For most of America, it’s the Lord’s Day, a day of rest, a day for football on TV, for The New York Times crossword, for yard work, brunch and barbecues.
Not for Jack. No, for Jack Eggleston, “Sundays are always miserable.”
Sundays, for the big man, mean aches. Body aches from two straight nights of total exhaustion on the basketball court and headaches from drowning it all out late Saturday night. The only cure? A bottle of red and a bottle of blue — Gatorade, that is. He’s a Quaker for life.
But Jack is built for this. Few can claim they’ve played three-straight overtime games, enduring through 45 minutes in all three. The forward sits sixth in the nation in minutes per game at 38.0. He is Penn’s Iron Man.
“It’s unbelievable. He is unbreakable, indestructible,” senior guard Tyler Bernardini says in one breath. “I don’t ever think I’ve seen him bleed, let alone bruise. He’s made of some type of alloy.”
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Whatever the composition, it’s served Jack well these 22 years. From basketball practices to lacrosse to hockey — often all in the same afternoon — the south Florida native has put the old temple through a beating. And he’s stronger for it.
Jack played wire-to-wire for his St. Thomas Aquinas high school team out of necessity, given the squad’s lack of frontcourt depth.
Coming to Penn, he was faced with a similar situation. With all-Ivy bigs Mark Zoller and Steve Danley out of the picture, there was a vacuum down low. Zoller’s backups barely had more experience than Jack, the wide-eyed freshman.
It was Jack’s off-the-charts I.Q. that got him into Penn. But it was his soaring basketball I.Q. that got him into the team’s starting five.
It comes as no surprise that he played 33 minutes in that first season-opening loss to Drexel.
Four years later, Penn coach Jerome Allen acknowledges his lack of big men. Yet even as a senior, Jack earns his minutes every game. All thirty-eight point zero of them.
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Jack’s career as a Quaker began as a phenomenon of the ‘right place, right time’ variety. Next week, however, he’ll leave the Palestra without an Ivy ring — one of just three classes since 1965 to suffer the unimaginable fate — so perhaps it was really the wrong time.
Does the Iron Man have regrets?
“Obviously this four years, from a basketball perspective, has not quite been what I’ve hoped,” he says after a hefty sigh. “But in terms of the people I’ve met, in terms of the connections hopefully I’ll make down the road, I think I made the right choice.”
It is a choice, Jack reminisces four years later, that’s now laden with irony.
He could have gone to American and been a four-year starter, he thought. He could have taken a scholarship to Lafayette and turned the Leopards’ program around. Or he could come to Penn and sit on the bench while the perennial Ivy League champs hung banner after banner after banner.
He chose the latter, but the scenarios didn’t play out quite right. The titles stopped coming for Penn after Jack’s arrival. Instead, American took home Patriot League championships Jack’s freshman and sophomore years. Come March, Jack had to sit on the couch and watch the Eagles dance with No. 3 Villanova and No. 2 Tennessee.
“It’s tough,” Jack concedes with a candor matched by few in Penn Athletics. “I don’t know if I’d say I regret it.”
Instead of regrets, Jack has minutes — 3,669.5 of them.
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“My dad always says it, but health is wealth,” remarks Jack’s partner in crime, Zack Rosen. If one player knows what Jack’s Sundays are like, it’s Zack, who averages just a minute less per game than his counterpart.
“He’s gotten his body in good enough shape; he can handle that amount of stress and that many miles,” Rosen says.
In a program recently riddled with injuries, Jack stands out, unmarred by the bug that’s taken entire seasons away from the likes of Bernardini.
“He’s the only one,” the wingman says. “How many practices he’s missed over his four years, you could easily count on one hand.”
Jack suffered a broken nose the first day of classes freshman year — it was healed by the time the season rolled around. “That’s it,” Bernardini said. “His injury quota was filled.”
With three games remaining in his career, Jack easily remembers the four he didn’t start.
“Howard, Miami, Cornell and Princeton,” he rattles off without a pause. The last was a fluke — a senior night when Cam Lewis got the nod in his final game.
The minutes Jack has missed on the floor are so few and far between, his teammates rarely notice his absence.
“I don’t expect him to be out of the game because he’s always in there,” Rosen says. “Even when I come out, I’m usually watching him.”
“It’s tough to take him off the floor when he always does things the right way,” Allen says.
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Jack always carries the burden. Of the minutes, of last week’s loss, of the program and the banners and the ...
“As a human being, I feel for him sometimes because we ask him to do so much,” Allen says.
Rookie Fran Dougherty, Jack’s protege, may pick up some of the slack when Jack heads off — hopefully to Europe for a stint overseas. But it’s hard to fill that void.
“We’re going to miss Jack. Period,” Rosen says.
“He will definitely be missed,” Allen says. “I think he’s left his stamp in terms of how to prepare yourself every day.”
He’s the 40-minute man. The Iron Man. He’s been there before: close games, blowouts, big leads, comebacks, upsets, downturns, rebounds, rematches — a resurgence. That institutional knowledge doesn’t just happen overnight.
“I think they’ll be alright,” Jack says. “I think they’ll be alright.”
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