Perspective: Time stands still at the Palestra

John McAdams, the Palestra's public address announcer, makes a living with his voice. For 19 seasons, he has been a fixture at the mike, reminding fans that the Palestra is "college basketball's most historic gym." But even McAdams' smooth voice quivers just a little bit when he recalls his first impression of the Palestra in 1956. "Wow! You look up at the ceiling, and you say, 'What a place!' You walk in there, and you just look around, you see everything -- the big high ceiling, the scoreboard, the stands?. Wow." Almost a half century later, little has changed. It's 11:45 a.m. on a Saturday, seven hours before tip-off, and the Yale team has just filed into the Palestra for its morning shoot-around. Dan Harrell, the Palestra's caretaker, watches the wide-eyed Elis take in their surroundings. The Yale players, five of them freshmen, remove their warmups in a reverent silence. "I can tell when an Ivy League team comes in if they're young," says Harrell, 56, who has worked for Penn since '89. "Because when they walk in, the players look up. They look around and they know they're someplace special." As the fifth-oldest gym still in use, the Palestra doesn't have the distinction of being the dean of college arenas. With a capacity of 8,700, it's hardly the biggest facility. It doesn't have luxury boxes or a jumbotron scoreboard or even comfortable seats. What it has, though, is more character than any other arena in the country. And no one challenges McAdams when he calls it college basketball's most historic gym. In its 73 years, the Palestra has hosted more games and more visiting teams than any other gym. It hosted the first NCAA Eastern Championship in 1939 and has since played host to 50 NCAA Tournament games. But mere numbers aren't what makes the Palestra so special. "If you throw that subject, the Palestra, out at people in Philadelphia -- actually at anyone with a connection to East Coast basketball -- they just start to rhapsodize about the place," says Alex Wolff, a longtime Sports Illustrated writer who first became acquainted with the Palestra as a Princeton student in the late '70s. "Everybody just feels they have a piece of the building?. Everybody has warm feelings about the place." Talk to anyone who has played or coached in the Big 5. To anyone who grew up within a trolley ride of Penn and spent their winter evenings at Palestra doubleheaders. You hear the same thoughts, the same warm feelings. "I don't think there's any question that it's magical and special," Penn coach Fran Dunphy says. Dunphy often brings the key to the Palestra with him when he speaks to groups. "I'll say how fortunate I am to have this [key] and that the Palestra is my place of work every day -- that's very special." "It's the best building in college basketball," says St. Joseph's coach Phil Martelli, a native of Southwest Philly. "I know that people would say Cameron [Indoor Stadium at Duke] and Pauley Pavilion [at UCLA] and places like that, but to me, [the Palestra's] synonymous with a noise level that doesn't exist anywhere else." With its arched ceiling and huge rafters, the Palestra has been likened to a giant bass drum, where the noise resonates like no place else. "It's so loud, that sometimes you can't decipher if people are cheering for you or against you," says Penn Athletic Director Steve Bilsky, who captained the 28-1 Penn team of '70-71. "It's loud and it's ricocheting off the walls and, as a player, it just propels you to be more juiced up and play better. At Big 5 games in particular, when the crowd is split down the middle, the noise is incessant. "When it's right, and both teams have their share of the crowd, you have noise the entire time," Martelli says. "It's really spectacular. I've never been anywhere else like that." The Palestra served as the exclusive home of the Big 5 and its doubleheaders -- synonymous with streamers, roll-out banners and city bragging rights -- from 1955 to 1986. The rivalry between Penn, Temple, St. Joe's, La Salle and Villanova thrust Philadelphia into a role as the nation's leading basketball city, with the Palestra as its focal point. In 1986, the five schools signed a 10-year pact continuing the round-robin but with a catch -- games would be held at each school's respective gym, closing the book on a storied chapter of the Palestra's history. In 1991, the dagger was driven deeper into local hearts when Villanova successfully petitioned to halve the schedule, ending the round-robin. "It's unfair to students today that they've never been to a Big 5 doubleheader at the Palestra," Harrell says. "Sometimes you have something, you don't realize how lucky you are until it's gone." Through it all, though, the Palestra stood like a portal to another era. Times changed, but the gym stayed the same. Whenever two Big 5 schools tangled at the Palestra, the magic would return, at least for a night. Last May, however, area fans erupted at the surprise announcement that the Big 5 would return to a full round-robin. While the Palestra only sees a share of the games, many view the rebirth of the Big 5 as a victory for everything the Palestra stands for, a reaffirmation of an era when local rivalries were more important than TV contracts, conference requirements or 20,000-seat-arena gate receipts. "['Nova] came to find out that you can play a Big East schedule and play in all these big arenas and be on TV all the time," Wolff says, "but there's nothing like coming into that building on a cold winter's night, making the walk over from 30th Street Station? and being in there for a couple hours and getting that energy." It is that energy that lured Wolff to the Palestra from Old Nassau as an undergraduate. "I was so taken with the place that I would come down from campus, the way if you go to school in New Jersey you can either go to New York and to a jazz club or to Philly and