The Penn Stater Magazine

More Memories of Indiana-Penn State Hoops

January 23, 2013 at 4:15 pm Ryan Jones 3 comments

The Nittany Lion basketball team is in Bloomington on Wednesday to take on No. 7 Indiana, which I’ll use as another excuse to expand on our feature on the ’93 Indiana-Penn State game that appears in our January/February issue.

As I’ve mentioned, I was in the front row for that game, as I was for nearly every game during the ’92-93 and ’93-94 seasons. We were right across from the visitor’s bench, standing—always standing, of course—about 18 inches from the court. For much of the tape from that ’93 game, I can see myself and my friends jumping, yelling, and occasionally getting held back by a student auxiliary officer. (What, I was gonna run across the court and tackle Bobby Knight?) What I remember almost as clearly as that game is what my friends and I did afterward.

Back in Snyder Hall that night, my fellow front-row residents—Greg Galli ’96, Guy Licata ’96, Doug Schoenly ’96, Rob Scott ’96, and Chad Weihrauch ’97—and I were an emotional mess. We felt like we needed to do something, and we finally settled on writing a letter to Bruce Parkhill expressing our support. (As Parkhill made clear when we spoke last year, we were hardly the only ones—he still has the dozens of letters he received from around the country in the weeks after the game.) I don’t remember what we wrote, but I remember the handwritten reply, on Penn State basketball letterhead, that we received via campus mail a few days later.

Pretty cool, huh?

But one of my favorite memories from this game is not actually my own. It comes from Loren Crispell ’00, who was a local eighth grader at the time and now works as the marketing manager for the Nittany Lion basketball program. I quote Loren in the story that appears in the magazine, but I didn’t have room to include this terrific story about how some of his friends ended up at the game:

I was born and raised in State College, and games at Rec Hall were events. Indiana coming to town was something that everybody had waited for. Everybody pointed to that game. You’d have the “General” in town, the history, all of it. That was something everybody anticipated from the moment we joined the Big Ten.

I went to Park Forest Middle School, and three or four of my friends got off the bus at school that morning and immediately turned and started walking toward campus. They were skipping school to go to Rec Hall. They went into the men’s room at Rec Hall, which was open then, and camped out all day in the stalls. They read magazines to pass the time, and they just waited. Once the doors opened for the game that night, they were in the building. To me, it just underscored how big that game was, how much people wanted to be part of that experience.

I remember I had a French test the next morning. My parents kept asking me if I was ready. I kept saying ‘Oui.’ Little did I know that game would occupy the whole night.

I’m pretty sure Loren’s out in Bloomington as I write this. Next time I see him, I’ll have to ask him how he did on that test.

Ryan Jones, senior editor

Entry filed under: The Penn Stater Magazine. Tags: Bruce Parkhill, Rec Hall.