Phila-Nova Basketball! Villanova - Georgetown's 1985 match up and Philadelphia's Big Five... a brief history!

The top shot here is of Villanova's Eddie Pinckney "powering through" Georgetown's defense! It dates back to 1985 when the Villanova Wildcats - serious underdogs going into the NCAA Tournament as the number 8 seed - shocked the world by defeating Coach John Thompson, Patrick Ewing and the mighty Georgetown Hoyas!

A few years before the BIG win in '85, I graduated from Villanova and immediately accepted a Commission into the United States Marine Corps. I spent the next couple of years in school and overseas on my first tour to the Far East - Japan, Okinawa and The Republic of Korea. I returned stateside in March of 1985 just as Villanova advanced to the "Sweet 16". In those pre-internet days, "out of the country" essentially meant "out of the loop" when it came to following your team as closely as you'd like to.

It was a very pleasant surprise that Spring to follow the team as they advanced from the Sweet 16 to the Elite 8, then to the Final Four and ultimately to the Championship Match against Georgetown.

More on the 1985 tournament in a moment, but first a brief history...

Growing up in Philadelphia there were always good natured arguments over who the best team's and players were both at the NBA and at the collegiate level.

The older fans would tell you stories of the great Warrior's teams... Yep - the same team that now calls itself "Golden State" - was THE team in Philadelphia when local favorite son Wilt Chamberlain played for them.

Fans who were a little younger, would tell stories about the 76'ers winning it all in 1967. Behind the great play of the same Wilt Chamberlain and his teammates Billy Cunningham and Hal Greer, the "Sixers" beat Wilt's old team who in 1967 were known as the SAN FRANCISCO Warriors! Yep - those same Warriors were also known as the San Francisco Warriors after leaving Philadelphia and before settling on the Golden State moniker!

But if you REALLY wanted to hear about Philadelphia Basketball back in the day... then you paid attention to the stories about the Legendary Big Five Teams of LaSalle, Penn, Saint Joe's, Temple and Villanova.

Here's the history...

The formation of the Big 5 was conceived by Penn athletic director Jerry Ford. Penn sports information director Bob Paul and the Quaker's business manager John Rossiter worked to put the round-robin format together. The other athletic directors who worked together to form the Big 5 were LaSalle's Jim Henry, St. Joseph's George Bertelsman, Temple's Josh Cody and Villanova's Ambrose (Bud) Dudley. Little did these men know that the Big 5 would become college basketball's most storied tradition and unique rivalry.

The official announcement of the formation of the Big 5 was made by University of Pennsylvania president Dr. Gaylord Harnwell at Penn's Houston Hall on November 23, 1954. The Big 5 was touted as a chance for Philadelphia to present the best basketball it had to offer with the five schools sharing the profits evenly after Penn was paid for the Palestra's upkeep.?

For over four decades, Philadelphia's Big 5 — LaSalle, Pennsylvania, St. Joseph’s, Temple and Villanova — waged college basketball’s biggest, most envied, unique, and frenetic, intracity rivalry. No other city in the nation ever had as many major universities competing so feverishly for such a coveted title as did the City of Brotherly Love.

The Big 5 was housed at the Palestra, often called the Cathedral of College Basketball, a venerable red brick building on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania.

Named by Greek professor William N. Bates after the ancient Greek term pal?stra, a rectangular enclosure attached to a gymnasium where athletes would compete in various sports in front of an audience. It opened on January 1, 1927 and has been called "the most important building in the history of college basketball" and "changed the entire history of the sport for which it was built." At the time of its construction, the Palestra was one of the world's largest arenas. It was one of the first steel-and-concrete arenas in the United States and also one of the first to be constructed without interior pillars blocking the view.

Since its inception, the Palestra has hosted more games, more visiting teams, and more NCAA tournaments than any other facility in college basketball.

“The Palestra is to college basketball what Fenway Park and Wrigley Field are to baseball,” wrote John Feinstein in his book, A Season Inside. “It is a place where you feel the game from the moment you step inside.”

It wasn’t just the frenzied battles on the court that made the Big 5 unique. The camaraderie between the coaches has never been duplicated. Big 5 coaches honored unwritten agreements not to send game films or scouting reports on their city rivals to out-of-town opponents. Athletic directors wouldn’t schedule home games that conflicted with a Big 5 doubleheader at the Palestra. Players would never think of transferring from one Big 5 school to another.

