on the games we play.)

ESPN recently posted on Grantland.com‘s “30 for 30 Short Film Series” a 12-minute documentary called “Silver Reunion” by the director Rory Karpf and First Row Films.  It is the quickly told tale of that U.S. Olympic team when it gathered, in the summer of 2012, to discuss the controversial game and then vote on whether at long last to accept (or not) the silver medals they had together walked away from forty years ago.

Watching the film I remembered that in May 1973, at the end of my junior year at Allentown College of St. Francis De Sales and our 6-and-9 basketball season, Mike Bantom (of all people) was the guest speaker at the Centaurs’ end-of-year varsity- and intramural-sports banquet.

This was a big, big deal. Mike Bantom of St. Joe’s and the U.S. Olympic team – and, perhaps more important, a high school Philadelphia Catholic League and college Big 5 player who’d run the hallowed floor of the Palestra! – here on our floor, right here in Billera Hall in nowhere Center Valley, Pennsylvania.

I remember everything about his visit.

I wonder if Mike Bantom remembers any of it.

Actually, he wasn’t supposed to be there. Jimmy Lynam, the St. Joe’s coach, was the scheduled speaker, but he begged off and sent his star player instead.

Mike was dressed in navy-blue blazer, double-breasted, gray pants and turtle neck. His afro was very early seventies, of the moment, making a statement. At 6-foot-9 (and close to seven with the afro) he had to duck to get through the Billera doors.

He listened to the invocation from Fr. Bob Devine, the Oblate of St. Francis de Sales priest who had started for three years at Notre Dame in the late 1950s and was on a team that had finished ranked No. 7 in the country. (Making Fr. D the ONLY person in Billera who was Mike Bantom’s athletic equal.)

Together with the rest of us Mike Bantom stood in line with paper plate in hand at the “banquet” buffet – glorified cafeteria stuff.

He sat through the awarding of plaques to eight intramural-sports champions and six varsity-sports teams, watching as each player, when called by name, walked up individually to collect his or her memento. This was a small school, this Allentown College of the Cornfields, proudly demonstrating one of its great and valued educational benefits (and I mean that sincerely and with affection).

He then waited as the most valuable players in each varsity sports were announced. (In men’s basketball, Dennis Ramella, the school’s first ever 1,000 point man.)  He listened as each varsity coach recapped the season, each one a more-losses-than-wins campaign. He shook hands with the outstanding intramural athlete of the year and with the outstanding varsity athlete (Dennis Ramella, again), then posed for pictures with everybody.

Next he listened to remarks by Coach John Compardo, the athletic director and sole proprietor of the school’s athletic department. Coach Compardo was beloved at the college from the moment he walked into the place. But as a public speaker he could be longwinded and digressive.

Finally, he waited as Chris Cashman, senior co-captain of the basketball team and emcee for the night, introduced our guest speaker. And with that Michael Bantom took the microphone.

I will never forget what happened next.

Mike Bantom was the same age as an Allentown College senior and a Baby Boomer college contemporary to the rest of us. Heck, any kid at the college who went to Roman Catholic High School in Philadelphia had four years before been his classmate. There was nothing about him that suggested “Sports Banquet Guest Speaker.” Such personages are, at minimum, supposed to be much much older than the audience.

But here he was anyway.

He was at least an inch taller, and probably more, than the tallest person (me) sitting at any table. He was likely the only African American among the 250-or-so present. (I say likely: in my years at AC I recall their being three African American students, one man and two women.)

Mike Bantom did have some things in common with us. He’d gone to a Catholic high school in Philadelphia, no small connecting rod. Our own Dave Glielmi, who had emerged as our best player this past season, had played at St. Joe’s Prep. He and Mike may have squared off agaisnt each other.

