The 70s was an era where Long island basketball really took off.

The beginning of the 70s we had Mitch Kupchak played for Brentwood.

He went on to star at North Carolina and the NBA.

We had Glenn who was first team high school All American.

Jeff Rulin came after that.

We had a lot of great talent that played Division 1 basketball.

Tom McEwen is the author of this Is Panther A Memoir of Youth, Underdog Spirit and Basketball Glory.

The book is a classic underdog story of a high school basketball team's quest for glory and a young man's journey of growth, family and determination.

Set against the vibrant backdrop of mid-1970s Long Island, New York, the book captures the excitement, challenges and camaraderie of a small town varsity basketball team and its dreams of triumph.

Told from Tom's vantage point in the eighth grade, he and the village of Babylon follow their varsity basketball team, the Panthers, as they fight their way forward in hopes of claiming the first ever Long Island Championship.

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Have.

Your notebook handy as you listen to this episode with Tom McEwen, author of this Is Panther Country, A memoir of Youth, Underdog Spirit and basketball glory.

Hello and welcome to the Hoop Heads podcast.

It's Mike Clensing here with my co host Jason Sunkel tonight and we are pleased to welcome in the author of the book, this Is Panther country, Tom McEwen.

Tom, welcome to the who Pets podcast.

Oh, pleasure to be here.

Thanks for the invitation.

Thrilled to have you on.

Looking forward to giving you an opportunity to share some of the great stories that make up the book.

This is Panther Country.

We're going to start by just having you give the quick synopsis of the book for people who want to pick up a copy.

Just tell them what they're going to be reading about and why don't we start out with where they can find the book and then we'll dive into the author and his story and then get into the book itself.

So, Tom, take it away.

Well, the book's available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, pretty much anywhere you can get books.

There's a bunch of distributors so they can order it into your local bookstore if you like.

What the book Is about is 50 years ago, they played the first ever Long island basketball championship.

And I grew up on Long island in Suffolk County.

Back in those days, the highest you could ever go before that year was to win a county championship in New York.

They never had a state championship really until 1980, but this was the first year they let two counties play each other.

And since there are only two counties on long island, it became the Long island championship.

And it was the first one.

And my school, Babylon High School, was one of the smallest schools on Long island and they got into a pretty good run there.

So I tell the story from my point of view.

As an eighth grader, I was 13.

I looked up to all the varsity players.

And I tell the story also as a coming of age story of me growing up as an eighth grader on Long island in a small town.

And you know what was going on then and to the backdrop of the team going on this incredible run.

A little bit about growing up in Babylon, what your life was like as a young, as a young kid, sort of how you got into the game of basketball.

Obviously, growing up in the era that you did, you're just a couple years older than me.

But I'm guessing that the way we grew up is similar compared to the way the kids grow up today.

You and I had a lot more freedom to be out, be playing, pick up basketball, playing backyard football, be playing baseball at the sand lot, all those kinds of things that kids today maybe don't get an opportunity to do as much.

But Just talk a little bit about your childhood kind of leading up to the time when you started writing, when the book kind of takes over the story, if that makes sense.

Yeah, so I always talk about my.

The year of my sports consciousness or awakening was 1969.

I was living in New York and that was kind of the year right around, over 18 month span we had.

The jets won it, the Mets won it, and the Knicks won it.

I was drawn to basketball mainly.

Walt Frazier was my idol back then.

He was a guard on the Knicks.

And I was about 10 or 11, so I started playing basketball.

We had a couple of very good public courts in the, in the neighborhood where we could go and, you know, pick up games whenever you wanted.

It was a small school, as I said, in the district.

So there was the town of Babylon, which had eight high schools.

And I grew up in the village of Babylon, which is actually the second smallest of those eight.

And that's eight of the 120, 130 high schools on Long Island.

And when I got into junior high school, I tried out for the basketball team.

I made it in the seventh and the eighth grade years and we had a pretty good team my seventh grade year, but then the eighth grade, my eighth grade year.

The varsity started to look pretty good.

And we had only one school all the way up.

So, for example, there was one elementary school, one grade school, and then the junior high, senior high was in one building.

So I was going with the same class of people from kindergarten all the way up to senior year.

So you got to know everybody really well.

A couple of the big stars on the varsity basketball team had younger brothers that I played with and they were among my close friends.

And, you know, we kind of clustered together, followed them around.

But, you know, it got into this really great era of basketball for our, for our, our school.

And it was consuming and it was wonderful the way the town kind of took to it.

Of course, everybody likes a winner, but it was always a great, it was always a great spirit in the village to follow the sports teams.

And the.

The village where I grew up is probably, you know, 4 miles caddy corner, one end to the other.

But we rode our bicycles everywhere across everybody's house.

And the village itself was very, I'd say, advanced as far as being integrated.

We had a, you know, race was still an issue on Long Island.

I talk a little bit about that on the book.

We have one high school on one of our borders was all white, and one high school on another one of our borders was all black.

We had a mix in our school, but everybody seemed to, you know, get along and not really make anything of that.

Talk about that social through line that kind of runs throughout the book in terms of just the connection between.

I know a couple of the guys that played on the varsity.

You had their brothers that played with you on your junior high team.

And as you said, because you had grades 7 through 12 all in the same building, there was sort of this social connection that maybe in other school districts where the schools were separated and maybe you didn't have the, the siblings that were on the two teams, there might not have been a much of a connection.

Just talk a little bit about sort of the social connection amongst all the kids and kind of how that put you in some situations throughout the book that maybe you wouldn't have been in had you been in a more, I guess, quote, normal environment.

Yeah, well, there were, there were two, two families of brothers who were kind of the pillars of the basketball teams back then.

One was the Farleys.

There were two on the varsity, there was one on my junior high team.

And then there was one that had played and had already graduated.

And there was very similar with the Vickers family.

One my year, two were playing on varsity, one that had graduated and was playing in college.

