On October 14, I think it will finally sink in. When the Penn basketball teams take the court for their first practice of the season and I look across the Palestra floor and see an unfamiliar face at the microphone, I will realize what a mistake I made.
In my two years at Penn, I have covered four basketball games at the Palestra and walked the aisles of Press Row countless other times and never once had a conversation with John McAdams.
Now McAdams is gone, and I am still here -- no better off than when I started two years ago.
No better off than when, with dreams of a career in sports, I first set foot on Press Row and had a chance to pick the brain of a man who has had the best seat in the house for as many sporting events as anyone else on Earth.
Then I had a second chance. Then a third.
I would get to it some day, I told myself.
I would ask him how he came to be an official scorer for the Phillies -- whether he, like me, sat in the upper deck at baseball games as a kid without peanuts and Cracker Jack, but with a scorecard and pencil.
I would ask him how he remembered how to pronounce so many names. I would ask him what his favorite memories of the Big 5 were. I would ask him what kind of things John Chaney says on the sideline if he says that when the cameras are rolling.
I would ask him...
Now I can't ask him.
From what I heard in the days following McAdams' death, he would have given me answers to those questions beyond anything I would have expected and with fond recollection. But now I'll never know.
Now I'll only know him as an announcer -- an announcer who took his job more seriously than anyone I can remember.
It was down to a routine, and we in Section 115, Row 4 knew that routine cold, from "college basketball's most historic gym" to "Penn will inbound the ball to begin tonight's second half." The Row 4 gang even got upset when the sponsors changed and the routine was thrown off ever so slightly.
It is a sad irony that during the NBA Finals when an announcer in Detroit was doing it so wrong, so much attention was brought to an announcer in Philadelphia who was doing it so right.
And it is because of his professionalism night in and night out that McAdams, who will live on in memory as one of the many ghosts of the Palestra, will be remembered forever. He will be as much of the Palestra lore as the players and coaches who have set foot on the court. As much as the court itself.
It's a funny thing about the Palestra. For the last two years, I've heard people talking about the building as a "basketball heaven", and I never really gave that term any thought.
With the passing of John McAdams, I have been forced to think about their comparison with heaven. And I figured out that they may have been right, but now they are most definitely wrong.
The comparison between the Palestra and heaven isn't even fair anymore.
For the first time in 25 years, heaven has a better announcer.
Zachary Levine is a junior Mathematics major from Delmar, N.Y., and is sports editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. His e-mail address is zlevine@sas.upenn.edu.
