Building memories
of the Palestra

By William Kenny
Times Staff Writer

Some things, we don’t appreciate until they’re gone. But that’s not a problem with The Palestra.
Aging and perhaps antiquated to modern college basketball, much like the venerable Academy of Music has been deemed by the Philadelphia Orchestra, The Palestra’s glory days are behind it by most accounts.
After all, the Philadelphia Big 5 is a shadow of its former self as a one-of-a-kind city championship series.
Furthermore, the 80-year-old venue’s permanent resident, the University of Pennsylvania basketball team, is no longer a true threat on the national stage. That is, an Ivy League title and occasional NCAA tournament win are as good as it’s going to get for the 21st-century Quakers.
But unlike some local sports shrines of the past, places like Connie Mack Stadium and Veterans Stadium, The Palestra has not been allowed to decay into oblivion. Rather, those in a position to preserve it, not only for posterity but as a productive and eminently charming basketball venue, have done so.
They’ve kept the building’s tradition alive for younger folks to absorb firsthand. That new generation has an unlikely constituent in Mikaelyn Austin, the 2004 Penn grad who last week premiered her sentimental yet completely unembellished tribute documentary, The Palestra: Cathedral of Basketball, to an enthralled audience of some of the most discriminating college basketball minds that the city has to offer.
Austin, the writer and producer, did not grow up in Philly. She’s from sunny San Diego. So, she never accompanied her dad — or her mom, for that matter — to a classic Big 5 doubleheader and never watched the old city series telecasts on Channel 17 with Big Al Meltzer doing play-by-play.
She would have been too young for all of that, anyway.
Likewise, she didn’t live through Penn’s 1979 Final Four run, Villanova’s 1985 national title, Temple’s rise to the No. 1 national ranking in 1988 or the 30-2 dream season of Lionel Simmons’ 1990 La Salle Explorers.
So, for the purposes of her film, she let the old heads do the talking.
Its running time is a little over an hour. It seems like about 10 minutes.
Legitimately, Austin could have made a miniseries out of it — a la Ken Burns’ Baseball — when one considers that the 8,700-seat arena has hosted more college basketball games and more visiting teams than any other arena in the nation, not to mention more NCAA tournament games.
The list of icons featured in the $70,000 masterpiece reads like a guest list at a Springfield, Mass., hotel on the night before a National Basketball Hall of Fame banquet. Not everybody is an inductee, but all are considered members of the sport’s high court.
Baseball Hall of Famer Harry Kalas narrates with his unmistakable voiceovers. Many locals will recall him co-hosting the Channel 17 telecasts with Meltzer in the 1970s. Basketball Hall inductees Bill Bradley, John Chaney, Chuck Daly and Dr. Jack Ramsay grace the film, along with Bill Campbell, Phil Martelli, Rollie Massimino, Fran Dunphy, Sonny Hill, Bill Raftery, sportswriter Dick Weiss and 76ers stat man Harvey Pollock, to name a few.
Dan Baker, the stadium voice for the Phillies and Eagles and former Big 5 executive secretary, naturally makes an appearance. He was a major influence on the project behind the scenes, too, according to the filmmaker.
Austin, who played four years in The Palestra as a shooting guard for the Quakers’ women’s team, says that getting so many authorities to take part was the least of her challenges during the three-year project.
"The moment I said I was producing a historic documentary on The Palestra, I gained one-hundred percent of their attention," she said.
If the nostalgic interviews are the lifeblood of the film, then the montages of archival photos and vintage game video supply the adrenaline. Every era is represented, from the pre-Big 5 era of the 1930s, ’40s and early ’50s when Tom Gola, Al Severance and Harry Litwack debuted at the arena, to Jameer Nelson’s 2004 St. Joseph’s squad that went undefeated in the regular season and claimed a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament.
Unlike Villanova and Temple, St. Joe’s continued to schedule many of its home games at The Palestra after the 1985 downsizing of the Big 5. The Hawks still use the Penn venue as a home-away-from-home.
Naturally, plenty of attention is paid to classic Big 5 battles of yore, such as the clash of titans in ’Nova’s Howard Porter and La Salle’s Ken Durrant in the late ’60s and early ’70s. But several of the experts note that the arena has seen plenty of alien powerhouses over the years, too.
Bradley and his Princeton teams stand out on the list, along with the old Kentucky and DePaul teams, Oscar Robertson’s Cincinnati Bearcats, Jerry West’s West Virginia Mountaineers and Wilt Chamberlain’s Kansas Jayhawks.
Daly, who coached Penn before leading the Detroit Pistons to multiple NBA titles, described how even top-ranked teams would succumb to the intense heat and noise routinely produced there by close to 10,000 partisan spectators.
"Once the reputation was built, it scared other teams," Daly said.
Meltzer noted how after one particularly trying visit, the late Hall of Fame coach Al McGuire vowed never to return there with his Marquette team. ••
Visit www.PalestraDocumentary.com to pre-order "The Palestra: Cathedral of Basketball" and for more information.
Reporter William Kenny can be reached at 215-354-3031 or bkenny@phillynews.com