But in virtually every other way, Mike Bantom had grown out of and then into a completely different set of life and athletic experiences from anything we at Allentown College could realistically imagine. He had come to us from a different world — we knew it; surely he did, too — and he was on his way to another different world. He would be taken No. 8 overall by the Phoenix Suns in the upcoming player draft; his NBA career would total nine years at 12.1 points and 6.4 rebounds per game.  I mean, geez.

So Michael Bantom, Olympian, All-American, Big 5 Legend, stood there for  a long moment holding the microphone, looking out at all of us with our expectant faces. And then he said, as if in summation:

This has been the most unusual experience of my entire life.

Perhaps he said “most interesting” or maybe “most intriguing.”

In any event, he had nailed it — on purpose or by accident doesn’t matter. The best comedy, they say, tells the truth.

There were first some nervous titters of disbelief, but followed by growing-louder guffaws of understanding, and finally full-on laughter and applause of appreciation.

Yo! Mike Bantom! Here in Billera Hall!

In Part 2 of “Six Degrees of Mike Bantom” the St. Joe’s star and 1972 Olympian answers questions about the gold medal he did not receive and the silver medal he does not want. And in Part 3, a long look at the ESPN short documentary  at Grantland.com, ”Silver Reunion,” directed by Rory Karpf for First Row Films.

I put aside what was going to be today’s post. Though the irony is worth noting: Today’s post was going to connect the early-Seventies Centaurs of Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales to the 1972 Munich Olympics, the Summer Games where terror first struck a sporting event.

Instead, there’s this:

Ten years after the September 11 terror attacks, I wrote an essay for my old hometown newspaper, the York Sunday News, in Pennsylvania. That 2001 morning at 8:46 a.m. I was at The Wall Street Journal offices, where I then worked, across the street from the World Trade Center.

Here’s why:

Yesterday, safely ensconced in Troy, New York, I went down to Noreen’s home office and watched a bit from Boston on TV. Here we go again.

“We gotta call Katie,” I said. “She could be there, easy”

Katie has been a friend forever and a runner since before that. She lives with her husband, Rene, in New Hampshire. They could be there, easy.

I dialed her cell. Listened to the rings. PickUpPickUpPickUp.

Then, from Katie, pleasantries dispensed: “I’m O.K.”

We talked again last night. “I knew it was you as soon as I heard my phone ring,” she said. She said it felt like 9-11 all over again, when she first heard that news and she immediately called Noreen at her job in Manhattan. “And now here you guys were calling us.”

So in sad and repeated memory I offer my story of what I saw and what it was like to be in New York City and live in Brooklyn on that 9-11 day, that night, that week, that month.

It is not the story of what happened in Boston yesterday. Or what it was like to be there last night, after. Or what it will be like to be living there a week from now. But it feels like it.

If something needed to get done, we had to do it. Anything, it seemed, was possible.

The story of the Centaurettes first-ever women’s basketball team – the college’s first-ever women’s team of any kind — is a perfect example. With tonight’s NCAA Women’s Basketball Championship as backdrop, this seems a perfect time to tell it.

[All links refer to previous CENTAUR SEASON posts that address similar ideas (often as they relate to the men's team).]

Sue McCandless Pfeil says she realizes now that what she did during the 1971-1972 basketball season was certainly a step forward for women at Allentown College.

But back then? She had NO idea.

“As far as all that went, that was the furthest thing from my mind,” Sue says. “There was nothing about feeling that I was ‘entitled’ to do this. I just wanted to play basketball, you know? I wanted to have a team. And if we wanted to have a team, I knew we were going to have to do it ourselves.”

Sue enlisted a friend, Gail “Clyde” Roney. Together they went to see Coach John Compardo, the Athletic Director and one-man-band of an athletic department.

Coach, we’d like to start a women’s basketball team.

By rights, Coach should have turned them down, in that gravelly gruff voice of his:

Eh, girls, now’s not the time, got no money, better wait.

“Coach,” says Walt Pfeil, who would soon be drafted to head the nascent team, “had the good sense not to say no.”

