Rollie....?
- Thread starter Stalker
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He was the main reason I stopped liking Villanova and them being the main reason for the breakup. (Although I’m warming up to Jay Wright from Relayer high school). Although the teams play each other to an extent it’s not the same. Palestra rules!
I don't think anything so consistently caught the imagination of Philadelphia sports fans in the '60s and at least the early '70s as the Big Five. The Phillies had everyone excited in '64, the Eagles were a great story in '60 and even the next year or two when they had Jurgensen, and the Warriors/Sixers rivarly with the Celtics was a great though usually disappointing saga but every winter at the Palestra there were great and colorful coaches (Ramsay, Kraft, Litwack, McCloskey, etc.), terrific players (Wally Jones, Cliff Anderson, Matt Goukas, John Wideman, Larry Cannon, etc), fierce rivalries, and unforgettable games--anyone remember the shot by Steve Donches at the buzzer?
I was out of the area for most of the time after the mid-70's but my sense is that the Big Five went on a slow and maybe inevitable decline, though I'd be happy to be corrected. Villanova was--and is--by far the farthest from the Palestra and with a greater percentage of its students coming from outside the area, the appeal of playing these once "rivalry games" 15 miles or so from the campus--and never "at home"--began to fade. To a lesser extent the same thing happened at the other schools. Maybe the natural life of the Big Five was from the 50s to the 80s,
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