When Steve McKee came to Allentown College of St. Francis deSales in 1970, it was, in his words, “an almost brand new school out in the middle of the cornfields. Our team had nobody on scholarship until my senior year, and before that it was the old-fashioned, “Who wants to be on the basketball team? Raise your hand.”
At 6’ 8”, Steve played basketball, finishing his career with 621 points and 236 rebounds; he led the team in scoring in his senior year. Those were the years when every season set a new record for wins. Those were the years when Coach John Compardo, the school’s first Athletic Director, was that larger-than-life figure who stays with you for the rest of your life.
Following graduation, McKee joined the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in St. Mary’s, in southwest Alaska, where he and his wife Noreen taught at an Eskimo-Indian boarding school for two years. Afterwards, he returned to school to study journalism at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.
Steve and Noreen moved to New York City to begin work on his first of three books. He spent 1983 roaming the country in an ugly brown van, attending as many sporting events as possible in one year and then writing about it. He wrote about his adventures from the Super Bowl to the National Tiddlywinks Championship and fifty events in between. The result was The Call of the Game, published by McGraw Hill.
A few years later he wrote Coach, an oral history of the sideline profession. In 2008, he published, My Father’s Heart: A Son’s Journey, a memoir of his father who died of a heart attack in 1969 when Steve was just 16 years old. My Father’s Heart was based on a pair of articles written by McKee for the Wall Street Journal where he had worked for 14 years. He covered four Olympics for the Journal: Nagano, Salt Lake, Athens and Torino. At the time of his death he was working on a one-man play based on My Father’s Heart.
In 2012, McKee established a “memory blog” called “Centaur Seasons,” which tells the story of his years playing basketball at Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales. The brand-new school in Center Valley, Pennsylvania, ran a team onto the court for the first time in the 1968-69 season and McKee showed up two years later and played through the 1973-74 season. He recounted in his blog the stories of the new school and the Centaurs, as the Bulldogs were called back then; the faith required of its students, faculty, and staff that the school could prevail, the basketball team succeed; how “by believing in it we could make it come to be.”
He recounted showing up for practice after Christmas in his freshman year, when the team slept in a classroom in the back of Billera Hall, “each of us given a cot, a pillow and a scratchy woolen blanket.” And stories about the school’s first team traveling to play in Cape May, New Jersey, in an old yellow school bus painted blue and red, for an away game against Shelton College. Along the way they had to push the bus twice around a Jersey traffic circle to jumpstart the engine (with everyone then running to get on board). Everything then was promise and potential. And heart.
“Centaur Seasons” ran for two years, three times a week, until McKee suffered an aortic aneurysm in 2013. He continued to post regularly about memories and stories of the Allentown College basketball team and other sports in the late ‘60’s and early 70’s. He died, at age 61, in March, 2014.
