Calhoun reminisces about legendary M. Hoops season

Despite the unfortunate ending, the '70-71 Quakers are considered by many to be the greatest Penn team ever. One of the stars of that talented squad was David "Corky" Calhoun. Calhoun played three varsity seasons at Penn and earned first team All-Ivy and All-Big 5 honors in each of his three years. As a senior in 1971-72, Calhoun was named MVP of the Big 5, and after graduating from Penn he played eight seasons in the NBA. That is the longest NBA career of any Penn basketball player. In Calhoun's three years at Penn, the Quakers were nearly unstoppable, compiling a 78-6 record and winning three Ivy League titles. Here, he recalls the magical '70-71 season and the loss to Villanova in the Tournament. · Corky Calhoun: The fact that [Villanova] had an ineligble player really didn't have a strong impact at all. I mean, we lost the game. They actually outplayed us that day, and I don't know, had we played better, whether we would have won on that particular day. But I still am convinced that, overall, we were the stronger team. And if we played a handful of games, we would have won the majority of them. But that wasn't our day and they played very well. They seemed to peak at the right time, not only with Howard Porter and Chris Moore? they all played great. They deserved to get to the final. Unfortunately, they prevented us from getting there. We had beaten them earlier in the year, that was the year they had lost seven games altogether. There was the question of whether they would even be invited to the NCAA, because at that point there were only 32 teams. I think that was the case? In the Philadelphia papers, there was speculation over whether they'd even be in the Tournament? We had won a big game 10 days before, beating South Carolina, a highly regarded team and we beat them down in Raleigh. I guess that after winning the big one, playing Villanova -- not that we took them for granted -- but perhaps in the back of our minds, we thought we had achieved the biggest challenge by beating South Carolina. But that turned out not to be the case? From the time, the Class of '72? we really as a group had won quite a bit. We were undefeated as a freshmen team, my sophomore year I think we lost three games, so I think we were pretty much expecting to win. The guys, we had a pretty balanced team? We were solid defensively and we had two great guards, Dave Wohl and Steve Bilsky. They controlled the tempo of the game. I think we had all the pieces we needed to win games, and we did win games. It was almost like the fact that we were highly ranked was a motivation that kept us going. We knew that as long as we kept winning, we'd see our ranking creep up from eight, nine, 10 to four, three, two. It was a great experience that we had.