And they're the older of the two brothers on the team.

Glenn was the real superstar in the, in the team.

It was a, it was a team of great, great talent surrounding like this really once in a generation player and his younger brother Ernie, we kind of always managed to collect over at his house across town.

And you know, so you talk a little bit about, you know, you're in seventh grade and eighth grade and you're going to school with 11th and 12th graders.

So we probably ended up at a lot of parties and gatherings we probably shouldn't have been at at our age.

And if we were in a, an area where, you know, there was junior high, middle school and high school, you know, we probably wouldn't have heard of those things.

And if this district was bigger, you know, it wouldn't be that far to just stroll by these houses that were.

The parents are out and they were throwing a big party.

What do you remember in terms of just your connection with watching those guys play?

And how did you feel first sort of get that feeling of connection that like, hey, I really am starting to witness something special.

I know you talk about it a little bit in the book in terms of obviously that connection with the siblings and, and growing up and being, being a kid who was Interested in basketball, but.

But when did you and the rest of the community sort of sense that there was something special going on with that particular team?

Well, to start out, I'd take it back to the coach, the coach of the varsity, a guy named Roy Kobel, still alive today, 91, still an incredible personality.

He had kind of built the program almost all the way down to the seventh grade.

He actually even had been a gym teacher in the grade school, and he managed to get all of the levels on the same page.

So we were all running the same offense from seventh grade all the way up to senior high, and he was evolving it more.

And it was called the 2, 3 offense, and it had a little bit of a triangle offense into it that, you know, eventually got used by, you know, pros and college team.

So he's a real visionary in that respect.

But going into the year, we thought we were going to be pretty good.

We had been good the year before, but we got knocked out of the county playoffs in the first round.

So this year we were thinking we were going to go one step better, but turned out we had a really competitive Suffolk county before we even get to Long island, had eight leagues in it.

They each had about eight to 10 teams in it.

We were in League 5, and we had a really tough league.

I'd say we probably had three of the top five teams in the county when you look at it at the end of the year in that league.

And we had a couple of brutal games there.

So we actually lost too early in the season, came back later to beat those two teams.

And it seemed like every game we started getting a little better.

But as far as my involvement, you know, it's.

I was in junior high.

I wanted to play varsity someday.

So, you know, I was watching everything from the freshman, the JV to the varsity.

You know, I would.

You know, I was always talking to the coach sometimes.

He probably would have considered me a pest.

I was around so much.

But.

But between that and, you know, the.

We.

We had a pretty athletic grade in my year, so there was never any.

Never any trouble getting a pickup game going, getting five to 10 guys to go down to the courts and play.

So it was really imbued into the culture and the crowd that I hung with.

And again, with the two guys having the older brothers playing on the varsity, we were friends with them, we looked up to their brothers, and it created an even tighter connection with us.

I know that in the book, you talk about the games that you had with your rival Amityville and that, that was a series, you call them a trilogy.

And we went with the, the Ali Fraser, you know, f.

Final, Final analogy and that.

And I actually heard and, and listened to you talk to the Long Island History podcast and they talked about how you went and tried to find one of the players from that team, a guy named Paul Smith, and then you actually connected with his son Tristan, who, believe it or not, Tom, I don't know if you know this, but Tristan was on the podcast with us and he talked about.

Yeah, so he talked about.

So when I heard that he talked about his experience, obviously playing at Amityville.

And so just kind of tell the story of how you connected with Paul, who was one of the rivals of that team, and his, his son Tristan.

Just talk a little bit about that piece of it.

So Paul was just this incredible athlete in high school.

He was a wide receiver and defensive back on the football team.

He was like the conference mvp.

He was guard on the basketball team and all county sprinter.

And he kind of became the face of the opposition, to me at least.

But they had a starting five that was right there with us and a bench that could go.

And kind of in the book, I kind of treat it as the Ali Frazier trilogy because it was two two point games and then one one point triple overtime game.

So the last one, I.

And the chapter in my book, I called it the Thriller with the Villa, you know, kind of staying with the Holly Frazier comparison.

But I really wanted to get ahold of Paul because I had talked a lot about him, more than anybody else on Amityville is, you know, what he was doing and you know, how difficult he was to stop and watching him.

So after I'd written the book and I detailed about him, I've gone back and looked at the papers.

Newsday and Long Island Press were the big papers back when I was growing up and they still are on Long Island.

And so I'd written the book and the way I decided to write the book was to write the whole thing just from my memory and from the newspaper articles.

And then afterwards I went back and fact checked with people.

So it wasn't too hard getting ahold of Glenn Vickers and some of the other players and the coach, you know, I tracked down in Florida and then actually went and visited, spent a few days with them.

But I really wanted to find Paul Smith.

So I found Tristan actually does a podcast out on Long island.

And I commented it on one of his recorded podcasts and said, hey, I wrote a book.

Your father's very Prominent in it.

I'd love to talk.

And so he and I connected.

I forget if we connected by phone or however, but we had a good conversation.

I said, well, next time I'm up on Long Island, I'll give you a call.

And he said, well, unfortunately I live down in Dallas and I don't know if I told you I live in Dallas.

So I said, you're kidding me, right?

So turns out we're like 30 minutes away from each other.

So I went and had dinner with him and his.

Him and his dad is also.

Paul is living down here as well.

So I went down, had dinner with him, we talked and compared notes and everything.

And you know, Tristan and I have actually partnered and put together mostly him, but this Long island history, basketball history, Facebook group that's taken off like crazy.

But yeah, so I caught up with Tristan, who I think went a level above even the people, all the people in this book.

As far as his career in high school basketball, I think it was a two time state champion champ and, you know, Suffolk County, Long island mvp.

So, you know, he was definitely a, a force.

You know, he might have gone dad and won better.

When you wrote the book and you're sitting down and I think about trying to reflect on different eras in my life.