Eh, sure. I’ll see what I can do. Why not? Got no money, though.

Sue and Clyde beat the drum for players, going room to room in the dorms, talking up the team to the college’s 70 or so co-eds.

“I spent more time getting the basketball thing going than I did on any school assignment,” Sue says.

Sue and Walt, now onboard as coach, attended a meeting of the Lehigh Valley Colleges Women’s Athletic Association to gin up some games.

Walt shanghaied his roommate, Wayne Rizzo, into being co-coach.

With an eight or nine game schedule in place, preseason practice commenced. All they had to do now was, well, everything …

“What limited us gave us opportunity,” Sue says of her original basketball efforts, but she could be talking of any number of projects back then that seemed to spring up whole cloth at this tiny school in Center Valley.

‘OK,” Sue says: “There was no women’s basketball team established, but then we get to have the experience of getting it started and keeping it going so that it worked for us.  We made it. We designed it. We created it. As opposed to it all just sort of being there for us.”

One more thing: “I wanted to have enough to have a real team,” Sue says.

Of the core group of eight women who signed on with the team (numbers vary), maybe half had never touched a basketball. “The player who could dribble the ball three times without it going off her foot became our point guard,” Wayne says.

A few women had played only during the six-on-six era, with three guards and three forwards relegated to one half of the court.

With no more court time to be squeezed from Billera Hall, the college’s overworked gym, Coach Compardo suggested the team practice up the hill, at Brisson Seminary.

“Yeah, they’ll let a bunch of girls run around up there in their shorts, sure they will. Nothing will happen” Wayne says. (In fact, they did let them. And nothing happened.)

One woman had no sneakers; Coach Compardo scrounged some money (likely from his own pocket) to buy some Chucks. “I remember being very jealous,” Sue says, laughing at herself. “They were very cool sneakers!”

During games there would be shots made in the opponent’s basket. One Centaurette would make “a great layup, utilizing all the technique taught to her in practice,” according to written notes Walt put together for me. “The only issue was that the game was being played on the main court and the shot was taken and made on one of the side baskets.”

It is easy here to have fun. But I won’t make fun.

If I have tried to do nothing else with this CENTAUR SEASONS, it has been to declare that the effort we guys put into our game be given proper due – even while acknowledge that we were just … the Centaurs, playing for some nowhere, no-name school in the middle of some cornfields.

These women, these Centaurettes (yes, that is what they called themselves) deserve no less the same.

“We took it seriously,” Wayne says. “Walt took it very seriously. We practiced two, three times a week, a couple of hours a night, and then we had the games and stuff, all on the road. We all devoted a lot of time to it. We got into it. We wanted to make a good showing.”

Deborah Bubba Dolan came to the team with high school experience, “recruited,” kind-a-sort-a, the way some us were, by an Oblate priest who had played major college ball.

Forty years later, Deb says, she still appreciates how diligently Walt and Wayne approached their charge.

Sue gets all the credit for stepping up and getting the team going, Deb says. “But had it not been for Walt and Wayne coming forward, we probably wouldn’t have played.”  And Deb, a freshman that year, really wanted to keep playing basketball.

“These guys were just fellow students willing to take time out of their schedules to coach us, so we could have a team,” she says.  “I think that shows what the college was about when we were there. How we were willing to help each other out. Here were these 20-, 21-year-old guys saying, ‘You don’t have a coach? We’ll coach you.’ They didn’t get paid, and they had to teach most of us how to play the game before they could take us on the road to play a game.”

I can hear the appreciation in Deb’s voice through the phone. I tell her as much.

“Oh, absolutely,” she declares. “I haven’t seen them in years, but I still have a great appreciation for them.” Then, unabashedly: “I think about them often. I do. Both of them.”

Some historical context.

This 1971-1972 Centaurette Season is the final gasp of the pre-Title IX world of women’s athletics. In that era, nothing — nothing — could be taken for granted.

“This team was all do-it-yourself,” Wayne says.

