The extraordinary life of Roman Catholic's gym

Pieces of history come in all shapes and sizes, and one of the oddest shapes in the history of Philadelphia basketball is found on the third floor of Roman Catholic High School.

The school at the corner of Broad and Vine Streets is celebrating its 125th anniversary this year, and so is the little gymnasium that sits atop the original structure, 66 steps from the street and a mile from the ordinary.

When the school opened in 1890, James Naismith was still more than a year away from inventing basketball, so it isn't any wonder that the gym wasn't constructed with the game in mind. Still, the narrow, suffocating space, bounded by a wall at one end, a stage at the other, and rows of Gothic windows on either side, has hosted thousands of basketball games over the years. But not for much longer.

The school has undertaken an expansion project for land recently acquired behind the main building, and the new construction will include classrooms, a fine arts center, and a field house with a regulation court and enough space to accommodate the student body. The project is expected to take at least three years, perhaps more, but the old gym and its odd contribution to local hoops lore are on life support.

"I'll be sorry to see it go, but I'll be happy for the kids. They deserve a great place to play at their school," said Speedy Morris, the winningest coach in Catholic League history, who coached Roman to six league championships. "That gym has a lot of tradition and a lot of memories."

The current team is undefeated (14-0) and making new memories, albeit in a few different home locations. Only four varsity games were scheduled in the tiny school gym this season, which has a capacity of perhaps 250 to 300. The Cahillites have beaten Cardinal O'Hara and West Catholic there, and still have games against Monsignor Bonner (Feb. 2) and Archbishop Wood (Feb. 6). Other "home" games this season are being played at Holy Family University, Philadelphia University, and Community College of Philadelphia.

When it is time for the Catholic League playoffs, as Roman looks for its first league title since 2007, the games have to be played somewhere else because, well, because the court atop the school just isn't legal.

"I always told opposing teams that if they wanted to shoot a corner three-pointer, they had to bend it around the Bunson burner in the science lab," said Dennis Seddon, who coached Roman 22 years and won 10 league championships, tied for the league record. "I first saw that gym when I was coaching JV at North Catholic in 1980, and I thought it was pretty unique because I couldn't find the locker rooms, and then I found out why. There are no locker rooms."

In more bygone days, visiting teams had to dress in the basement and then climb all those flights of steps to get to the court. Once there, this is what they found: a playing surface that, according to measurements of Philadelphia prep authority Ted Silary, is only 38 feet wide and 82 feet long. (The standard U.S. court is 50 feet by 94 feet.) They found that the toes of spectators sitting in the front row of benches along the sidelines were actually on the court. They found that some fans occupied folding chairs on the stage at one end of the court and appeared to hang over the proceedings like gargoyles. They found a wall just beyond the baseline at the other end that would stop any fastbreaking player in his tracks after a layup. They found they didn't much like the place.

"The fans were so close to you. There just wasn't much room," said Fran O'Hanlon, the longtime coach who played as a visitor when he went to the now-closed St. Thomas More High School. "There was an altercation once, and a guy stood up in the stands and grabbed me from behind. I was thinking, 'Wow, you've got to be careful here.' "

The court is so narrow that the line marking the arc for a three-point field goal stops approximately 10 feet from the baseline. If a team has a great corner three-point shooter, he might as well stay on the bus. It is so narrow that pressure, trapping defense becomes very difficult to beat because the pressure can easily slide from sideline to sideline.

"When I was a junior, Speedy became our coach, and I remember we went to one of the suburban schools, O'Hara or Bonner, and were just in awe of the gym and were saying how great it must be to play in a gym like this," said Mike Bantom, one of nine Roman graduates to eventually play in the NBA. "And Speedy told us, 'We're going to make our gym an advantage for us,' and he was right. We just dominated people because we had a full-court press that basically covered the whole court. Other teams would come in and get strange looks on their faces. Like, what is this place?"

It is still that way. When Roman beat O'Hara there recently, the Cahillites press converted turnovers into baskets at a rapid rate, and the players looked like giants playing on a dollhouse court.

"When I first came to a summer workout here, I couldn't believe it was so small. But there's also so much history here," said 6-foot-4 swingman Tony Carr, one of the stars of the current team. "But it is small. I saw one of my teammates make six turnovers in a game by stepping out of bounds."

Small, unique gyms were a lot more plentiful in the old days. There was a low ceiling at St. Thomas More, which O'Hanlon said he scraped with a jumper at least once a game, and tight quarters at North Catholic and West Catholic, the latter of which still holds true. The players from the city learned the game in cramped rec centers or neighborhood gyms with low ceilings. It was said that at one time you knew a kid emerged from the basement gym of Incarnation School at Fifth and Lindley - as Tom Gola did - because his jump shot was nearly flat. Learning to go straight up to make a layup, thus avoiding a wall, was nothing for those players and, for those who made their way to Roman, the gym was different but not really that out-of-the-ordinary. Not like now.

"Philadelphia basketball history, when we as a group talk about it, is full of bandbox gyms," O'Hanlon said. "Sandy Grady, the great sportswriter, once said that in Philadelphia, they just put up two baskets in a phone booth and call it a basketball court. But, even so, Roman is really a bandbox gym."

The gym wasn't outfitted for basketball until the 1920s, according to Silary's research, although Roman began playing the game in 1898. Since the Catholic League was formed, right around the time that the third floor got baskets, there have been a record 20 league titles for the Cahillites, who were nicknamed for Thomas Cahill, a Philadelphia merchant who sponsored the founding of the school. The bandbox won't be playing much longer, however.

"We loved it," Bantom said. "The other teams didn't. They had to walk up four flights of stairs and then have the fans breathing down their necks. It was a general feeling of uncomfortableness for them. They had to adjust to so many things."

No story on Roman's gym would be complete without the tale of Speedy and the suit jacket. Morris had a habit as a young coach - when disagreeing with an official or with something one of his players had done - of tearing off his coat and tossing it over his shoulder into the stands. At Roman one afternoon, so the story goes, Morris threw his jacket behind him and it sailed out a set of double doors that open onto a fire escape. Down it went, all the way to the courtyard, landing finally in a Dumpster.

"When they got it and brought it back up to me, it had a banana peel in the pocket," Morris said. "That's a true story."

In previous tellings over the years, there were orange peels on the jacket, but the actual variety of the fruit isn't the important part of the story. It is that those things could happen in a squashed-together, third-floor gym that was always blazing hot because of the radiators, so hot that the great Gothic windows were open, as were the doors to the fire escape. Along with the occasional jacket, the sounds of the game could float down to the street and mingle with the hubbub of a city corner over which the big stone building had presided for so long.

The sounds will shift to another gym in a few years and there will be the clean squeak of sneakers on a smooth, new floor and the hum of a thousand fans stacked in tall bleachers to watch the games. It is probably time for that, and it will be great. But it won't be the same.

@bobfordsports