If I think about a year during my junior high time, or I think about my junior or senior year of high school, or I think about a year in college, and I try to think about putting together the details of that and getting it down on paper and getting it into a book, that to me feels kind of daunting and I'm not sure how much I would trust my memory.

There's obviously certain things that would stand out, but I'm not sure I could put together a coherent story.

So as you sat down to get the idea for the book and you sit down and start kind of going through it, and then obviously, as you said, you wrote the book and then you kind of went back and fact checked it and tried to reach out to some of the participants in the story, so to speak.

How did you, how did your memory kind of jive with what some of the people that were some of the main characters in your book.

How did your memory jive with some of the things that they.

That they remembered?

It was pretty consistent with everybody remembered.

I will say that everybody remembers that triple overtime game against Hamill just a little bit differently.

It's like, did I miss that final shot in the first overtime regulation?

But as far as the gist of the whole Book.

There were some things, I joke that the coach down in Florida.

He's kidding with me.

No, no, that's not how this offense work.

And he starts down moving salt and pepper shapers and drawing on Napk.

This is.

I said.

I said, I remember that offense.

I ran it for seven years, so we kind of had fun with that.

But mostly everybody pretty much jived up.

And even to the sense they were like, oh, wow, I don't even remember that as far as I.

And Glenn, who was the star in the book, he was on varsity since he was a freshman, so I guess he had never sat in the stands.

So he said, is that what the chant was?

Because that's where this is Panther country was our chant.

And he says, I don't even remember that.

I said, well, you were never in the stands, so how could you remember it?

But, yeah, so when I went through the facts and I, you know, I had, you know, everybody.

Well, Glenn and.

And.

And the coach read the book beforehand.

They were the two ones that, you know, had the most input.

Paul, actually, he read it afterwards, had a few things, but he said it was pretty accurate.

I do a flashback to a football game, you know, so actually we played Amityville three times in basketball, and we played them in the conference football championship.

And he had a few things on the.

I remember the game as being a rainy, muddy game, and he was telling me, no, it was a dry dust bowl.

And I was like, okay, maybe it might have been the one thing I.

One thing I got off, but pretty much the spirit of how it was going and whatever everybody was at games, everybody thought I kind of captured it.

Tell me a little bit more about the structure of Long island basketball and what made this season so special, obviously, to be able to have this Long island championship.

When I was doing the research and looking through and reading the book, I did not realize that the state of New York did not have a state championship.

Right.

We go back and we think about the team and Milan, Indiana.

Right.

And that the movie Hoosiers is based upon where that was in What, I think, 1954, maybe.

You're talking about an Indiana state high school basketball championship.

And so just tell me a little bit about what.

What made it so special, not only this team, but also the fact that it just happened to coincide with the first year on Long island where you had this Long island championship.

Talk about how that kind of impacted the story of this team.

Yeah, well, it kind of had two trends colliding.

So I Talk up until 1974 75, the highest you could get in New York was a county, or at least there were 11, I think new York state basketball districts, and you could win one of those 11.

And that's where it ended.

But they were open championships.

So, for example, Suffolk county, all 56, 60 teams, played in one tournament, or at least the league champs and write ins played in one tournament.

And that's the way it was pretty much in every county.

And then they decided in 74, 75 not to have a state championship, but they decided to let each county champ play one more game.

Okay, so, you know, two counties may be playing up in upstate New York, but that's not as significant as the only two counties playing on Long island in a championship game.

And we, we had the Nassau Coliseum, where the Nets were playing at the time, and Julius Irving.

It was only two or three years old, so it was a state of the art, fantastic facility.

And it was also the first year they played the championship not only at county championships, but the Long island championships there.

So it was a championship weekend.

I remember it came to the end of that year.

I was like, on Friday they had.

Was it tripleheader?

They had the Nassau county championship, the Suffolk County Championship.

And then the Nets played a game with Dr.

J.

And then on Sunday, they had the two county championships, but they played after an afternoon Nets game.

So both, both championships were doubleheaders with the, with the nets and Dr.

J.

So that was kind of big time for everybody.

But the other thing that was kind of going in the other direction is the, by the end of the decade, the 79, 80, the, the tournaments started breaking up into A, B, C, D champions.

So there was, you know, the schools were playing their own size teams.

So New York actually never had an open state championship.

You know, by the time they were getting to play each other, they were dividing it up into levels.

So it kind of represented, you know, the end of one era and the beginning of another era.

And I'd probably say, you know, that when, you know, the Long island championships took place, that was probably as big an open championship as.

As took place in New York, because even when you got to the state championships and you're playing the A, B and C, I don't know if there were, you know, 130 schools in those.

In those tournaments.

There might have been, but.

So that was kind of special.

It was the first in that.

And it was also the 70s was an era where Long island basketball, particularly Suffolk county, all of Long island, really took off.

The beginning of the 70s we had Mitch Kupchak played for BrentW and he went on to start at North Carolina and the NBA.

We had Glenn who was, you know, a parade or first team, all high school, all American.

Jeff Rulin came after that.

We had a lot of great talent that played Division 1 basketball.

And I talk a little about in the book, the quarter, the semifinals before with the champ, the champion first championships in Nassau Coliseum was played in this really big gym out at Ward Melville, which is a location out on Long island.

And they had the biggest gym on at least in Suffolk County.

And all of the pro coach, the college coaches and everything started showing up at that game.

So, you know, we're at the game to watch, you know, us hopefully get to the county championship.

And Luke Honaseka, Jane Chanz is popping through the door.

Lefty Drizzell, Denny Crumb from Louisville.

And over the next, you know, even after that year and the year subsequent, you'd always see like, you know, 5 to 10 top flight college coaches going to those semifinal games.

So it was really a kind of a golden era of basketball for Long island and it kind of launched into it and so it was really special to be around.

