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Sport

13th Dec 2018

Saturday Night Lights: Seeing the strange magic of college basketball come to life in the US

Kyle Picknell

The Cathedral of College Basketball sits at the heart of the University of Pennsylvania’s campus in West Philadelphia. It has stood for over 90 years and hosted more college basketball games than any other venue in America.

In 1958 three of the greatest players in NBA history played here in the same summer: Jerry West; the logo himself, Oscar Robertson; the first player to average a triple-double over the course of a season, and Wilt Chamberlain; the 100-point game behemoth who changed the sport forever.

Chamberlain, Philly born, dominated there years prior to that as local high school Overbrook’s star player between ’53 and ’55. He led them to back-to-back city championships in the building. Kobe Bryant, another Philadelphia native, turned out for Lower Merion there before joining the NBA at 17-years-old. LeBron James came and blew the doors off too, putting up 26 points, eight rebounds, five assists and seven steals for St. Vincent-St. Mary High School in 2002.

Tickets cost 50 cents for students when the gym opened. A courtside season ticket will set you back $550 now.

Rich Prendergast, a radio analyst working the game, thought back to his first experience at the venue before tip-off.

“I had a 50-cent student ticket,’’ Prendergast told the Philly Inquirer. “I got stopped about five times on the way over from the train. I was offered 20 bucks. I was 14. I said, ‘I want to see Wilt.’”

They call it the Palestra, the term for the wrestling courtyards of ancient Greek gymnasiums. There was a sense of history from the start. You can see it. You can feel it too, in the steel and the concrete.

It’s impossible not to come here and think about your own formative experiences playing sport.

They were shit compared to this.

They were so, so shit.

It’s Saturday evening and ESPN have a full television crew, including presenters and courtside analysts, covering the big game. It will be broadcast live to millions. When I get back to the hotel that night, I will see the highlights played back to me in between the NFL coverage. Fans in the crowd wave giant cardboard cut-outs of the players’ faces. There are four separate cheer leading squads that operate at each corner of the court. A scout from last year’s NBA finalists, the Cleveland Cavaliers, sits next to me in the press row. A seat next to him, for another from the mighty Golden State Warriors, is empty. But still.

You can buy pizza slices and special commemorative cups of soda as big as your head from the concourse, down past the old trophy cabinets and the black and white portraits of men with the same high and tight haircuts. When the first three pointer clanks home on the second possession of the game, an improbable bank shot that goes in just as the shot clock flashes to 00, ribbons in one of the team’s colours are fired onto the hardwood from every perceivable angle.

The game is stopped, and the cheerleaders must now operate in their second capacity as impromptu litter pickers. In terms of occasion, it ranks somewhere between an episode of Friday Night Lights and the second coming of Christ.

This is it then, the great American dream, concentrate. College sports, where every moment plays out like a scene from a movie, where the sepia tone practically oozes out of the walls.