Blue White Illustrated

enn State lost one of its most sig- nificant basketball players recently. Jack Sherry was the captain of the school's only Final Four team in 1953-54. But he wasn't a pure basketball player in the modern sense. Jack and several of his teammates, including the greatest bas- ketball player in Penn State history, Jesse Arnelle, were actually football players. Football scholarships paid their way through college, and basketball always came second in their athletic priorities. Even their style of play on the court re- flected their football birthright. "We banged people," Jack once told me with one of his typical hardy laughs. "Nobody played the game the way we did. We weren't particularly quick and we weren't big, but we were a very physical team." Penn State basketball in that post- World War II era was still a stepchild within the athletic department. Al- though basketball was the school's fourth varsity sport in 1897, it lagged far behind football, track, wrestling and boxing in popularity. When basketball began to attract sports fans nationwide in the postwar era, Penn State still struggled, primarily because it and most of the other varsity sports received limited financial support from the ad- ministration. Football was king. When Penn State restored athletic scholarships in 1949 after a 20-year drought, all two dozen or so went to football recruits. However, in a rule-bending, behind-the-scenes maneuver to help basketball coach Elmer Gross, a small group of alumni convinced athletic department officials to pay the tuition of one basketball re- cruit. The alumni would take care of room and board. In the fall of 1949, Herm Sledzik, a standout at tiny Elders Ridge High School in Indiana County who had full scholarship offers from Duquesne and St. Francis, enrolled at Penn State's DuBois campus while the first group of football recruits went to what was then California State Teachers College. The temporary out-of-town residency was necessary because housing was at a pre- mium on the main campus, and fresh- men were ineligible. By the time Sherry was a sophomore in the fall of 1951, the exporting of freshmen was no longer necessary and they also were eligible to play on the varsity. Sherry and Sledzik developed a friendship that would last the rest of Sherry's life, and I eventfully became good friends with both of them. But that season I was just a ninth-grader living not far from Sledzik's home. I didn't follow Penn State, and it wasn't until years later that I learned Sledzik and Arnelle had led the team to the NCAA regional playoffs during the 1951-52 season, only to fall to South- eastern Conference champion Kentucky in the first round, 82-54. That '51-52 team finished with a 20-6 record, the Lions' best mark in 10 years, and Sherry was good enough to become a starter. The next year, when Sledzik was the captain, they had another good season (15-9) but just missed the NCAA tournament. Arnelle averaged 17 points per game to lead the team, with Sledzik second (14.6) and Sherry third (10.3). However, Sherry's forte was football. He had been a standout two-sport ath- lete in suburban Philadelphia, but he never intended on playing basketball at Penn State. He often told the story of shooting baskets at Rec Hall one day with some other students when Gross asked him to come out for the team. The Lions' varsity coach primarily needed bodies but also thought Sherry could help the team. Gross's amiable personality masked the gutty attitude of a World War II vet- eran who had won a Bronze Star and Purple Heart on the beach at Normandy. Before the war, Gross had played bas- ketball for Penn State, and he had be- come a full-time faculty member in physical education and basketball coach in the fall of 1949, succeeding his men- tor, John Lawther. When Gross was a senior co-captain in 1942, Lawther's 17- 2 Nittany Lions were invited to the NCAA tournament for the first time. They lost to Dartmouth, 44-39, at the Eastern Regional in New Orleans. Sherry, who made friends easily, be- came devoted to Gross. Through Jack, I learned how hard a frustrated Gross fought to make Penn State a success in basketball, only to be continually re- buffed by the athletic administration. That was why Gross quit coaching after the great 1954 Final Four season but continued teaching until his retirement. In later years, Sherry made it a point to periodically visit Gross at his retirement home in Arizona. Football made Sherry a Penn State household name before his ultimate success on the hardwood. In his sophomore season, he and jun- ior defensive back Don Eyer set a school record with eight interceptions each. The record lasted 16 years until it was broken by All-American Neal Smith with 10 in 1969. Sherry never bragged about that record, although he liked to tell anyone who would listen that two of his inter- ceptions set up touchdowns in a 17-0 victory over Pitt. Sherry also would re- mind friends and acquaintances that he played when passing was usually a sec- ond thought to running. Sherry didn't catch many passes compared to the Penn State receivers of the past 30 years. Yet as a 6-foot-2 185-pound end in an era when all players played offense Sherry helped PSU basketball reach an all-time high P and defense, Sherry, was the team's leading receiver in his senior year of 1954, tying with co-captain Jim Garrity. Both men caught 11 passes, but Sherry's statistics were better. He averaged 14.9 yards on 160 yards and a touchdown compared to Garrity's 11.9-yard average, 119 total yards and no touchdowns. The touchdown was the only one of Sherry's career and came in his final game. He caught a 19-yard pass from sophomore quarterback Bobby Hoffman in the second quarter that helped beat Pitt, 13-0. Hoffman also was on the bas- ketball team. As one would expect, Sherry and Hoffman also became friends, and in the last decades of Sher- ry's life, Hoffman was one of his closest pals. In fact, the last time I saw Jack, Hoffman was escorting him around the Bryce Jordan Center during the annual basketball players' alumni weekend in 2012. I didn't know Jack in the 1950s because he had graduated before I enrolled at Penn State in the fall of 1955. It was not until the publication of my first book, The Penn State Football Encyclopedia, in the fall of 1998 that I met Jack. I keep trying to remember how it happened, and it's too bad Jack isn't around to tell me. Until his illness took over his mind and body, Jack could remember things the rest of us had long forgotten – at least he said he did. As I recall, we met when I was doing a book signing at the Student Book Store in 1998 or '99 after a football game at Beaver Stadium. Jack walked up with a couple of his teammates from the 1950s and wanted to tell me how accurate my book was in describing the seasons he played and particularly the details about the games. "I don't know how you did it, but you hit all the important parts of the games and did not make one mistake," he said. "We wanted to come up and tell you that." I don't remember who was with Jack, except one guy, a beefy, grey-haired for- mer tackle named Danny DeFalco. In the classic 1953 game against Syracuse at Beaver Field, I had written about the key play of the game and one of the defining moments of that season. With less than a minute remaining and the score tied, 14-14, the defense forced Syracuse to punt from inside its own 35-yard line. The ball came off the punter's foot, I wrote, and "smashed into DeFalco's chest and Garrity scooped up the ball at the 23 and ran untouched into the end zone." The Nittany Lions won, 20-14, but the game ended with a famous brawl in front of the Syracuse bench when Penn State's star player, Lenny Moore, was roughed up while returning an intercep- tion. "You had everything right," DeFalco told me, shaking my hand vigorously. "I have been telling people about that game for years, and about my blocked kick that won the game and the fight on the sidelines. No one would believe me. Now, your book proves it." He then bought a book from me, and I signed it with a very personal message about that blocked kick. DeFalco is gone now, too, as are many of the other teammates Jack introduced me to over the past 15 years. Some of the players became so close they would gather every Dec. 31 to ring in the new year. Buddy Rowell, a reserve running back on those teams, would host the event at his residence in suburban GOIN' TO KANSAS CITY Sherry (front row, with basketball), was one of the key players on the Lions' only Final Four team. The squad also starred Arnelle (front row, far left) and was coached by Gross (back row, far left). Penn State University Archives

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