You'd see guys playing high school or guys you played against in high school, and then you'd see them in TV playing for the ACC and you know, all these great teams.

So it was a lot, very special in that regard as well.

My understanding that you went up to some of those coaches and talked to them during those games.

Yeah, I was, I was a paparazzi or still whatever.

If I saw someone famous, I wasn't up to it, you know, so, yeah, so kind of seco was at that, that first game and he had actually was the coach of the Nets for a couple of years.

He went to St.

John's he went to the Nets, then back to St.

John's so he had even a little added celebrity status to it.

So.

Yeah, but they were, they were, they were all very personal.

Of course.

I ran right up and talked to him and same thing for Lefty Drizelle.

I don't know if you remember Lefty Drizell coaching at Maryland, but he had an accent.

I couldn't understand a word.

I might have been his first time up north, I don't know.

But, but yeah, so he went up and talked to them and they were all, you know, just, just good guys, but they, they were really there looking at the talent.

You could, you could see it.

Another Small world moment for you.

We had Lefty Giselle's grandson, Tyson Anderson, who is currently, he's a coach at Wofford College.

And we had him on, I don't know, maybe two, three weeks ago.

So, yeah, it's a.

Again, there's.

The basketball world is just so interconnected.

It really is, it really is kind of amazing when you look at just how, I mean, you think about those guys and just the names of Lefty Giselle, Luke Carnesecond, Denny Crum.

And those are names of guys that, you know, I grew up as, watching them as icons of the college game.

And here you are, a kid who at the time, you're in eighth grade and you just get to walk up to him at an arena a little bit different than what the situations are that we would have today.

But certainly a very cool experience for, you know, for, for you back in that time.

And then being able to see those guys that, as you said that you played against, that you watched play, and then to be able to see them go on and have success the college level and in some cases at the pro level, I think is, you know, is really special.

How far, how, how much did you follow Gary Vickers career when he went on to Iona?

Glenn Vickers so Glenn, I followed his career closely because first off, he was, he could have gone to a lot of schools further away in the country, but he, you know, he came across a really great salesman.

Jim Valvano was the coach at Iona.

He just started as coach.

I think I forget where he was before that, but before he went on to North Carolina State.

And he really sold hard to get, to get Glenn to come to Iona.

And by getting Glenn, he was able.

Glenn was, you know, very high regarded amongst his peers and competitors.

And by getting Glenn, he was able to recruit practically a Long Island High school all star team.

There was another, another player, Kevin Hamilton out of North Babylon, who was probably the second best guard to Glenn on the island.

There was this powerful center, Jeff Ruland, who went on to a great NBA career as well, who went to Iona and there were several other players got there.

So Balvano actually pruned the Long island, picked the Long island talent and created a national contender at Iona who hadn't had a.500 team as far as I remember until that year.

But with Glenn playing at Iona, he was, he was always, you know, we could go see him play.

He played three or four times at Madison Square Garden that I remember.

I went to see him and his, his family always got complimentary tickets to the game.

So I saw him play St.

John Seton Hall A lot of great games at the Garden.

And one.

One game we saw, Glenn's older brother, Willie Vickers, was actually played at Hofstra.

So he was a senior at Hofstra when Glenn was a freshman at Iona.

And there was actually a game where they played each other.

And I think that was as big as the Long island championship.

I think everybody in Babylon showed up for that game.

And Willie actually clamped in, clamped Glenn down a little bit.

Glenn ended up having the better career, but Willie had the better night that night.

It's funny, just when you think about the opportunity to be able to watch guys who have, you know, that you've had the opportunity to play with and, and against, and that you've had an opportunity to see in person.

And obviously in your case, with the Vickers family, you know, being close with them and kind of growing up and being in their household and then getting an opportunity to see, as Glenn went on to have a tremendous amount of success moving forward, and again, was still close enough right at Iona where you could still be able to go see him play and be able to follow him.

It's not like it is today, where he could have gone halfway across the country and you could have still kept tabs and watched every.

Watched every game that he would have played.

Had he decided to go, you know, go to the Midwest or go to the south or go out west, you wouldn't have had any opportunity to see him.

But the fact that he kind of remained in the city gave you an opportunity to still kind of follow his career, which I think is probably something special.

I'm sure it's something that, you know, retrospectively that his family and his brother, I'm sure, appreciated.

Yeah.

And he was always such a down to earth guy.

I mean, I remember in high school, and I talk about a couple instances in the book, you know, he was a rock star, and yet anybody came up to him in the hallways, you know, during school and said, hey, Glenn, great game.

Glenn would actually stop and talk to you and kind of start talking about, really, I missed that foul shot.

I can't believe.

Yeah, I mean, he was, he was, he was that.

That genuine.

And that never stopped.

Even when he went to Iona, you know, we'd see the.

After the games sometimes, and he always remembered all of us.

And he'd ask how, you know, by the time he was in college, I was playing varsity with his younger brother Brian and Ernie, who, Who I'd kind of come up the ranks with.

So it was.

Was.

Yeah, he was just always.

And, you know, we, we reconnected when I was writing the book and you know, had lunches together and everything and reminisced about everything.

And it was a really, really special catching up, particularly with him and the coach down in Florida was my favorite part of, you know, doing the writing.

Yeah, Most surprising detail story.

Something that either you remember that maybe you had kind of lost in the recesses of your mind or something that somebody else brought to your attention that you learned as you were, as you were right.

Going through the process of writing the book.

Is there, is there one thing that kind of surprised you?

Like, oh, I didn't remember that or oh, I did remember that, but I didn't realize what a big role that played in the story.

Well, the couple of smaller things.

You know, first off, I thought so the year before we won that Long island show, we, you know, we went the year of the book, the year before we had won the league championship.

And I thought that was our first league championship.

I'd hear the program was, you know, not great before then, but the coach actually read the book and he said, no, no, we won two league championships before that.

We just never won a county playoff game.

