Q&A with Philadelphia Daily News' Rich Hofmann

We caught up with Rich Hofmann, a 1980 Penn grad who joined the Daily News out of college and – as you’ll read – never left. As a sportswriter for The DP, though, Hofmann did get to experience the 1979 Final Four run, the Chuck Daly and Bob Weinhauer eras of Penn basketball coaches and plenty more.

Daily Pennsylvanian: You wrote a column back in March of last year saying that the Big East has been good for the Philadelphia basketball community over the last 30 years and will continue to be so. How did you feel about the future of the Philly basketball community when Big East first came along?

Rich Hofmann: When the Big East first came along, the reaction in the Philadelphia basketball community was something just sort of alarmed. You have to understand what things were like back then. Everybody played pretty much every home game at the Palestra. The doubleheaders, and the Big 5 standings, were the backbone of the thing, and college basketball in this town was beyond provincial. With the arrival of the Big East, it threatened what had been wonderfully comfortable.

DP: When you got to Penn in 1976, how likely did you think that a Final Four appearance was for Penn?

RH: When I first got to Penn, I never even considered the Final Four as a possibility. Two weeks before they traveled to Salt Lake City, I didn’t even consider it as a possibility.

DP: Were you able to cover Penn basketball in both the Daly and Weinhauer eras? If so, how did the two coaches compare from your perspective covering the team at the time?

RH: I never covered Daly — he left at the beginning of my sophomore year, if memory serves. His departure, to be a Sixers assistant, was a last-minute thing, a week or two before the start of practice; Weinhauer got the job because he was the top assistant, not because they did some big search.

People often forget that Daly was not a popular coach among Penn fans in his last year. In the pre-shot clock era, Daly was the kind of coach who would be up by 18 with 5 minutes left and hold the ball, calculating that he couldn’t lose — and he was right, he never did lose. But the 18-point leave inevitably dwindled to four at some point, and the fans hated it.

DP: During your time at Penn, what was the relationship between the basketball team and the student body, how much on-campus excitement among students surrounded the team and the Palestra in your time at Penn?

RH: Interest in the team really began to pick up in the 1977-78 season. Student attendance went way up, and students used to stand for extended periods of the game. I still remember when the Daily News’ Phil Jasner, who then covered colleges, wrote about “what has become a revival meeting in the South Stands.” At the same time, I don’t want to pretend — a Penn-Harvard game on Friday night might draw 1,100 people.

DP: What was the highlight of the ’79 Final Four run from your perspective covering the team?

RH: The Final Four year, I was sports co-editor. The first tournament game was at Raleigh, N.C., against Iona. I was a junior and we had two great seniors who were the basketball beat guys — John Eisenberg and Jon Lansner — so they went to the game and I stayed home to put out the paper.

But after Penn won, Eisenberg and Lansner said they could get me a pass to sit in the WXPN radio booth if I could get to Raleigh. I had no car, and little money, so I took the bus. I still remember it cost $31. It was an overnight bus and I got to the Raleigh bus station at about 6 a.m. I figured I’d go have breakfast before I woke those guys up to come get me. After eating, I sat down in the big waiting room of the bus station. I was alone for a few minutes, when a disheveled guy — obviously drunk — came in, sat right next to me, belched and then threw up on my shoes. Needless to say, I called them to come get me. I watched the game from this radio booth, high above the court.

When Penn took the lead at the end, I can still remember jumping from my seat and hitting my head on the roof of Reynolds Coliseum.

RH: My favorite Palestra memory was the year before the Final Four. It’s my favorite because it involves more than just Penn. In 1978, they actually played a first-round NCAA tournament doubleheader at the Palestra. I didn’t cover it – I sat in the stands with my friends, in the same seat I had all year as part of my season tickets. They might have charged us an extra $5 or so, but there was no lottery, no nothing – you got your same seat, guaranteed, if you wanted it.

So there I was, in the eighth row, for the NCAA tournament. The first game was La Salle-Villanova in a wild (and wildly entertaining) game where defense was pretty much a rumor. Villanova won. The second game was Penn-St. Bonaventure. That is correct – Penn had a home game in the tournament. That’s how small-time the tournament was back then. Needless to say, the Bonnies didn’t have a chance.

As for my sportswriting career, it started at The DP because I promised myself that I would join an activity my first week at school, and that was the one I chose. There was no great preparation or anything. I just wanted to join something so I had a second set of friends outside of my dorm. My first story was about women’s volleyball, and the editor’s reaction after I turned it in was, “But where are the quotes?” No, I was not a prodigy.

At the Daily News, I was hired in April of my senior year, just before graduation, for a temporary position because someone had suffered a heart attack. Six weeks turned into a summer when he suffered a relapse, and then they found a way to hire me for real in late August.

How did they find the job? We had a guy whose job was working 20 hours a week as an editor on the desk and 20 hours as the outdoors writer, and he left to go to the Inquirer as the full-time outdoors writer. They replaced him with a different desk guy as the outdoors writer, but he was terrible.

So then they went to another, older guy, Joe Greenday, who spent half of his time working on the desk and half as the golf writer. They asked him if, for his last few years before retirement, would he rather work half outdoors and half golf, and not have to work nights on the desk anymore. He said, “I don’t know which end of the pole goes in the water.” They said, “You’ll figure it out.” Because he agreed to try, I got his spot on the desk — and I never left.

SEE ALSO

Q&A with Penn basketball alum Craig Littlepage

Q&A with former Penn and current Temple assistant coach Dave Duke

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.