Growing up at the Palestra, 1958

Stanley Kessler's father taught school with the guy who hired ushers for Penn football games. Stanley and I worked there the fall of '56 and again in '57. You got $1 a game. You walked the ticket holders to their seats on the long, wood benches that ran up the sides of Franklin Field. You flicked the seats with a rag. If you had a rich alum or a sport on a date, you might catch a tip. I worked every game and don't remember a moment or a player's name.

The end of the second season, the guy asked if we wanted to usher the Palestra. You got $2 but no tips. You showed no one to their seats. You stood in the entranceway to your section and pointed up or down. You watched the games.

The Palestra, on 33rd between Spruce and Walnut, had been Penn's home court for 30 years; but, in 1955, four other Philadelphia area schools— LaSalle, St. Joseph's, Temple and Villanova— had joined the Quakers in an informal conference, the Big Five, agreeing to play each other and most of their "home" games there. That meant double-headers, three nights a week. Half-times and between games, the hallway that surrounded the arena's core was a-jangle with buzz and laughter and "How you been, man?" "How'd you like my boy?" Fan and athlete circled, flesh pressed against flesh, plaques on the wall conjuring heroes who had passed. There had never been anything like it.

Even the Warriors were local

Eighty percent of the players were local. They'd played each other in school, in summer leagues, and on playgrounds. The rivalries were intense, the competition fierce and the skill level high. (And that season, coming in to test them were Oscar Robertson, of Cincinnati, Jerry West, with West Virginia, and Philadelphia's greatest high school player, Wilt Chamberlain, with Kansas.) If you were a basketball fan, you had rooted for your favorites from courtside through these levels and— since the NBA then allowed teams preferential rights to players from their areas— into the pros. When Chamberlain joined the Philadelphia Warriors in 1959, with Paul Arizin, Tom Gola and Guy Rodgers, four of its five starters were local boys.

Rodgers was a senior at Temple in the 1957-58 season. He led a prototypical Philadelphia team: small, highly talented guards (himself and Bill "Pickles" Kennedy); undersized, over-achieving forwards (Mel Brodsky and Jay "Pappy" Norman); and an earnest if limited center (Tink Van Patton). All but Van Patton were products of Philadelphia public schools. So was their coach, the already legendary Harry Litwack, inventor of the box-and-one defense, master of the switching man-to-man zone, a wizard at transforming the unrecruited into the formidable. (Rodgers, whom scouts had deemed "too short," had an inch on Kennedy. Norman had come out of the service to play football and had bum knees. Brodsky was a walk-on, and Van Patton had busted a leg as a high school senior.) With another Philadelphian, Hal "King" Lear, instead of Kennedy in the backcourt, Temple had reached the semi-finals of the NCAA tournament two years earlier. This team looked better.

Why Temple won me over

There are two types of sports fans. The more highly evolved savor the beauty of the movements, appreciate the finely honed bodies and derive joy from the physical excellence on display. They approach games as aficionados do ballet.

I was of the lower kind: a fan who rooted out of his own discomforts and hurts and shortcomings. Who identified with a team or individual who appeared more talented, more powerful, more capable of vanquishing foes. A fan who won if his heroes won. "They keep score, don't they?" was how I defended my position. "You don't pay money to watch scrimmages, do you?"

Temple became my team of choice. Penn was Ivy League and, hence, effete. LaSalle, St. Joe's and Villanova were too full of the older brothers of kids who'd hassled my friends and me as they'd passed through our neighborhood on their way home from St. Francis de Sales or Transfiguration ("Transy") Elementary in southwest Philly. But to a son of parents who had met each other at a fund-raiser for Spanish Loyalists, who had been raised on Paul Robeson's Songs of Free Men, the scrappy, gritty Owls, from their cruddy, ghetto-bordering Broad Street campus, exemplified the Brotherhood of Man.

Temple had fielded more black players than the other city schools combined. And with Brodsky inheriting the yarmulke of Fred Cohen and Hal "Hotsy" Reinfeld (as well as Joey Goldenberg and my camp counselor, Gerry Lipson, on the bench), it also had the Jews. When Gerry introduced me to Pappy Norman upon their arrival one evening at my section and he had shook my hand, my 15-year-old allegiance was cemented.

The aristocratic, all-white Kentucky Colonels

After losing two of its first three games"“ in triple overtime, 85-83, at Kentucky, and two days later, at Cincinnati, when still physically and emotionally depleted"“ this Temple team had won 27 in a row, to again make the NCAA semi-finals and a rematch with Kentucky in Lexington. That game evoked aspects of the mythic: The ragamuffin Owls against the aristocratic Colonels.

Kentucky had won three national championships (plus one NIT) in the last decade; Temple had won none. Kentucky had Cliff Hagan, Frank Ramsey and Lou Tsioropoulos (practically 4% of the entire league) in the NBA "“ and would have had twice that, but for the point-shaving scandal of 1952; Temple had no one. And in that time of Montgomery bus boycotts and Little Rock school desegregation, Kentucky remained an all-white team, in an all-white conference, in a segregated state. (Unlike some SEC schools, Kentucky did play teams with black athletes, but made little effort to control the insults and threats hurled upon them from the stands.) It seemed God had scripted the game to make a point.

The geek in the kitchen

Television had no interest in the NCAAs in 1958. I listened on a radio in the kitchen of a girl named"“ no kidding"“ Hope. She dated Eric, the president of a high school fraternity to which I tenuously belonged. She'd invited Eric to a party, and he'd invited even his geekiest "brothers." Gangly, gawky and eye-glassed, I felt about as desirable at parties as a banana slug on a pastry cart. The radio, with its game, was a place where I could withdraw and, through my devotions, feel myself a person of consequence, something I could not achieve by dancing to "Silhouettes."

On the hostile and malignant floor, even with Rodgers hampered by a bad back, Temple led by six points with two minutes to play. Then Kennedy was called for a charge whose legitimacy, for the ensuing 50 years, has been questioned by Philadelphians more fervently than that of Piltdown Man. A pass from Brodsky slipped through the rattled sophomore's fingers. Kentucky, 61-60.

A knife in the throat. A scream in the night. An anguish oiled by Goya.

The winners shellacked Elgin Baylor and Seattle for the title, and Temple waxed Kansas State for third place in the consolation game.

Sports, they say, prepare you for the world. Being a Philadelphia sports fan prepared you better than most.♦


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