And another part was at the end of the triple overtime game.

It was a one point game and the losing team got a shot off.

And it's all sorts of memories.

Did that ball hit the rim?

Did it rattle out?

Not even come close.

Where did they throw it in from?

But everybody had a different memory.

But you know, they, everybody was up that that shot got off and it hung in the air for about a thousand seconds.

It felt like, because, you know, it's, you know, it would have been different title to the book if that ball had gone in.

What's funny is, is that obviously today, if that game were to be played, there'd be a record of it.

Now maybe the huddle camera would have pivoted with its AI and missed the corner depending on where the shot was.

But generally speaking, somebody would have had their phone out or been recording it or whatever.

There would have been multiple instances of that last shot.

And, and yet in a way it's kind of interesting and fun that nobody has that video.

So all the different interpretations that people have who participated in that game.

And Jason's heard me tell this story before about my final game in high school.

There was a shot that we were up by three.

There was a shot that was taken that I swear the kids feet were on the line.

I have my college teammate who actually played against in that game swears that the kids feet were behind the line.

There's no video of the shot.

So it's just like all we can do is argue over what happened in that moment.

And there's a part of me that wishes that there was video.

Then there's a part of me that is kind of glad that there isn't.

Even though I feel like I know I'm right.

So Harold, if you're out there listening, I still think I'm right.

And the shot was a two out of three and we should have won that game.

But anyway, it's just funny that you have this memory and everybody was there in the gym in that game and yet the different perspectives as you found out, from this person to this person to this person, everybody kind of has this different memory in their mind and.

Nobody, nobody was like hardcore on it.

They were all like, really?

I thought it hit the rim or you know.

Right.

Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly.

And the other things that I point out in the book just you triggered it when you said something for the.

There was no three point line back then and there was no shot clock.

So you know, it was really a game of discipline, you know.

So we again we ran this offense which could be run slow or it could be run fast.

And you know, the, the, the, the coach, Roy Coble.

Yeah, just you know, do not shoot unless you have a good shot.

And they would work that thing back and forth, back and forth and they'd put teams to sleep because they were, you know, just so disciplined being able to do it.

But they didn't have to get a shot off if they didn't, you know, have a good shot.

So yeah, I think it was not until like 1987 they had a three point shot and a shot clock on Long Island.

So it was pretty much the same going forward.

So it was, was a different era from that, that standpoint.

And I, I joke.

I was, I was a guard and I said that was definitely a great time for forwards because an outside shot counted the same as an inside shot.

So you better have a good reason if you took an outside shot.

That is true.

The game has definitely changed since 1987 when the, the three point line.

I think that was the same year it came to Ohio because I was a senior in 1988.

I think it came in, if I'm not mistaken, I think when I was a junior, I don't think we had it when I was a sophomore and I think it came in when I was a junior.

And of course at that time nobody really knew the way that basketball was going to morph into what we see today, the number of threes that are being shot today.

Even when the line came in, nobody, players and coaches really had an idea how to, how to utilize it.

There were very few players who could shoot it back in that day.

Whereas now you look at whether it's high school teams, college teams, or certainly in the NBA, almost every player can step out beyond that line and at least credibly put the ball up there.

At least think they can anyway.

People aren't afraid to shoot it, let's put it that way.

Yeah.

And coaches build it into the offense.

You know, it's like, you know, Absolutely.

I can't imagine, you know, my coach, he actually, the coach of that team, he would have adapted, but he liked that working around, get it, getting it down to the pivot.

So he, I don't know, he would have, he would have done.

We had some good outside shooters on that team as well.

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When did the idea of writing the book first enter your mind and what was the process for making it happen?

Were you before you started it?

Were you a con?

Were you a confident author going into it where you thought, hey, I, I, I, I'm gonna have no problem writing this book?

Were you, were you nervous to start getting it and seeing if you could go through the process?

Just what was your mindset and when did the idea first kind of take hold?

Well, actually the first time I thought about writing it was when I saw the movie Hoosiers.

That's a long time ago.

That's a long time ago.

Yeah, that was 1986 or whatever.

And I'm thinking, God, I was witness to a story, at least just as good as that, and I don't have to make up a fictional version of it.

And I actually tried to write a book about a different subject back in 2001, and I shopped it around to some publishers, and they all gave me some feedback that it was totally undisciplined.

And you gotta.

So I actually took some courses over the next ten years or so.

But, like yourself, I had young kids in the early 2000s, so I had to kind of put that off, earn a living and stuff like that.

But during the course of my professional career, I started writing a lot of articles for professional publications.

And so I kind of honed my craft a little bit.

And then finally I got to the stage where I started a company.

I sold it to another company, and I had some time off, and I was like, okay, I'm going to do this.

So I sat down and I was able to put together all I learned, and really, the story did just start flowing out because I had it all in my mind.

And then I got some archive subscriptions to the newspapers that I told you about, and using the four months of the season as kind of like a ruler.

You know, I would go from game to game and then fill in between the games what was going on socially in the town and, you know, introduce the town and the different areas and, you know, the people who shaped it and everything.

So it kind of fit to my kind of mathematical numerical nature, the way I could write it that way.

And, yeah, the dialogue, it just came out because I had a very good memory.

And, you know, everybody was starting.

You know, Everybody's in their 60s now, so I'm like, yeah, I got to get this.

Somebody's got to get this written so that nobody forgets.

That's it.

And fortunately, I was able to do it.

We had a big launch of the book back in Babylon, in my hometown, right across the street from the gymnasium at the American Legion Hall.

About six or seven of the players showed up, both coaches, where the coach from Florida came all the way up.

He wasn't initially going to come, but his children said, no, you got to get up for that.

So they took him up, and so he came up, and I think he'd always been itching to have a reunion with that group as well, so it really served that purpose.

And, yeah, so it's.

The village was really behind it.