But in this same season Immaculata College, outside Philadelphia, would now-famously win the very first women’s national college basketball championships. And on June 23, 1972, Title IX and its transformative possibilities for women’s athletics would be signed into law. No one in that moment knew what the future held, but it was a heady time to be thinking about it.

Meanwhile, for the Centaurettes that year, after a few weeks of preseason practice they get word that an informal scrimmage has been organized against the Lehigh University women’s freshman team, at their place. But when they arrive, the gym is set up for a real game, with clock, referees, scorers’ table, all that. It gets ugly quick.

“I don’t remember the score, but we were kept to single digits,” it says in Walt’s notes. “Our high scorer had two points.”

Back in their dorm room that night, coaches Walt and Wayne figure that this women’s hoops experiment is over. “Had they been embarrassed enough to not want to go on?”  But everyone showed up – “strong” and “determined” – for the next practice.

For the real games, Coach Compardo got the team grey ALLENTOWN COLLEGE T-shirts —  “and blue polyester shorts,” Sue says, dripping sarcasm. “And we were happy to get them.”

I can tell you that in 1971-1972 the first women’s basketball team at Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales went 0 and 8 or 0 and 9. As Walt has it in his notes: “We had a DEFEATED season.” There were losses to schools like Cedar Crest, Our Lady of Angels, Moravian. There was a tournament of sorts at the end with St. Joe’s and LaSalle, according to Walt and Wayne, organized by Tim Kelley (again: It needed to be done; Tim got it done). I can’t tell you any scores, which is just as well.

Though that is also not the point.

“I was not an athlete,” Maria Martinez wrote to me in response to an all-points email. “I never played basketball before. But it didn’t matter. What mattered was that we were starting a program for the women.”

Which makes it all the more a shame that this first team (and the ’72-’73 team as well) has been left unrecorded in the otherwise mindboggling DeSales University athletics archive.  There is nothing nefarious about this oversight, I am positive. And I’m certain the ommision is not for lack of trying on the SID’s part. The hope here is simply that Centaur Seasons can help fill in the blanks.

Because the very fact that Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales University put a women’s team on the court in that seminal season of Title IX is well worth celebrating.

Why not invite them all back to a game next year?

“Not too many years after I graduated,” Sue told me when we talked, “I saw in an alumni newsletter what the team was like. And it made me think, Wow, we just had what we had. Look at what they have now!”

She said that when she was at the college she didn’t – maybe couldn’t – see much beyond where she was right then.

That basketball team she spent so much time getting onto the court? “I thought we were just a little side note,” she says. “I didn’t see us then as us contributing to a ‘program,’ or building Allentown College into a place where people would really want to go. It just wasn’t something we thought about AT ALL back then. We didn’t know what the future held for women athletes, in that moment in time.”

So what about now, this moment in time?  These days the DeSales University women’s Bulldog basketball program is a perennial power, having won an average of 20 games a season over the past decade.

“Without us realizing it,” Sue says, “we really pulled something off.”

*          *          *          *          *          *

The 1971-1972 Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales women’s basketball team: Kathy Anthony Gray, Deborah Bubba Dolan, Ann Conahan (manager), Mary Ellen Ewell Strohl, Julie Gleason, Maria Martinez,  Molly Maclean Monte,  Sue McCandless Pfeil, Violetta Romano-Lucey, Gail Roney Mallett,  Stevie Tagye, Sally Wise Swanson. Coaches: Walt Pfeil and V. Wayne Rizzo.

The 1972-1973 Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales women’s basketball team (which also went 0-and-8/-9: Kathy Anthony Gray, Deborah Barnak Burke, Deborah Bubba Dolan, Deborah DeNardo, Sue McCandless Pfeil, Stephanie Tagye,  Regina Scirrotto Ivcic, Sylvia Stubits, Sally Wise Swanson. Coach: Mrs. Mary Wendell

There appears to have been no team in 1973-1974, the last year of these CENTAUR SEASONS.