to a college basketball game in a temple, in a cathedral." To thousands, the Palestra serves as both a fan-luring mecca and a shrine to another era, of both basketball and America. Martelli chalks up his days taking the trolley to doubleheaders as a different age, when "parents could trust they could send their kids somewhere, and everything was going to be alright and you were going to get home safely." The Palestra stands as a time capsule in a changing world. A mere glimpse of the building is enough to send shivers down the spine. "As bad as things get in your life, you come here and you feel young again," Harrell says. "Things aren't as bad." So many great games have been played at the Palestra that picking one as most memorable is impossible. But ask anyone who has spent more than a few evenings on the Palestra's wooden bleachers and you'll be met with a flood of stories that make no mention of final scores. "It's every moment," Harrell says. "It's game time, when you can feel the place come alive. It's just a feeling." Martelli laughs when he thinks about a game between the St. Joe's Hawks and the Fairfield Stags in the mid-'60s. "Some friends of mine and I were running up and down in the portals, and we went near the Fairfield student section and started yelling, 'What the hell's a Stag?!' A couple of college students who'd had a few libations before the game ran down and started chasing us -- these college guys were chasing seven sixth-graders through the corridors of the Palestra. That's something that I will never forget." Jack Scheuer, an Associated Press writer, has been getting paid to watch games at the Palestra for 40 years -- he used to read Bob Vetrone's copy back to the Evening Bulletin for $2.50 a game. "I thought I was overpaid, I loved being there so much." Scheuer is still amazed by a pre-game shooting performance he saw over 30 years ago. As fans counted audibly, Princeton's Bill Bradley hit 22 -- or 26, depending on whom you ask -- straight jumpers. Wolff loves the bomb scare story. The capacity crowd was evacuated prior to a game in 1965, but immortal play-by-play man Les Keiter continued reporting from an empty gym. "It was almost like the captain refusing to abandon ship -- he was going to go down with the thing," Wolff says. "That's part of the Palestra legend -- there are all these wonderful stories you don't hear about any other building." They are the stories that make the Palestra into what Harrell calls a "living museum." They are part of what makes it the most quintessential of college gyms, the pulse that makes this building so different from the flashier new arenas that appear more suited to professional teams than college ones. At 73 years old, the Palestra is very much still alive. "That's the heartbeat right there -- it's a living thing, this building, when the basketball bounces," Harrell says, hearing the echoes from the court reverberate through the gym. The Palestra is frequented by a stream of former players and old fans. They walk the concourse and peer into the dusty trophy cases. They climb the bleachers. They tell stories to their children or grandchildren of what it's like to watch a game on a cold winter night, a feeling that Wolff describes as "human electricity passed from elbow to elbow" when 9,000 fans are shoe-horned into the bleachers. Harrell sees it every time an ex-player comes back. "You can just tell when a guy comes in, if he played here," he says. "And I never bother them, because they're 20 years old again." As much as the old place is alive, Harrell swears that there are spirits at the Palestra. "She's seen one of the ghosts down here," he says, holding a picture of his daughter Erin, 17, a basketball player at West Catholic. "She was shooting here one day and said, 'Daddy, I always thought you were kidding me, but I looked over and there was a guy in a plaid shirt. I shot and looked back and he was gone, but I know he was there.' So ever since then she believes me. It's true though." Mostly, though, the spirits make themselves felt and heard but not seen. Tony Crossen, an electrician who has worked at Penn for 39 years and at the Palestra for 25, agrees with Harrell. "If you're walking through there at night you can swear that you hear somebody walking behind you or somebody talking or a crowd noise. It's definitely haunted." Still, Crossen can point to a few explanations. Renovations to the Palestra altered the air flow of the original design, creating a circulation problem that causes doors to slam and the concourse, on occasion, to howl. "You can feel the strong wind," Harrell says. "To me, that's like the spirit of the building trying to get back to where it was." Walk through the front doors of the Palestra, past the lobby and into the main concourse. Adjust your eyes to the dim lighting, soak in the musty smell of concrete and wood, of floor varnish and sweat, of basketball -- 70 years of basketball. Look at the dusty photos. Stare through one of the portals and look up at the iron rafters, the sky blue ceiling. But don't enter the gym. Turn to the wall on the front concourse, where there is an old bronze plaque. It reads: "To win the game is great? To play the game is greater? But to love the game is greatest of all?" On paper, it's the kind of saying that sounds a little too mawkish to inspire awe. But hanging on the wall of the Palestra, it makes your pulse quicken and your throat well up. The Palestra is not nearly so much about basketball as it is about collective emotion, about the stories and memories of generations of fans who have shared a love for an old mass of concrete and steel. "This is home to a lot of people. Somebody wrote a book years ago that you could never go home again -- you move on in life and you can never go back to the old neighborhood. But you can come back to the Palestra," Harrell says.

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