Art Casciato: A personal goodbye to 'Dunph'

Last week's editorial in The Daily Pennsylvanian had it exactly right: All of us at the University of Pennsylvania are lucky to have been coached by Fran Dunphy. I should know. Dunph's been coaching me for nearly 50 years. And I'm not talking about my bank shot. Coach's greatest lesson has always been on how to be a friend.

Anytime one of our old buddies from the neighborhood hears that I'm working at Penn, they inevitably ask me if Dunph got me the job. I'd like to think their question has less to do with the unlikelihood that someone as improvident as I am would finally land on his feet in the Ivy League than with Fran's unfailing generosity and loyalty to all he knows. Whatever the truth, even if he had gotten me this job, it wouldn't have been the first time, and I am hardly alone in this. Dunph always takes care of his own, and his own is everyone he meets.

In 1972, I was a college drop-out, anxious and confused, but I hadn't hit bottom until I took a job washing dishes in the cafeteria at Fitzgerald-Mercy Hospital in Delaware County. Pearl-diving, to be sure, is honest work, but a set of whites and a hairnet weren't exactly what my long-suffering parents had in mind when they sacrificed to send me to the Jesuits at Saint Joseph's Prep. In fact, my folks had pulled some strings to get me in at Fitz as a low-level administrator, but I screwed that up somehow and launched myself into a career dunking and scrubbing instead. Those days, I was the kind of guy you send who, after you send him out for ice cubes, immediately books passage on the Titanic. That's when, almost on cue, Dunph walked in.

I shouldn't have been surprised. I don't remember who he was visiting in the hospital that afternoon, but as many of you know already, Dunph has spent a lifetime making it his business to look in on those struggling through a rough patch. He hadn't expected to see me either, and definitely not grinning sheepishly in the little window through which he had just pushed his cafeteria tray.

But as far as struggling through a rough patch goes, I qualified in spades. Dunph had me out of there (and the hairnet) in three days, having found me a gig tending bar with his brother Dennis at a restaurant owned by their sister Joanne's father-in-law. That's Dunph. He treats everyone as if he were family.

This past February, after his team had defeated Brown at the Palestra, Dunph was missing from the press conference after the game in order to attend to what the DP reported was a "personal matter." That personal matter was the viewing for my cousin Carmen, tragically killed in a horrible car wreck five days earlier. Carmen was a great guy, loved by many, a graduate of Saint Joseph's University and former president of that university's alumni association.

As was appropriate, St. Joe's coach Phil Martelli put in an appearance that evening. So did, believe it or not, the Hawk himself, his flapping more subdued than usual but unending nonetheless. And there too -- standing in the cold in a line that snaked all the way around the block and that took the better part of two hours to get into the church -- was Dunph. La Salle University graduate. Penn coach. Standing up and doing what was right (and what his mother Josephine taught him to do) for the most loyal of St. Joe's Hawks.

I shouldn't have been surprised again. I'm pretty sure Dunph never met my cousin Carmen. But please don't think Dunph was there to support me. Or even to support his friend Herbie Magee, coach of Philadelphia University, who is married to Carmen's daughter Geri. Dunph was there simply because, as he told me later, "Geri is such a nice person I just couldn't not show up." It's worth saying again: That's Dunph. Always has been, always will be. A good friend to everyone fortunate enough to know him.

And now, sadly, gladly, on to Temple. In Fran Dunphy, Penn has not only lost its all-time greatest coach -- and, following the DP, I leave out the "basketball" -- but also its all-time greatest friend and Philadelphian -- Judith Rodin, Ed Rendell, and that Franklin guy from Boston notwithstanding. You don't ever replace people like Dunph. You just go on the best you can.

Art Casciato, director of Penn's Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships, is a long-time friend of former basketball coach Fran Dunphy. His e-mail address is arthurc@english.upenn.edu.

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