Source: May 11, 1972 Allentown College 7^th Annual Sports Banquet program (Tony Mazzeo collection); May 10, 1973 Allentown College 8^th Annual Sports Banquet program (Steve McKee); DeSales University Alumni Directory, 2012 edition

And yes: Walt and Sue married a few years after they graduated in 1973.

Wait! I know that guy! The referee! I mean, I know who he is. His name comes immediately.  Jody Silvester. He used to ref our Centaur games at Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales back when.

The game in the Garden from there on becomes mere backdrop. I spend the rest of my time watching Jody, this guy who used to ref our games in Billera Hall in Center Valley, Pennsylvania, our college of cornfields, and now here he is … at Madison Square Garden.

When I decided to do this post a few days ago, I sent an all-points email to members of these Centaur Seasons asking whether they too still remembered Jody Silvester.  P.J. Brennan, a well-coached CYO kid from Pottsville, Pa., got back to me right away. “Absolutely,” he wrote, and explained that for a while when he was still in  the Lehigh Valley area he became a high school ref to stay with the game.  He belonged to the Bethlehem. Pa., chapter of the PIAA.

“Every Chapter had a President and an Interpreter,” P.J. wrote in his email. “The Interpreter was the most knowledgeable ref, the best referee in the Chapter. Jody was the Interpreter. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the game, but more importantly he had a command of the game. His games were well and fairly called and orderly. No confusion, no questionable calls. Always confident. Coaches and players respected him.”

After my St. John’s game in the Garden, when watching college games on TV I’d always check to see who the referees were. Jody appeared regularly. He reffed until 2000, worked 22 NCAA tournaments, four Final Fours and two Championship Games – Indiana-Syracuse 1987, Duke-Arkansas 1994. All told he probably called well more than 2,000 games.

When Jody retired, Seth Davis of Sports Illustrated wrote a terrific valedictory: “…[T]here may be no greater testament to him than the fact that most coaches respect him, but fans have never heard of him.”

Yeah, well, we Centaurs sure have heard of him, this ref who used to blow the whistle on us back at Billera Hall.

“The guy to get info from is Maz,” Jerry Wilkinson wrote me, referring to his senior year roommate and co-captain, the fiery, tempestuous, give-no-quarter Tony Mazzeo.  “As P.J. said,” Wilk continued, “Jody controlled the games with his calm, knowledgeable demeanor. He reffed a lot of our games and we were happy to see him walk in the gym. But when you controlled our games that means you controlled Maz.”

Ironically, or perhaps not, Maz himself became a well-regarded soccer referee. So maybe he knew better than the rest of us when he said in his email: “In some small way, I am convinced that we helped him in his craft. You can’t get to the top without experiencing the bumps, bruises and ‘school of hard knocks’ referee knowledge that our scrappy, do-or-die-effort teams offered him.”

Maz claims Jody worked at least 25 of his games – nearly half the home-game schedule. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, Jody got one of his first big-time calls, working the hallowed Palestra of Philadelphia, the year after Maz graduated.

We need now to go to December 1992, to an alumni game at the college celebrating the 25^th anniversary of the Centaurs’ first-ever collegiate game, in 1967, against King’s College. “The Quarter-Century Centaurs.” Of the 40 or so players from the Centaur Seasons era, nearly 30 show.

And they’re talking.

Hey, you ever see Jody Silvester on TV doing games?”

 Yeah! He cut his teeth on us!

Yeah! We got him to the Garden!

And now it is Sunday, yesterday, and I am on the phone telling these stories to Jody Silvester. He’s 76 now, retired nearly 20 years ago from his job as the postmaster of Emmaus, Pennsylvania, over the mountain from Center Valley., where he still lives with his wife, Helen. This being NCAA Final Four weekend, it seemed an appropriate moment to see if I could locate him and tell him that however silly it may sound, seeing him on TV, in the big-time, always a produced a thrill.

