In fall 1961, three recent graduates of Temple University were trying to sell their school on letting them broadcast its basketball games. I was one of them. After being turned down, we went shopping among the other Big 5 colleges in the hopes someone would buy the idea. We would provide the sponsors (we hoped) if they would just let us on the air. In short order, the other schools also turned us away until we found a friendly reception on Hawk Hill.
St. Joe’s basketball had a jolt the year before with the news two of its players accepted money and shaved points. Legendary coach Jack Ramsey was beside himself. Our crazy proposal didn’t seem so crazy to a St. Joe’s in search of anything to boost morale. We found a radio station, WHAT-AM, and a sponsor in Al Berman Clothes across from the school on City Line Avenue. It didn’t matter to us that, after figuring out all the costs, there was no money to broadcast the games. We would do them for nothing. But, only to maintain our pride, we told friends we were getting $5 a game. That’s how three Temple grads, two Jewish friends and myself, broadcast one glorious year of basketball at that small Jesuit institution. It’s how Berman, also a Jewish guy, was voted Man of the Year by the Jesuits. All of it seemed normal. And it was how, in a brief crazy way, my life intersected with Jim Boyle.
We didn’t actually get on the air until the new season was a month old. St. Joe’s was not expected to make much of a stir in the Middle Atlantic Conference. Our first broadcast was the NYU game from the Palestra. NYU had Satch Sanders, who went on to a pro career with the Celtics. The Hawks were big underdogs, but they had Jimmy Lynam, Tom Wynne, Steve Courtin, and a gangly sophomore by the name of Jim Boyle. In the steamy confines of the Palestra, before a shrieking crowd of Hawk fans, with the drum pounding and Ramsey kneeling on the sideline, a program in his clenched fist, NYU didn’t have a chance. That was the start of something beautiful. Game after game, the Hawks would fall behind early. At Delaware, they were down 16 at the half. Then Ramsey would call for the fearsome full-court press and the opposition would crumble.
I met a young lady at a dance who, by coincidence, was a huge St. Joe’s fan and she lived down the street from Jim Boyle. We got caught up in the magic of the basketball season and youthful hormones; We thought we were in love. There is nothing so heady as broadcasting from the Palestra with your girl behind you, knowing you will always be young, and neither your love nor the Hawk will ever die. As I look back, one out of two wasn’t bad.
The night of the St. Joe’s-La Salle game, the Palestra was warming to a fever pitch as the rival cheering sections taunted one another before the game. We were setting up our equipment when Father Geib of St. Joe’s came over to me. He had a worried look on his face. Jim Boyle had been rushed to the hospital with a suspected case of appendicitis. We were already worried his absence could cost the Hawks the game. Father Geib whispered to me Jimmy had snuck out of the hospital and was somewhere in the crowd. Please don’t mention it on the air, Father Geib said, because his mother will have a heart attack. St. Joe’s won and Boyle went undetected. It turned out not to be appendicitis and the Hawks went on to win their conference and a trip to the NCAA Tournament in March. And the rest, as they say, is history.
The St. Joe’s family is so close knit, in today’s calloused world it seems difficult to believe. Boyle went on to coach the Hawks as did Lynam. One of the Lynam kids married one of the Boyle kids. If they ever made this into a movie, they would have to make it in black and white and bring back Bing Crosby, Barry Fitzgerald and Pat O’Brien to star.
Years later, long after my Hawk memories were in the distant past as was my Hawk girlfriend, I ran into Jim Boyle in the stands at the Palestra before a game. I sat next to him and chatted for a while, reminding him of the night he snuck out of the hospital to cheer for his team against La Salle. He smiled that impish grin of his and said, "Man, I was crazy back then." I managed to sneak a question into the conversation about his neighbor, my former girlfriend. She had never married, but he was still friends with the family.
That is St. Joe’s basketball. One big family through the good times and bad. This past week was one of the bad times. Jim Boyle died at the age of 63. And I remembered the moment in time when our lives intersected briefly. And the Hawk will never die.
