BTO Exclusive: At The Palestra, Time Stands Still

BTO Exclusive: At The Palestra, Time Stands Still

Many aspects on the college game are beyond tainted, luckily, there's a time capsule in Philadelphia that can bring fans back to simpler times.  In Philly, an old-fashioned Big 5 game at the Palestra is all you need.


 By BRENDAN F. QUINN
Basketball Times

Once it was over on Wednesday night, a collective exhale extinguished the passion. It was a long, deep breath into the steamy air of an 83-year-old cathedral.

On the Villanova side, a nightlong crusade from a plucky underdog left the Wildcats battered, but not beaten.

On the Saint Joseph’s side, an emotion-charged effort saw the Hawks play over their head against a team they had no right doing so against. 

Throughout the old gym, a sold-out crowd of 8,722 diehards exhausted itself for well over two hours. These fans – Saint Joseph’s and Villanova fans – come to this annual game choked with animosity. As they cheer, it’s not sweat that drips from their brow – it’s venom. Hatred is a strong word, but this comes close. Red-faced and charged with fervor, they watched as the Hawks, a book of matches, nearly took down the Wildcats, a flamethrower.

Whew.

After third-ranked ’Nova completed its catch-your-breath 97-89 victory over St. Joe’s in the Holy War, there was nothing left to be said.  

It was the Big 5. 

It was the Palestra. 

College basketball’s time warp.

“Man, those ghosts just refused to go away tonight,” said Jack Scheuer before the postgame news conference. A revered writer from the Associated Press, Scheuer has covered basketball in Philadelphia since 1958, three years after the inception of the Big 5. He has seen La Salle, Penn, Saint Joseph’s, Temple and Villanova trade haymakers since the Eisenhower Administration.  

Back when Scheuer first covered the Big 5, it’s unlikely that blaming “The Ghosts of the Palestra” was a plausible explanation for what happened on Wednesday. The building was only 30 years old in ’58. The ghosts were just being born.  

In the glory days of the 1960s, all of Philly’s City Series games were played at the Palestra. Those who attended those wars seem to drift off when retelling the stories. Sold-out crowds were split down the middle – half screaming for one team, the other half screaming for the other. Streamers filled the air after each team’s opening basket. “Rollouts,” banners unfurled by the students, could stir as much controversy as a bad call by an official. When any Big 5 outlier had the misfortune of playing a city team at the Palestra, well, they had little chance. 

But now it’s 2009. Times haven’t just changed, they’ve been transformed.  Everywhere, that is, except at the Palestra. Even though all Big 5 games are no longer housed at the Palestra, the University of Pennsylvania’s old barn on 33rd St. remains a time machine.

“These games – and everyone in here has seen a million of them – you can never predict what will happen,” said Villanova coach Jay Wright. “You’ve got to tough it out. That was a classic Big 5 atmosphere.”

Just like the coaches that walk its sidelines, writers love to wax poetic about the Palestra, like Frost and Hawthorne writing of New England. The building is a living, breathing vessel, coated with memories, powered by passion. It brings out the kid in the hardnosed, roughshod fans in Philadelphia. There’s no place like it in the country – a hallowed ground that’s gone unchanged.  

It’s the one place where you can expect a sub-.500 team to bring a top-five team to the brink.

“I do this to win basketball games,” said Saint Joseph’s coach Phil Martelli, “so this loss really stinks. On the other side of that, what I want for these kids is to have memories that they can take with them. And if they can remember the night when they competed against a Final Four contender with that noise, well then that’s a good thing. Not all losses are losing experiences, and not all wins are winning experiences. We lost the game here, we didn’t lose the experience.”

There’s something about the sound generated in the Palestra that scribes have been trying to put their fingers on for years. The collective, “Yeeeaaaaahhhhhhhh!” that thunders when a jumper falls in a late-game rally … it can’t be matched anywhere. The hairs on your neck don’t stand, they dance. There are goose bumps, lots of them. That’s why any true-blooded Philadelphia basketball fan is a votary of the Palestra.

After watching Saint Joseph’s and Temple square off at the Palestra last February, John Feinstein (a New Yorker) declared that the building is, “still, hands down, the best place in the country to watch a college basketball game,” in his Sunday column in The Washington Post.

If folks in Durham, Lawrence, Stillwater, Lexington, or Albuquerque visited, they might have to bow and say the same.

Though it’s certainly not the good-old-days of the Big 5 that the good-old-timers love to talk about, these games can still transcend time. Money-driven politics have taken amateurism out of amateur-sports, but a Big 5 game at the Palestra is still pure basketball. The modern amenities amount to nothing. Just grab a soft pretzel, a soda and a program, cram yourself into an aisle, sit on a bleacher and watch the game.  

There is no video screen to aide you.

No stat scoreboard to show you who is doing what.

No ritzy vendors selling $10 sandwiches. 

It’s uncorrupted.

“When I came in here, I didn’t necessarily know anything about the Big 5,” said Villanova’s Scottie Reynolds. “I’m from little ol’ Herndon, Va. We’re a little cooped up down there, so we don’t really know anything. But I actually know all the history now. It’s great.”

Earlier that day, Reynolds assisted Wright. Before the Wildcats play at the Palestra each season, the coach walks his team through the building’s concourse. It’s a lesson for the freshmen. This place doesn’t look like much, but here’s the back-story.  

This was Reynolds’ fourth and final tour. He and Wright led the youngsters through the concourse-turned-museum. They pointed to the display honoring former visiting players, guys like Oscar Robertson, Pete Maravich, Julius Erving, Jerry Lucas, Bill Bradley and, of course, Philly’s own Wilt Chamberlain. They pointed to the display honoring Big 5 coaches, guys like Dr. Jack Ramsay, Chuck Daily, Paul Westhead, John Chaney and Jack Kraft.

They pointed to all of this and explained how five schools within a radius of 17 miles, turned a simple redbrick building into heaven.  

“It’s like an old, high-school gym with everybody on top of you … except it’s like 9,000 people,” Reynolds said.

And that’s the way it will always be.

Times change.

The Palestra doesn’t.


Brendan F. Quinn is a freelance writer in Philadelphia. He has contributed to Basketball Times since 2006 and currently covers games for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Born in 1982, it’s sad to say that he missed the Big 5’s golden era. Luckily, he has friends to recite the tales.

Photo Credit: University of Pennsylvania Athletics 
Photo Credit: Greg Carroccio, Sideline Photo LLC