Traditional rivalries like Army-Navy (also hosted by the City of Brotherly Love) or Harvard-Yale had nothing on the Big 5’s fierce battles fought before screaming fans, amidst the colorful streamers, fanatic mascots, often-raunchy rollouts, banging drums, and blaring bands. These games were often decided by a last-second buzzer-beater fired by some obscure walk-on, whose shot sent the Palestra into tumultuous bedlam and gave the winning team’s alumni and students bragging rights for another year.

“If you won at the Palestra in the winter, you could talk all summer on the playgrounds,” explained Penn's famed coach Fran Dunphy, who played at La Salle. “The Big 5 was part of the fabric of life in Philadelphia; there’s no other way to describe it,’ said St. Joseph’s athletic director Don Di Julia. “The Big 5 intensity level was equal to professional playoff game,” added Cliff Anderson, the great Hawks center, who went on to play for four years in the NBA and ABA. “Right -down to the last guy on the bench, your heart was in your throat, you were sweating, you couldn’t sleep the night before.”

Frequently these Big 5 battles, waged between institutions located within a radius of only 17 miles, were renewals of some of the intense rivalries that characterized many of the local Catholic and Public League high school games. Maybe it would be a couple of ex-high school teammates from South Philly facing each other in the Temple-La Salle game or kids from West Philly and the Northeast teaming up to beat their former CYO buddies in the Penn-St. Joe’s game. During the summer they would go at it again in pickup games at the Palestra, on the playgrounds, or down at the South Jersey shore.

Back to the 1985 Tournament...

Villanova's stunning victory over Georgetown in the 1985 NCAA title game is mentioned among the best stories in tournament history to this day! Beating the Hoyas is often listed among the greatest upsets in sports history.

On the surface, there are plenty of reasons why the 1985 championship remains so relevant. The Wildcats are still the lowest seed (8) to win a national title. It was the first year of the 64-team bracket, which has proven to be a wildly successful formula but at the time was an experiment. The NCAA was taking a risk here, and it paid off huge with the type of "Cinderella" run that has come to define the romance of the tournament.

This was also the formal arrival of the Big East as a powerhouse conference, with three Big East teams (Villanova, Georgetown and St. John's) reaching the Final Four. Still, despite the strength of the conference, this was the ultimate David vs. Goliath matchup. Villanova wasn't even assured of a spot in the field, and Patrick Ewing and the Hoyas were beasts.

Everyone else may have been counting the Wildcats out in that tournament. As mentioned previously, when I arrived back from Japan in March of '85 they had just gotten past Dayton and top-seeded Michigan in the first two rounds, and suddenly history was on their side.

The Sweet 16 game was against a Maryland team that had the great Len Bias. It didn't matter! The Wildcats knocked off the Terps to set up a matchup with Coach Dean Smith's vaunted North Carolina Tar Heels in the Elite Eight.

After Villanova outplayed the Tar Heels in the second half, Dean Smith called off the troops in the final minute as Villanova Coach Rollie Massimino, a frequent opponent, clinched his first Final Four bid.

At the time, Massimino shared that "Dean Smith was a wonderful, wonderful gentleman. We're up 12 with a minute to go and he just held the ball to end the game," Massimino remembered. "It was a wonderful gesture on the part of Coach Smith."

The human element of loving Cinderella stories comes from the relatability. There's nothing relatable about a demigod, and in 1985, Patrick Ewing was about as close to one as there was in college basketball. It was much easier to root for Ed Pinckney. An All-Big East player in his own right and eventually the Most Outstanding Player in the 1985 tournament, Pinckney always got up for playing against Ewing when the two teams met on the floor.

"Eddie Pinckney loved to play against Patrick and they both had something going," Massimino said. "They challenged each other every time they played against each other. John Thompson and I had a wonderful relationship. So it was something that was very special.

For close to 40 years, Rollie Massimino's family-first way of doing business has been the rule in running the Villanova basketball program.

Massimino's former assistants Steve Lappas and Jay Wright have carried on his legacy with the Villanova basketball program and other major college programs across the country. With two Tournament wins in 2016 and 2018 respectively, Villanova has become known as a perennial contender.

Here's to a great "Sweet 16 Dance" in 2022.

Paul McBride is a Villanova graduate (1983) and a former Marine Officer. He currently serves as the RVP for Sales at ZeOmega Population Health Management Software as well as the Founder and President of American Military Society Press. You can contact him at [email protected]

"Villanova...setting our sites on higher things... 2018!"

NB: A version of this article originally appeared on the AMSP1775 website on Sunday March 25, 2018

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