Basketball In The Summer?

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You’ve got to be kidding.

But I’m not.

That’s not to say hoops aren’t played this time of year. They are.

The WNBA is playing. Kids play ball all year long. There have been great summer league games for as long as you can remember.  Back in the day, the famed Rucker League in New York’s Harlem was a legendary proving ground for those who were hopeful college and professional players.  Listing some of the greats who played there would be endless. Okay, here are a few: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Wilt Chamberlain, Kobe Bryant, Julius Erving, Kevin Durant, Earl ‘the Pearl’ Monroe…

I never thought of writing about basketball until I got a call from someone I met during my years at Syracuse. I haven’t had any contact with him since then, but when he told me his name I immediately knew who he was.

His name is Sam Penceal, who also played in the Rucker League, and he brought back a million memories.

Sam played on SU teams at the very beginning of the great revival of the school’s basketball program which had fallen on hard times. You can underscore hard times.

When I arrived at the school, the Orange were in the midst of incredibly tough years which at one point mired in a 27-game losing streak. One season they won only two games. Then a coach named Fred Lewis was brought in. Nobody ever heard of him. He came from Southern Mississippi, but he was a Brooklyn native. He knew of the immense talent in New York City and in other eastern locales. Fred Lewis was a master recruiter, and that’s what the program needed.

And needed badly.

The single star who launched the great turnaround from mediocrity to national powerhouse was Dave Bing, out of Washington D.C.

Everything was built around Bing, who was an All-American at SU, and later named one of the 50 greatest players in the NBA, performing for the Detroit Pistons.

Lewis surrounded Bing, who later was the Mayor of Detroit for a time, with the cream of the NYC crop.

One of them was Sam Penceal, who besides starting for the Orange, was a media hopeful who I met in a radio and television production class. I was a junior, Sam was a freshman. He became a jack-of-all trades focusing on education and the marketing of nutritional products. He was a school principal and a successful man in his life.

I recalled his mission as a defensive specialist who guarded the #1 scoring threat on the teams the Orange faced. He was 6’3”, and while he felt he could have expanded his role, Lewis thought otherwise.

He was recruited out of Boys High School in Brooklyn, a City powerhouse for years. They won more championships than they lost and boasted some of the greats in the game.

Maybe none better than Connie Hawkins, one of the NBA’s, superior talents and one of the top showmen the sport has seen. I know, it’s ages ago, but it’s there to look up.

A year younger than Penceal, was Vaughn Harper, a rebounding wizard who could leap with best of them and was a top scorer and commander of the boards during his Syracuse tenure. Harper was not big for a rebounder, at 6’4”, but realize that one of them best ever off the glass, Charles Barkley was the same size, only a lot bulkier.

Harper was drafted by the Pistons but never played pro ball. Instead, he found another career. Harper passed away in 2016, at the age of 71, but made his mark as a renowned radio disc jockey, who in 2008 was inducted into the Living Legends Hall of Fame as the fourth Best Urban DJ of all-time. He was a fixture for 30 years for WBLS in New York, hosting a program called “Quiet Storm”, featuring smooth mellow music selections.

I’ve never heard a deeper, more mellifluous, voice than Vaughn Harper’s.

A third member of that team, was not from The City, but a small town upstate, Lyons, NY. By now you may realize I’m talking about Jim Boeheim, a walk-on, who became a starter and eventually a Hall of Fame head coach for Syracuse.

Penceal says Boeheim was in the right place at the right time. Somehow, Sam recalled, the ball came into Jim’s hands, and he knew exactly what to do with it. Shoot the ball, which Boeheim did and did effectively. If Dave Bing was double-teamed, which happened more often than not, Boeheim would be open and made the opposition pay.

While the better athletes improvised and ad-libbed with their jumping, running, and shooting, Jim Boeheim was the guy on the court who followed the coaching instructions to a “T”. It’s no wonder, he had a coaching mind and, of course, the rest is history.

I became a college hoops fanatic growing up. I followed the sport intensely. I listened to out-of-town games on the radio in our apartment in Queens. I could get Kentucky Wildcats broadcasts amid the static, games played by the Big Five in Philadelphia (St. Joseph’s, Villanova, Temple, LaSalle, and Penn), Duke games on a station in Charlotte, and even St. Louis University out of KMOX, the 50,000-watt clear channel outlet in St. Louis.

I sent away and received a ticket to the 1966 Final Four at Cole Field House in College Park, Maryland. By then I was working radio in Philly. Syracuse with Bing, Harper, Boeheim and Penceal were playing Duke for the right to move on to the Final Four.

What a thrill it would be for me to see my alma mater at my first Final Four. But the Blue Devils prevailed and ultimately, I witnessed Texas Western upset Kentucky in the title game. A memorable game indeed. No Orange, but it was still an unforgettable experience.

My chief memory of Penceal, a starter on that ‘66 group, was, as I mentioned, his defensive exploits. I even recalled a four-team December tournament in his sophomore year when he held the great Bill Bradley to 17 points in a victory over Princeton. It was the lowest Bradley ever scored in his sensational college career. Bradley went on to help the New York Knicks win two world championships, before he later became a U.S. Senator from New Jersey.

But Sam added what was the end of the story. Bradley later scored 39 on him before a full house at Madison Square Garden.

Well, you can’t win them all.

In describing his style, Penceal said he was quick but not fast. He often looked like he was lazy and not hustling, but he obviously always hustled. Playing tennis and cycling well into his later years.

It’s funny where your mind goes when you get a call out of the blue. A call that triggered a series of memories I haven’t thought about for years.

That’s what transpired when I saw an email from Sam Penceal, a name out of the past, setting off conversations and communication.

Much of it was about basketball, in the summer, no less.