I don’t know if this will make any sense, I tell him, but it does to me, and I think it does, in a way, to all of us who played back then, were reffed by him, at tiny little Allentown College. It’s like Maz said. It was us who got him there — the Garden, the big time. He used to work our games and then he went Big East, Atlantic 10, eventually BIG 10.

At Billera Hall we got maybe 65 people at our games. He reffed a title game in the Superdome in front of 65,000. And still it’s like there is a part of us that was out there with him, running the floor with the most talented college ballplayers in the country.

I stop, the gushing over. Then: “I don’t know if you can understand that,” I say, “but there’s just no other way for me to say it.”

A silence on the phone. Finally, Jody says, quietly, “That’s really nice. I appreciate it.”

So of course, now I try to push the ball, force the action. “Do you remember working our games?” I ask. Do you remember the Centaurs?

“Wow,” he says, laughing “you’re really testing my memory!”

I recite the games with his name in the scorebook. Including this game from the recent diary-blog of the 1972-73 season, one of my more humiliating performances — though no, I did NOT get fouled out!

I also mention a few players. I say the name Tony Mazzeo. “That one rings a bell, yeah,” Jody says.

But mostly, no.  “It’s easier for you guys to remember me,” he says. As for him: “There’s been thousands of players.”

But here’s the thing, he says, perhaps sensing my disappointment. “My philosophy was this. No matter whether there were two people in the stands or 75 people in the stands or 25,000 people in the stands, my philosophy was that those kids had been practicing every day of the week and to go out there and lollygag around, that wasn’t my style. Every game to me was important — a 25,000 Division I big-time game, or DeSales – that’s the way I always refereed.  That’s the only way it can be, no matter who’s playing.”

Even when “just” the Centaurs?

“You gotta start somewhere,” he tells me. ”And you never forget where you came from.”

Even when you can’t exactly remember.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

TO LISTEN TO THE FINAL INSTALLMENT IN THE EXCLUSIVE CENTAUR SEASONS FEATURE “TALKING WITH JOHN WOODEN” — TODAY’S CONVERSATION: “WILL THERE EVER BE ANOTHER UCLA?” — click here … … and then here.

No, today Centaur Seasons is going to wade into the morass that is the Rutgers University/Mike Rice basketball-coach fiasco. (Surely you’ve heard.) I think that much of what Centaur Seasons has been about these past six months — the striving, the trying, the not exactly winning a whole lot – can find application here.

But to get there, some personal history.

I am the “father of sports blogging.” Really. Well, actually, the full quote was “the UNWITTING father of sports blogging.”

I was so dubbed in 2008 by Michael Gluckstadt an editor at Gelf Magazine and the host of Gelf’s Varsity Letters sports reading series. Mike declared me so for my efforts as the first writer of a brand new sports column – The Daily Fix — at The Wall Street Journal’s then-nascent online efforts.

It was August 2001. A time which within just one more month would already feel like a long time ago. The idea for the blog belonged to Bill Grueskin, now the Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor of Professional Practice at the Columbia School of Journalism, but then the wsj.com major domo. Why not write an online column, Bill posited, that would direct Journal readers to go to other newspapers to read what other writers thought about the sports stories of the day?

A radical idea then (the unwitting part), even if it doesn’t seem so now (the father part). There was little out there like it. Maybe nothing.

And Bill gave me the gig. He appointed Jason Fry (who now blogs here) as editor.  Go, he said: Figure it out, find a voice, have fun. Boy, did we. I Loved it. Did it for a year. Best. Job. Ever.

Fast forward to this week and the ugliness that is the Mike Rice video  (here, on the off chance you haven’t seen it) and the Sturm und Drang it has created at Rutgers and, indeed, across the country.

