Penn basketball memories: You are not the father!

We're lucky at Penn to have many notable alumni who are always willing to help out. I guess we're even more lucky that '62 alum Maury Povich had dreams of being a sports broadcaster and spent much of his time at the Palestra as an undergrad. I spoke with him on the phone to gather some of his favorite Penn basketball and Palestra memories.

Well I was at Penn from '57 to '62 and ... I also broadcast the games on WXPN. I was a sports director at WXPN. So these were the days when the Palestra had double-headers 3 times a week and all 5 area teams played there, it was their home court- for La Salle, Villanova, St Joe’s, Penn and Temple. When I was there — when I first got there — we had Wilt Chamberlain and Kansas played, and they did that because Kansas gave Wilt a favor to go back to his hometown so they played at the Paletsra. Oscar Robertson, who was at Cincinatti, played at the Palestra, and we saw and covered all those games. And we had the great players there- Lenny Wilkens from Providence, great eastern schools all played at the Palestra. And at the same time you had the 5 area schools were really good basketball schools at the time and Penn probably- this was a time where penn had not grown to its basketball height yet- that came a little later. So it was kind of like embryonic in its basketball history. But they were fairly good teams, but they didn’t contend for Ivy League titles, and it was only a few years later when John Wideman came to the team that Penn really became good. But I can remember, I used to go down 3 days a week and broadcast both the double header, three times a week, and I lugged this big 50-pound tape recorder because I wanted to hear my tapes of the game because I wanted to be a sportscaster- I actually started out as a sportscaster afterwards. But I went back to the Palestra a couple years ago for the first time in 40 or 50 years, and it almost looked the same. There were a few seats with backs on them, but otherwise they looked the same.

Actually Wilt Chamberlain and Oscar Robertson- those two guys, they were the greatest basketball – two greatest college basketball players there were- and to have them in the Palestra, in your home, since it’s on the Penn campus, it was electric. The other memory is just the great support that all 5 schools had. I remember It used to be like a 10,000 seat arena, but because there were at least 2 schools playing a night, and maybe 3 if they were playing each other, it was packed. And we couldn’t pack Franklin Field- I guarantee you there were more people that time at the Palestra than there would be at Franklin Field. Also the coaches were great. The penn coach at the time was a man named Jack McCloskey, who went on to become a pro coach in the NBA for many many years- in fact he’s still broadcasting on the radio many games. Harry Litwack, the Temple coach, Jack Ramsay, who is still broadcasting radio games for the NBA, he was the St. Joe’s coach, Jack Kraft was the Villanova coach, and the All-American Tom Gola who went to La Salle, was the La Salle coach. So the coaches were almost as popular as the players. And also in terms of Penn basketball, I used to talk to Chuck Daly a lot about it. Chuck was the Penn coach for a long time before he went into the pros. Digger Phelps and I still had – we see each other once a year and we STILL talk about the Palestra- because he was an assistant coach at Penn. The greatest part about it is it has a campus feeling. It’s not like a new arena, it’s not like set apart from the campus, it’s just part of the campus, I don’t think Penn.. Penn would not be Penn without the Palestra.