And we were originally gonna have it at the Historical Society Museum, but it grew too big, so we had to move it.

But, yeah, it's been a great experience and very little questioning of what happened.

More along the lines of, God, that was such a great time.

Yeah, I remember this.

I gotta remember the Nassau Coliseum, seeing the games there.

So it was.

I think for everybody who's read it, it's been a trip down memory lane.

And people who weren't a part of it that have reached out to me who've read it are just.

It triggers their own childhood or their own memory.

I think everybody has a story like this.

So, you know, I was getting some flyers made up here in Dallas, and a lady was behind me, and she said, what's that?

And I said, I just wrote a book about my high school basketball team.

You know, they won championship back in the 70s.

She went immediately from, you know, my daddy was a football coach in Abilene.

So everybody.

You know, it's like I say to my wife all the time, if I could monetize the triggering of that memory from everybody, you know.

Yeah.

Because, you know, like yourself, you know, just talking about you remembering, you know, the, you know, championships and growing up and playing, I think it kind of triggers that in a lot most people.

Yeah.

And I think not only when you read the book, not only does it trigger you if you are a member of a team in high school, but I think there's also just some generalized high school memories and things.

When you talk about just the.

The parties, when you talk about just the connection between people.

You've got a little boy, girl relationship stuff in there that kind of is sprinkled in that.

But everybody who's been in high school, there's something in the book that I think anybody can relate to.

And certainly if you've played sports or you're a fan of a team, you think about again, there are still some pockets in America where you have the same level of support for high school sports in the student body.

But I think it's getting more difficult to generate that same level of connection that I'm sure that the.

The city of Babylon and the student body at the high school felt for that team.

Just because there's so many more distractions.

Kids carry around a distraction machine in their pocket all the time that.

And so you don't have the same level necessarily, always, not.

Not everywhere, but you don't have the Same level of participation in terms of students attending games and doing things that, you know, were more common back in that era.

But certainly it doesn't surprise me at all that when people read or see or hear about the book, that it does trigger something in them, because I think everybody has some memory of high school that you probably touched on in the book, that there's something that when they read it, they're like, oh, yeah, I remember when this happened to me.

And they can kind of reframe it around their own story.

And I think that's sort of the best part of the.

The book is that, yeah, you're telling that story, but then you're also.

As the reader, you're also being kind of taken back through your own memory lane as well, to.

To your high school years.

And that's one of the things that I enjoyed the most about it is.

Is just kind of being able to go back and, as you said, think about some of my own experiences, sort of framed through the experience that.

That you had with that.

With that Panther team, for sure.

Yeah.

And it's funny.

I joke all.

Of course, everybody's like this.

You know, it was.

It's funner reliving high school than it was actually living it.

Yeah.

All the, you know, stuff you don't want to remember, but.

Yeah, well, it was a special town because.

And back then we wrote our.

I don't point out this much in the book because it was winter, but we rode our bicycles everywhere back then.

Everybody had a bicycle.

And, you know, you were one part of town one night, another part of town another night.

You were, you know, passing, you know, bicycles.

You know, there were 10 speed bicycles all over that town somewhere.

And it was funny.

Someone reached out to me today and said it seemed like a pretty nice area you lived in and you still had to lock up your bicycle.

And I was like, oh, no, you always locked up your bike.

I think everybody I grew up with, regardless of where they lived, had had a bicycle stolen.

So it was like if you were.

If that was not.

Your bicycle was not in the garage, you had a lock on it, no matter where you.

Where you parked it.

Yeah.

I do miss bicycles in neighborhoods.

I will say that when I think about my time as a child and just.

And then part of me also looks at some of the places that I rode as a kid, because I actually live right now in the town where I grew up.

And so I look at some of the places where I rode when I was a kid, and I think, man, my parents Were crazy for allowing me to ride that far on those roads when I was 10 or 11 years old.

But it was just, again, a different, a different era of, yeah, they wouldn't.

Have the finding thing on the phone, so they'd know where you were and then.

Correct.

Yeah, be home at 6 for dinner.

Right, for sure.

Right.

For sure.

For sure.

There, there was definitely, there was definitely no knowing.

It was kind of like, I'm going out.

I'll see you back here whenever.

And it was just, again, a different, different era of parenting, different era of childhoods.

And I always say I'm really glad that I grew up in the era that I did.

In some ways, our kids have it better, but in a lot of ways, I feel like the way that you or I grew up just being able to kind of be out in the neighborhood and playing with our friends and riding our bikes and doing all those kinds of things are, it's, it's easy to get nostalgic.

And your book certainly does a good job of, of painting that picture of what that, what that time was like.

And although, yeah, not everybody grew up on Long island, you can certainly, just like we talked about with high school, you can certainly find bits and pieces of your own community and sort of your own experience.

If you, if you live through that time period by, by reading the book.

How, and if you're, you know, like, you know, the, and the families, I, I, I don't point it out.

It was like everybody's mother was everybody's mother, you know, like, you know, my or my house, my mother, you know, treated them like kids and vice versa.

All the others, you know, it was just, it was very, very communal amongst the families, in addition to, you know, the kids being close.

So it was, yeah, it was a very tight community all over.

When you sat down to write, how long did you write for a session.

When you sat down, did you always sit down and say, I'm going to write for an hour today.

Did you write until you felt like, okay, I'm kind of out of ideas for the day?

Or what was your process like, day to day?

Well, actually, I had read somewhere that Hemingway would try to write 500 words a day.

So I tried to do that, but I actually had a lot going.

So I actually got to the point I was writing a thousand words a day.

So I would write six days a week, always in the morning when I was most alert.

And I had an editor who worked with me where I would do three chapters and then I would kick it over to Him.

And he didn't do much reshaping of the story, per se.

He did a lot of editing.

He was.

He was the one who told me to introduce the romance angle.

So he said.

He's like, do you have any kind of romance angle?

No, I was 13.

