The Uproar In Philadelphia

All Big Five games are audience-participation affairs, and almost all are sellouts. The fans arrive bearing huge rolls of paper with which to taunt the opposing cheering section. Just before the game begins the banners are slowly unwound and passed down the row, the letters coming into sight one by one, as the members of the clergy in the audience sit nervously and hope that the canons of decency will not be trampled as they have been in the past. The banner game got so far out of bounds that Big Five officials have ordered them screened by faculty members. One memorable St. Joseph's banner observed that LA SALLE IS AN ARMPIT. When another St. Joseph's roll-out proclaimed, LA SALLE IS YELLOW AND BLUE BUT MOSTLY YELLOW, the La Salle fans quickly unfurled: IS THAI WHAT THE JESUITS TEACH YOU? The clerics of the three Catholic schools in the Big Five frequently find themselves perplexed over the banners, and call upon their lay friends for translations. Last year Villanova students harassed St. Joseph's star Steve Courtin with a rollout saying, STICK IT IN YOUR EAR, COURTIN! The next day Jeremiah Ford II, Penn's athletic director and one of the founders of the Big Five, received a phone call from the Rev. Joseph M. Geib, S.J., faculty moderator of athletics at St. Joseph's. As Ford tells it, Father Geib said, "Jerry, are there some things that I should know about life? I didn't see anything wrong with that sign." Ford assured Father Geib that the interpretation was all in the eye of the beholder.

The St. Joseph's students, the smallest student body of the Big Five colleges, are, by common agreement of the others, the most enthusiastic, and the rhythm of their cheering is set by a bass drummer who surely must have one of the strongest right arms in the bass-drumming business. When CBS engineers arrived on campus last week to discuss a regional telecast of St. Joe's Saturday game against Boston College, they asked the bass drummer if he would cease and desist just this once, because it was difficult for them to get a proper sound level with the drum causing the meter to fluctuate across the red line. The drummer had a solution; he explained that he would simply beat the drum constantly, and the engineers would have no problem of fluctuation. ( CBS lost that argument and another one. The network asked for a specified number of time-outs, to enable them to peddle products, but St. Joseph's Coach Jack Ramsay, an independent thinker, author and doctor of education, said he would call timeouts at St. Joseph's pleasure, not CBS's, and did so.)

For years the St. Joseph's mascot has been a Hawk—a campus leader, masked and feathered, who is required to flap his arms without cessation every time the team plays. In time-outs the Hawk does fancy figure eights and chandelles while the student body screams, "The Hawk will never die," and enemy students boo. Other Big Five schools have countered with their own mascots: Penn has a Quaker, dressed in Franklinesque style, tiny glasses, a wig and tennis shoes; Temple has an Owl; La Salle has an Explorer dressed in astronaut garb; and Villanova has an ersatz Wildcat. But the Hawk still commands the most attention, and is usually the eye of a rooting hurricane.

Every year the faculties and student leaders of the Big Five schools implore the fans to desist from their wild antics, and every year the students ignore them. Of all the five student bodies, only Pennsylvania's behaves itself, and that is largely because Penn students are not as basketball crazy as the other, smaller schools. When the Penns produce a roll-out it usually says something wildly imaginative, like PENN—IVY CHAMPS IN '65. More often Penn will arrive with no banners at all (which once led St. Joe's to roll out: TOO SOPHISTICATED?). Thus unsupported, Penn still manages to rise to Big Five heights and give its rivals fits, and this season almost dumped a strong Villanova team in a game that could serve as the archetype of all Palestra battles. The astute Pennsylvania coach, Jack McCloskey, ordered his men to play stall ball, and as a result the game was tied at the half 19-19, while the crowd hooted and screamed. Pennsylvania opened up a bit in the second half, and soon was leading by seven. The tension over McCloskey's tactics was agonizing. Villanova Publicist Ken Mugler was ordered out of his benchside seat by Referee Lou Eisenstein for baiting the officials. The Penn water boy was so jumpy he sloshed water on Coach McCloskey and doused Penn star Stan Pawlak, who said, "I'm going to kill you!"

Toward the end Villanova began pressing for the ball, and finally tied the game up; Penn missed scoring a remarkable upset when a rimmer fell out at the buzzer, and Villanova went on to win the game in overtime. The two coaches met for the traditional handshake, and Villanova's Jack Kraft said to McCloskey: "You're not gonna make yourself very popular playing that kind of game." Said McCloskey: "If you want the ball why don't you go after it?" and the two of them stomped off, shaking arms and fingers at each other.

This was the first open clash of Big Five coaches in anyone's memory. The wonder is that they are not constantly fighting in the tense caldrons of Big Five games. But, for the most part, they are good friends off the court, as they are expert tacticians on it, and a more typical scene was the one last Friday after the Villanova-La Salle game, when Coach Bob Walters of La Salle rushed over to embrace Villanova's Jack Kraft. Preparing for the game, Walters had hardly slept in three days. On Wednesday night his La Salle team had lost to Louisville in Louisville after a shoddy first-half performance ("They were already thinking too much about the Friday night game with Villanova," Walters theorized later). After that game Walters took a pair of wake-up pills, rented a car and drove all night from Louisville to Philadelphia, 700 miles, to get ready for Villanova. His deep-set eyes looking like little red coals, Walters whipped and barked his team into a state of nervous preparedness. "You're not thinking!" he shouted at a big pivot man. "Why that extra dribble? Just shoot! A pivot man loses 50% efficiency when he what?"

"Dribbles," the player muttered.

"Dribbles! That's right. That's what you were doing last night and you've got to cut it out!"

For two and a half hours Walters stood in the center of the little gymnasium at La Salle and rasped orders in his sandpapery voice, now and then swaying slightly with fatigue, hands on his hips, blowing short clouds like angry smoke signals from an ivory-tipped cigar. He apologized for keeping some friends waiting. "Ordinarily we wouldn't go through a long drill the night before a game." he explained, "but this is the Villanova game."

The next night Villanova produced female cheerleaders, recruited from its Nursing Division, for the first time in its history. La Salle responded with two roll-outs: LA SALLE COLLEGE FOR MEN and WHO WEARS THE PANTS AT VILLANOVA? At half time La Salle sent out five students in female attire to lampoon Villanova's cheerleaders, but the Wildcat cheering section subdued them with a steady chant: "LaSalle is sick!" followed by a foghorn voice shouting, "Get those fairies off the floor!" The consensus was that La Salle won the battle of tastelessness, but Villanova won the ball game 86-72, and Bob Walters' sleepless nights went for naught.