Fran Dunphy cements his status as Mr. Big 5

Sure, Fran Dunphy remembers playing in his first Palestra game. You don’t forget such things.

“Oh, yeah, we played Rider,” Dunphy said the other day. “It was my sophomore year.”

La Salle opened the 1967-68 season with Rider.

“I can remember vividly, Jim Harding putting me in the game, me dribbling up the floor,” Dunphy said.

He remembers Explorers star Larry Cannon calling his name. Cannon wanted the ball. Dunphy got it to him.

“The referee deemed that I had traveled in making the pass,” Dunphy said, explaining that he had entered the game with 12 minutes, 6 seconds to go, and exited with 12 minutes, 2 seconds left. A four-second debut. Did Harding put him back in?

“I think he did,” Dunphy said. “The wound was so deep, I can’t remember.”

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It would not be the last time a Palestra wound stayed with Dunphy forever. As La Salle, coached by Fran Dunphy, prepares to face Temple in Wednesday’s Big 5 Palestra doubleheader, with Penn taking on St. Joseph’s in the nightcap … it’s worth reminding that nobody quite matches up with Dunphy when it comes to a varied Big 5 history.

It’s not too much at this point to call him Mr. Big 5.

Nobody else ever coached two Big 5 schools … and now Dunphy has made it three, taking over at his alma mater after his long stints coaching Penn and Temple. Throw in his master’s degree from Villanova for a fourth Big 5 affiliation. (Maybe St. Joe’s can throw in an honorary degree some year to make 5-for-5.)

Would this doubleheader have taken place if Dunphy had not taken over this season at La Salle?

“I’m not exactly sure how it came to be,” he said. “I think it was from the Penn guys.”

In fact, it was. Penn assistant coach Joe Mihalich Jr. remembers a Zoom call last spring between the staffers of all the Big 5 schools handling scheduling, so all could have a loose master schedule. The possibility of two Big 5 games on Nov. 30 appeared.

“Floated it by the La Salle guys and it kind of fell into place,” Mihalich said.

As it happens, Joe Mihalich Sr. had joined Dunphy’s coaching staff as a special assistant to the head coach.

“There was definitely a Mihalich-to-Mihalich aspect!” the younger Mihalich confirmed by text about those conversations.

When it was presented to Dunphy, he took it to his administration.

“It just sounded like the right thing to do for Philadelphia college basketball in general,” Dunphy said.

While La Salle would be giving up a home game, Dunphy also ran it by his own former Temple assistant, Aaron McKie, now the Owls head coach. It worked for Temple. They’ll go with a 6 p.m. tip-off.

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Six degrees of separation are never necessary when it comes to Dunphy and local college hoops. His own memories continue …

Favorite game he ever played in?

“It’s hard not to look back on my junior year,” Dunphy said.

Many old-timers have the 1968-69 Explorers as the greatest Big 5 team ever, despite being ineligible for NCAA play. (Yo, 2018 Villanova, you’re in this conversation now.) La Salle-Villanova that season was a City Series classic. Dunphy, who saw a lot of time as a top reserve on that team, noted that it was one of the few games you could still find on film.

Both schools were ranked in the top 10 nationally when La Salle took this one, and finished the season 23-1, a loss to South Carolina the only blemish.

Favorite Palestra game Dunphy ever coached in?

“There’s probably a lot, but the most meaningful — the game we had the huge lead,” Dunphy said.

Yes, he’s talking Penn-Princeton, Feb. 9, 1999. That lead: “27 points, 15 minutes to go,” Dunphy said. “Figuring there’s no way we could lose that game and we did. There were 8,700 people in the Palestra; 8,000 wanted me fired on the spot — me included.”

Why most meaningful? What kind of twisted thought are we dealing with here?

“That team stayed together and we won the rest of our games, won at Princeton,” Dunphy said. “I would have sold my soul to the devil for two more points [that night] and now 20-something years later, I would never trade that.”

He thinks back to the leadership of that group, how Matt Langel is now the head coach at Colgate and Michael Jordan in charge at Lafayette, and Paul Romanczuk is back coaching Malvern Prep after a long stint at Archbishop Carroll.

“If I just kept my mouth shut and listened, lots of good ideas came out,” Dunphy said of assistants and players he had over the years. “Take a step aside and keep your mouth shut and learn from that.”

For some time, it’s been easy to look at Dunphy and Don DiJulia, now retired athletic director at St. Joseph’s, as kind of the de facto leaders of the Big 5. If there was an issue that needed to be handled, they often were getting a call.

“You sit there and say, what’s the right thing to do?” Dunphy said. “No more than that. What’s the right thing?”

Of course, with John Chaney around, some diplomacy was sometimes required. Chaney trusted Dunphy even as a rival coach, before Dunphy succeeded Chaney at Temple.

“Several, I would say,” Dunphy said, laughing, when asked about calls either from or about Chaney. “They weren’t anything more than, let’s let cooler heads prevail here.”

Dunphy, the longest continuous head coach in Penn history, said his “most peaceful” Palestra memory when he had the keys to the place would come after a big win, walking across the court toward his car: “There would be that one bulb still lit in the place — you’d look around this Cathedral, as ‘Hoops’ [Dick Weiss] so aptly named it. Just alone in your space there.”

Dunphy can’t help but think how it almost didn’t play out like that. Mr. Big 5 could have had a short run in charge of the Quakers.

“After my second year coaching, I went to see Paul Rubincam,” who was Penn’s athletic director. “He slides a sheet of paper in front of me.”

Dunphy’s team had gone 9-17 that season, after a 12-14 first season. He remembers saying to Rubincam, “What’s wrong with you? Are you aware we were 9-17?”

Rubincam told him he was doing fine. The sheet of paper, Dunphy said, was a new three-year contract. The next season, the Quakers went 16-10, before three straight undefeated Ivy seasons.

“That kind of respect and foresight — I can’t thank him enough,” Dunphy said, thinking back to a “very insecure and not very mature head coach.”

It takes a good memory to remember such a person, but Mr. Big 5 has not forgotten much, starting with his own four-second Palestra debut.