There was a girl I had a crush on.

He said, that's great.

Put that in.

I said, okay, well, I'll have to let her know.

But.

But, yeah.

So at that pace, I was able to get the, you know, the first draft done in, like, six, seven months.

And then, you know, then I worked more closely with the publisher to craft it and, you know, style it and everything.

But the original draft was pretty much 90% complete.

You know, I went back again, as I said, and talked to people, tightened up some of the facts and stuff like that.

But, yeah, I didn't experience writer's block the entire time I wrote it.

It was like every time I sat down, I would write up to this game, then I would write up to this game, and then I would write up to this game.

And, like I said, that was kind of the ruler.

It was the gains.

And then what happened in between the gains socially.

So it was pretty.

I wouldn't say easy, but it came very.

It really came out.

And, you know, the classes that I had taken and that I had gotten feedback on a prior book, I was able to craft it a lot better.

Who was the first person that you had read the book, other than the editor?

The first person I had.

Well, the first person I had to read the book was the coach.

Yeah, I connected with him, and we had agreed.

Well, the editor.

Yeah, the editor read the whole thing.

But the coach, I wanted to get his blessing, because even when I was kind of talking to him about things that were in the book and I was changing stuff, I was like, okay, maybe there's some stuff here.

So I said, hey, you know, he'd already agreed that I was going to come down and visit him, so I sent him a copy ahead of time, and he read it before I got there.

And he was like, God, this is magnificent.

How did you remember all this?

You know, I was expecting him to beat me up.

I wasn't that.

I think, here's what I would guess is that anybody who was given the opportunity to sort of have a book like this presented to them about something in their life that I'm sure, obviously that season was very important to him, and obviously for the number of years that he coached and.

And how important the.

Those teams and players and we all know that if you've been part of a team, whether you've been part of it as a coach or a player, how important those moments, those memories are.

So, like, if somebody were to come to me, one of my teammates were to come to me from a time when I was playing college basketball or high school basketball, or if somebody came to me, who I coached with early on in my career and said, hey, I've got a book about such and such season, I would be ecstatic to read it and to kind of hear their perspective on it.

And I'm sure, just like some of the things that you brought up and that you brought to light, that maybe some of those guys that were a part of that team, maybe they didn't even remember, or maybe they did remember, but they might not have remembered on their own.

I mean, I think there's all kinds of things, right, that I have friends from high school that will be on, like, a text chain and they'll say, hey, do you remember such and such happened?

And if I would have had to recall that incident on my own, I don't know if I would have recalled it.

But when they can kind of provide some of the framework and the details, then that makes me.

It kind of jogs my memory and takes me back to that moment, and then I can relive it.

So I'm sure that everybody who was a character in this story, who was a part of that special season, I'm sure they all expressed their gratitude to you, but I'm sure they probably even felt even more gratitude to you for kind of bringing that story to life.

And the.

The other thing that he did say was, you know, he, you know, I was.

He said, you know, he was so invested in the team and getting them ready, and he said he had no idea that it had.

Had this, you know, the effect it was having on the rest of the community, you know, that we were all trying to get rides to the games and you know, how the.

The dad.

How we were.

Yeah, I was.

My dad and I were talking about at dinner time practically every night, hey, the varsity won again.

Looks like they're going to get the top seed in the playoffs.

You know, things like that.

And that was the one thing he said, you know, seeing, you know, how what he was doing with the team was affecting the rest of the community at dinner, dinner tables and the local vendors and stuff like that, which, you know, you're sort of ingrained in what you're doing there that, you know, you don't look up and see, look at this great effect it's having on everybody else as well.

What percentage of the games that year did you actually attend in person?

Do you remember?

I missed three or four games.

And I talk about this in the book, because the varsity games were played Tuesday afternoons and Friday nights.

If it was a Tuesday afternoon away game, I was on the junior high team.

We were practicing then, so we.

We wouldn't.

We wouldn't.

There was no way we could get to those games.

If those were home games, then we would do our practices, get them done, and then go to see the game.

So I missed like three or four games.

However many there were that were Tuesday away games.

I missed all of those.

But I was at every Friday night, home and away and all the playoff games.

So it was.

I pretty much.

Pretty much saw them all.

And the key was getting my.

It was getting my father to go.

I.

The book actually accomplished two things for me.

I wanted to tell this great story about the basketball team and growing up.

But I'd always wanted to write a book about my relationship with my father because he died young in 1980, so didn't get to spend as much time as I liked.

But the 70s was our decade together.

I was playing basketball, I was watching basketball.

And he was just such a basketball fan himself.

You know, once I.

Once I got him, you know, interested in the team, he wanted to go to the away games, too.

And that made me somewhat popular because when you have a car that's going, you get three or four friends, like, hey, can I get a ride to the game?

All of a sudden you're.

You're a rock star amongst your friends.

And, yeah, you can invite the girls that you have crushes on and, you know, they'll come as well.

So.

Yeah.

And then all the conversations we had in the car.

So it's like sometimes it'd be just him and I, and.

But we'd always talk about life in school and, you know, so it was, you know, there was that part of it as well, that.

That was a big part of his relationship.

My relationship with him is I.

I was the only one in my family who was a real sports nut.

And, you know, he.

He and I talked about that a lot.

We'd also often, you know, just going to games during the season.

We'd drive off to summer league camps and, you know, games over the summer and, you know, sports.

So a lot of the best moments of my life were sitting in the front seat next to my father, driving somewhere where, you know, he was kind of just mine.

And we could talk about, you know, life, sports, school, whatever.

Very cool that the book served that purpose for you, in addition to being able to tell the story of that special season.

But to be able to also sort of go back and.

And relive and talk about that relationship with your dad.

And again, if you read the book, you can feel that in terms of just.

Just your connection with the community, with your family, with your teammates, with the guys that you looked up to on the varsity, there's all these different sort of threads.