This story was tailor made for The Daily Fix — talk of the nation! — and it so far has weighed in twice.  On Wednesday with this, “Rutgers Re-evaluates Rice Decision,” by Jeremy Gordon and on Thursday by David Roth with this, “Rutgers Changes Course, Fires Rice.”

Jason Gay, also of the Journal, independently weighed in with his own terrific take on the blunders, under the headline ”What Was Lost at Rutgers.”  It would’ve been bad form for The Fix to call attention to itself, as it were, so allow me, self-proclaimed “Original Fixer,” to do the honors instead — applying the rubrics of The Fix to a Centaur Seasons’ blog.

” … [I]t would be useful,” Mr. Gay writes in Thursday’s paper of the coach’s belated firing, ”to take a step back and consider the broader picture, which is how a school with presumably good intentions could get to this point, how its sense of priorities and values could become so skewed it took the public airing of a videotape for people in charge to do the right thing.”

And then a moment later he avers:  ”Intoxicated by sports, a school lost its way.”

In was Mr. Gay who inspired me to reach back into my bag of Fix tricks to find some lessons in past Centaur Seasons posts and apply them to the here and now.

Forty years ago, at a brand new Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales in Center Valley, Pennsylvania, we Centaurs did not lose our way. No way.

“We were just happy to be able to play the game, to play it as hard as we could,” says Jerry Wilkinson, a senior co-captain when I was a sophomore, in this post about the first day of practice on October 15. Hard to forget where you were and why you were there, Wilk says, when you realized how lucky you were to be there at all: “I really enjoyed playing the game with my teammates — at a level I never suspected I would ever play.”

Chris Cashman, a four-year Centaur stalwart and one of the team’s most important leaders, talked about the values he learned while a Centaur at Allentown College in this post about a bus trip to an away game where (in fact!) we did get lost. “’The things I learned, the values I learned,’ Cash said, ‘I learned there’ – and then. ‘I don’t know if I would have learned it at Villanova. I don’t know if I would have learned it at St. Joe’s or Harvard or Yale or Fordham.’ A lot of colleges, he said, offer a lot of similar experiences. But with Allentown being so new — and we new to it — it was like we were ‘born there and grew up together.’”

And, finally, this.

“In a crazy way, in the purest sense of the word, it was just playing the game for the love of the game,” said Joe Thomson in a blog post about Centaur Seasons that I was invited to write for D3hoops.com. And Joe has it right.

Though don’t get me wrong. We Centaurs at Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales in Center Valley, Pennsylvania, back then, we would have LOVED to have been big time. Heck, we would have settled for some bigger small time.

Instead, we were who we were. And that’s fine.

“There weren’t a lot of externals,” Joe Thomson said in my D3Hoops essay. “We weren’t getting money, we weren’t on scholarship. We didn’t have to worry about who was getting all-conference. We just played. We didn’t like the losing, but when we did we just got ready for the next game. To me it was pure sport. We were just a bunch of guys playing ball.”

How much you wanna bet Mike Rice — and the Rutgers University Scarlet Knights — would like to get themselves back to playing the game like that?

A MARCH MADNESS special, exclusively on CENTAUR SEASONS. A multipart series now through the Final Four

Today’s featured conversation: WILL WE EVER SEE ANOTHER UCLA?

To listen immediately, click here. 17  and here 23 .

“Before we had that string,” Coach Wooden says, speaking of course of the ten NCAA titles in 12 years, including an outrageous seven in a row, “if you or I or anybody else had been told that this was going to happen, we’d [have] said, ‘You’re crazy, [it] could never happen.’ But it did happen! And I think it’s just as possible today as it was then.”

To be fair to the Coach, he spoke those words nearly 22 years ago, before “one-and-done” and all the rest that has changed the landscape of college basketball. Still and all, Coach Wooden is the only person who knows what it’s like to win 10 titles in a dozen years (and those seven in a row!) so attention must be paid.

To listen to Coach Wooden consider more on the differences between the NCAA tournament then and now … click here17 …  and then here23.    A word-for-word transcript is provided.

