Hunting the 'Big Game'

Sports Illustrated senior writer Alex Wolff has covered basketball for that magazine for 20 years. He is the author of six books on the sport, including his latest, Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Adventure.

For this book, Wolff spent more than a year traveling the globe, trying to find insights into the game, while using the game to try to gain insight into some of the more exotic places he visited. He went as far away as places like Bhutan, a Himalayan nation with a king who also happens to be a rabid NBA fan. He also went right down the street, to the Palestra. One of Wolff's chapters is dedicated to the building he calls "Philadelphia's Quaker Meeting House" and "the St. Peter's of basketball, the destination of any pilgrim in search of the spiritual essence of the game."

Though the Palestra chapter might be a painful read for some Penn fans who were there -- the story hinges on the Black Tuesday game in 1999, when Princeton rallied from a 33-9 halftime deficit to beat the Quakers, 50-49 -- it remains a fitting tribute to the arena that Penn calls home.

Wolff will be at the Penn Bookstore at noon tomorrow to read from and sign his book. He recently spoke with The Daily Pennsylvanian in a telephone interview about his book, the Palestra, Penn-Princeton and the Big 5.

DP: Could you tell us how the idea for this book came about?

Alex Wolff: The book was the result of my having essentially been told where to go by editors for 20 years and deciding, you know, I've covered the game. Let me see if I can uncover it, in a way. Let me just go where I want to go, be my own assignment editor.

If I went to someplace in the U.S. it was because I wanted to explore something about basketball. Hence I went to Peoria to look into the crossover dribble. Why do all these great guards come out of Peoria? I went to El Paso to visit [former coach] Don Haskins in his last season. I went to the Palestra to try to understand the magic of the place.

DP:What was your first Palestra experience?

Alex Wolff: They were still playing doubleheaders there when I was a student at Princeton in the late '70s. I'd go down when Princeton was playing Penn, and I think [Princeton] even played St. Joe's there once.

I'd just go down there the way that people in New York might take the train to go to an art museum. The smell of the place, the feel outside of it, the way you could walk over from the train station, the way it was tucked into campus kind of unobtrusively... there's just something very warm and inviting about it.

DP: What about the resurgence of the Big 5 this season?

AW: You know, it's wonderful stuff. You always knew it was a matter of people. You talk about institutions turning their backs and going in a different direction. Let's not kid ourselves, It depends on people, and it's the people who are in charge and if they want it to happen it'll happen.

We had either the departure of people who didn't want it to happen, or we had the changing of minds. People suddenly got religion or just realized what they had. It's marvelous that it's been brought back to life.

Everyone seems now to be committed to it, and I think everyone can find ways to use it in recruiting.

I remember at [the Big 5 tipoff luncheon], John Chaney said off-handedly that sometimes people will try to use [the Big 5] against Temple in recruiting,, saying "why would you want to go to a school that plays games off their campus to play on somebody else's campus?"

The best response to that is, they just don't get it.

DP: As much as it may hurt to say it, you couldn't have picked a better game to capture the mystery of the Palestra than the one that you did, could you?

AW: Remember this, as painful as that game was for Penn fans, Penn won the Ivy title that year.

DP: It was certainly vindication, but could you have picked a better game, do you think?

AW: Well, there have been so many great games played there. I think maybe a game where a Philadelphia team pulled off a huge upset of a national power, if maybe Kansas came in and a .500 Penn team or a .500 La Salle team beat them by 10 or 12 points by changing defenses and being smart with the ball and all those good Philly things, that would be pretty sweet -- or maybe with great guard play.

The thing about the Palestra was they'd always bring these wonderful teams in to play the locals, and the doubleheader would be a game like that paired with a nice city rivalry matchup. The team that would come in would so frequently have these great players and the Philly crowd would receive them.

It would be like a state visit. There'd be a great appreciation for the visiting player.

It was kind of like you play Broadway if you're an actor, and if you're a basketball player, you play the Palestra. You tried to make a go of it there, and if you did you were a success.

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