Right.

Of connection that go out from.

From you.

And.

And I think the way you chose to tell the story kind of from your perspective, I think just allowed for it, made it for.

For interesting reading, because although you were involved in the story, you weren't directly on the team, so you were kind of this almost, you know, floating above the team, kind of looking at it from this outside perspective, as opposed to somebody who maybe it's sort of the, you know, can't see the forest for the trees.

You were kind of able to see the whole picture, whereas maybe somebody who had been on the team might have maybe had some more insider details, but might not have had the whole big picture sort of effect, like you said, when you talk to the coach and he didn't see the bigger picture of the impact it was having on the community.

And so I think that to be able to kind of serve all those different purposes, I think, again, speaks to how well done the book really is.

Yeah.

And from a memoir standpoint, usually the memoir is, you know, the.

The person writing it is the protagonist, as we say in the book.

But this was more like Great Gatsby ish, where the guy telling the story was telling the story about the protagonist, which was the team.

And, you know, you know, Glenn and Coach Kobel being the principal faces of the team.

Since the book's been out, has there been anybody that has reached out to you that maybe you didn't know that has some connection to Long island basketball that just wasn't connected to the story, but just said, hey, this book really resonated with me after I had a chance to read it.

Is there anybody famous.

Not famous, just anybody who reached out to you that the book had an impact on who wasn't, again, directly related to the story?

Oh, well.

Well, one guy I wouldn't say reached out to me.

I reached out to him.

Was one of the quotes I have on the book was a guy named Matt Doherty.

You're probably familiar with that name.

He played on the 82, national championship coach, North Carolina, coached Notre Dame.

Former guest in the podcast.

I was going to ask if he was that.

I'm sure you would have had.

Him on twice.

And I'm a big, I'm a big North Carolina guy.

So that the North Carolina Michael Jordan freshman year, the jump shot team with Matt Doherty and Jimmy Black and Worthy and Sam Perkins and that whole group, that's probably my favorite college team of all time.

So it was a, it was a thrill for me to be able to have Matt Doherty on.

And I know he's a Long island guy, so.

And I saw that he did put, put a little blurb on your book.

So what was the conversation like with him when you reached out to him?

Well, I reached out to him and it was actually through LinkedIn.

We'd connected and I just sent him a chat and said, hey, Matt, I know you're, you know, you know, Long island basketball roots.

I've written a book about this era.

A guy from that team was actually a freshman on the team.

Chris Brust was on that 1982 North Carolina team as well.

So he had made of mine as well.

But I reached out to Matt and just said, you know, I'd love it if you would read it.

And he said, absolutely, send a copy over.

So I sent it over to him and I had to bug him a couple of times.

So it was like about a couple of weeks.

Busy guy.

And then finally he said, okay.

It was like, you know, Christmas, a couple days before Christmas.

He said, okay, I've got nothing scheduled next week.

I promise I'll get your book written, read by before New Year's.

So, yeah, so he calls me back, you know, like the week after Christmas and said, God, if he.

I felt like I was reliving my life, you know, I was driving with my father to basketball games all the time, riding my bicycle in the snow in the winter.

He said, I remember Glenn Vickers, he was my idol and all that great team of that year.

And he played in one of the Catholic schools, Holy Trinity, but he was in Nassau County.

But I'm trying to remember.

I think he said he might have been at that Suffolk county champion or that first Long island championship game.

But yeah, I was expecting him to more like kind of just check.

Yeah, I said I'd do it, so I do it.

But his enthusiastic response to how much the memories it brought up for him was really special.

And I was happy that he was that thrilled with the final product as he was.

Yeah, very cool.

And again, I think that for anybody who grew up in that era, for anybody who has played on a high school basketball team, I think you can find things that will resonate regardless of where in the country you grew up, regardless of what your experience was like.

There's definitely some common themes that I think run through most people's high school experience, especially if you're a high school athlete.

And then obviously you have, if you have the connection like Matt did of, of growing up in the area where some of those things are even more familiar to you just because of, of the similarity to the experiences that you had.

And so it's cool that you were able to reach out to him and that Matt was gracious enough to, to lend his, you know, lend his praise to the book for you to be able to.

I really appreciated that.

It was so nice to get that on the book.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

All right, before we wrap up, I want to give you a chance one more time to share if you have any other thing else that, that you'd like people to know about the book.

And then again, just, just share the title again.

Share where people can get it, share how people can connect with you.

And we'll get all that in the show notes and put all that on the website so people can find it.

But just go ahead and kind of give your last pitch for the book.

Okay, well, here's a copy of the book here the book is, this is Panther Country.

It's available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble.

Everybody buy books.

If you want a little more in depth on it, I have a website, it's tommceownbooks.com T O M M C K E o w n booksplural.com and in addition to having an overview of the book and a background on the author on the news and media page, I have a link to all the content that I've done with the book.

I plan on putting the link to this podcast on there, but any articles, reviews, interviews I've done elsewhere are all on there recorded so you can get to it.

So just you can relive your childhood.

Even if you weren't born in that era.

It takes you back to high school and all those things that made you a little insecure but were so worth living during that time that I think sports fan, not sports fan.

You'd really enjoy this book if you like a good coming of age story.

Would not agree more.

It's really well done, Tom.

I really enjoyed the opportunity to read this is Panther country.

To all of our audience out there.

Please go out support Tom, pick up a copy of the book, as he said.

And as we've said on the podcast, I think you'll enjoy it.

You'll get transported back to your high school years and it'll trigger some memories that maybe you haven't thought about in a long time.

So please pick up a copy of this is Panther Country.

Tom cannot thank you enough for taking the time out of your schedule to jump on tonight and join us.

Congratulations on the book again.

It's very well done.

And to everyone out there, thanks for listening and we will catch you on our next episode.

Thanks thanks for listening to the Hoop Heads podcast, presented by Head Start Basketball.