Coach Wooden’s self-described “string” at UCLA didn’t start until after he’d been the coach for 17 years. (Imagine that long a leash today!) But once he started gathering that string no coach and no team dominated the NCAA tournament’s 75 years as completely as did Wooden and the Bruins from 1963-64 to 1974-75.

In those days you simply could NOT play college basketball, at any level, without just always knowing that UCLA and Wooden were glaring down from the mountaintop — setting the standard, defining the game, winning the titles.

And yet for all that it can be difficult now to appreciate how ridiculously overwhelming the Bruins and Coach Wooden were, in their time.

Remember: Magic and Bird had yet to appear. So too Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing, Christian Laetner, Carmello Anthony, Kemba Walker. There was no Jimmy V, John Thompson, Rick Pitino, Coach K, John Calipari, Shaka Smart. ESPN? Phi Slamma Jamma? Forty Minutes of Hell? Runnin’ Rebels? Valparaiso at the buzzer? “Diaper Dandies, BABY!”? Blue Devils? 8 vs. 9? Bracketology? No one knew.

There was UCLA and there was John Wooden. That was all. That was everything. That was enough.

Coincidentally (or maybe not) the Bruins’ championship run fits snugly around this CENTAUR SEASONS blog. From 1968-69 to 1973-74, the Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales Centaurs went 37-72; the UCLA Bruins in those same seasons went 174-8. But Centaurs and Bruins together in one sentence is jarring only on first blush. Really. What was basketball to Coach Wooden if not an opportunity for him to teach and his students to learn?

Which we Centaurs did. Christopher Cashman, a leading stalwart on four of those Centaur teams, declares it best: “The experience we got playing at Allentown College in Center Valley, Pennsylvania,” he says, “is no less important to us than are the experiences that Bill Walton and Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Tom Ingelsby got at their big-time programs.”

Cash, a year ahead of me, went to Cardinal Dougherty High School in Philadelphia and was best friends there with Tom Inglsby, who went on to Villanova and started against UCLA in the ’71 NCAA Final. Cash’s relationship to and with the big time provides its own clarity: “Maybe it was even more important to us,” he says adamantly, “because we did it just for the joy of the game rather than any expectation of recognition.”

So here at CENTAUR SEASONS, during this month of madness (and “March Madness” wasn’t officially coined until 1982), we’d like to remember again for the first time the prominence and dominance that was UCLA and John Wooden. In a never-before-heard, two-hour audio interview conducted nearly 23 years ago, Coach Wooden talks here on CENTAUR SEASONS about a wide variety of on- and off-court college basketball topics: Lew Alcindor, Bill Walton, that game in the Astrodome, his most pleasurable victories, the N.C. State loss, his “Pyramid of Success,” growing up in Indiana, and much much more.

To access Coach Wooden’s thoughts on the more modern tournament, click here.

At CENTAUR SEASONS the full two-hour John Wooden conversation has been apportioned into 24 individual sections. This post, ANOTHER UCLA?, takes you directly to that segment. Keep in mind that in nearly every section other topics were discussed as well. It was a wide-ranging conversation! Some segments are just a few minutes; the longest is about 13.

I conducted the full interview with Coach Wooden on Saturday, May 18, 1991, for what eventually became the book “COACH,” an oral history of the sideline profession. (Coach Wooden was one of about 150 coaches I interviewed.)

Clicking on two previous CENTAUR SEASONS posts can also access the interview with Coach Wooden. This one: “AT THE END OF THE BENCH: What a Centaur-Turned-Coach Learned at Allentown and Shares with Coach Wooden.” Or this one: “U.C.L.A. CENTAURS; A.C. BRUINS: An Exclusive Interview with John Wooden.”

OR, click here to proceed directly to the CENTAUR SEASONS John Wooden Interview page.

However you get there, here’s hoping you enjoy listening to John Wooden here on CENTAUR SEASONS.