To get to the media room within the Sixers’ arena on game night, you enter through the north side of the building a couple hours before tip-off, exchange how-ya-doins with the always-affable attendants at the security checkpoint, wade through the empty stands to court level and head for the tunnel on the far side of the place.
Then you turn right and thread your way past the loading dock (approximate temperature in wintertime: minus-100 degrees), as well as the basketball hoop which for some reason is attached to the opposite wall.
And just like that, you’re there.
More often than not, I’d open the door to the media digs and Jack McCaffery, sports columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, would already be sitting behind his laptop, coffee cup in hand.
We’d exchange waist-high waves – don’t ask – then settle in for the night. More inside jokes. The usual complaints. (And believe me when I tell you this: No one is quite so aggrieved as a middle-aged sportswriter. No one in the history of mankind.)
In time a game would be played. Quotes would be accumulated. Stories would be written. Wisecracks would be exchanged. (Not necessarily in that order.)
Next game night: Rinse, repeat. And as the years passed, the players would change, as would the team’s fortunes. But the rhythm of the night never would. It was comfortable, familiar.
Which is why things haven’t felt right these last two years.
Jack suffered a stroke during the first period of a Flyers game on Jan. 4, 2024, and hasn’t worked since. That has left a void, an unfillable seat in the media room.
His mind remains sharp, and thank goodness for that. But he has lost the use of his left leg. Also his job. Under the terms of the union contract with the Daily Times, he had a two-year window to return to work, a deadline that has come and gone. He was informed about a month ago that after 40 years, his services were no longer required.
Or as he put it over the phone the other day, management “ran me off.”
There was a severance package to ease the blow. Still, he said, “I wasn’t ready yet.”
The silver lining this winter was that while Jack was no longer where he was supposed to be (at least in my mind), he was exactly where he needed to be. That would be the Palestra, every time the Penn men’s basketball team played there.
An aside: Jack used to recoil about the many, many game stories that paid tribute to that grand old barn. It can’t always be about the building, he’d say. Except now it is, where he’s concerned.
To some extent it always has been. He and his younger brother Fran more or less grew up in the place, regularly venturing there from their home in the West Oak Lane section of Philadelphia for Saturday double-headers. Later Fran played guard for the Quakers. He also began his coaching career at Penn, back in 1982.
And this season he returned as the school’s head coach, leading the Quakers to an Ivy League Tournament title and an NCAA Tournament berth. All of which was therapeutic for Jack, who parked his wheelchair courtside each game night.
“It was fabulous,” he said. “I enjoyed every minute of it. … That helped a lot. I’m sorry that’s over.”
Jack is 69. Fran is coming up on 67. Jack graduated from Villanova in 1978, then made stops at the Philadelphia Journal, Trenton Times and Montgomery Newspapers before arriving at the Daily Times in 1985. After starting out as a Penn assistant to Craig Littlepage in ‘82, Fran hopscotched to five other places, notably serving as a Notre Dame assistant for 11 years and Iowa’s head man for 15, the latter immediately before returning to Penn.
But all the while their lives remained entwined, just as they had always been. Jack would routinely make the four-and-a-half-hour drive to Siena for games when Fran was the head coach there (2005-10), and routinely drive 15 hours to Iowa to work his summer camps. There he would officiate, work stations, maybe instruct the youngest campers. Whatever was needed.
Now they need each other that much more. Fran said he talks with his brother all the time, and visits Jack and his wife Sherrie at their home in Lafayette Hill whenever he can.
“Sometimes we’ll just watch the Phillies together, or the Eagles or whatever else is going on,” Fran said. “We’ll get some food, I’ll go over, we’ll hang out. That’s been really special.”
The only children born to John and Shirley – a police officer and school counselor, respectively – the two boys were, in Fran’s words, “incredibly close.”
“We did everything together – everything,” he said. “Best friends.”
Both were athletes at LaSalle High School, and both managed to turn their passion for sports into careers. Jack is happy to tell you that at all five places Fran has served as head coach – Lehigh and North Carolina-Greensboro, in addition to Siena, Iowa and Penn – he has taken title-winning teams to NCAAs. And others are only too happy to celebrate Jack’s writing, which was always stylish, fearless and oozing with Philly attitude; his space was most definitely a no-sacred-cow zone.
“Every time he wrote a column, he was good,” former Daily Times sports editor Rob Parent said. “And he was clean (i.e., typo- and mistake-free). You’d edit his copy and have to look hard to do your job right.”
Parent was there the night Jack suffered his stroke, covering a game between the Flyers and Columbus Blue Jackets. But Parent was seated in the front row of the pressbox, while Jack was seated not only behind him, but above him, as the back row slopes upward, and is semi-enclosed. It wasn’t until the first intermission that Parent learned his colleague had been stretchered out of the building by EMTs.
“I had dinner with him,” Parent said, “and he was fine.”
Jack recalls only that he “felt something in (his) back” after settling into his seat to watch the game.
“Next thing I knew,” he added, “I was out.”
Sherrie called Fran to fill him in; he also talked to one of Jack’s doctors.
“They were still trying to figure out what it was,” Fran said. “They were treating him for a stroke, but they were trying to determine the severity, and was it something else? Was it some other type of seizure?”
Fran coached the Hawkeyes to a home victory over Rutgers two days later, then flew to Philadelphia and stayed for a few days. It was the start of a long journey for Jack, who spent a month at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, then over a year at Magee Rehabilitation Hospital. His last stop was Luther Woods, a sub-acute rehab center in Hatboro, from which he was released June 25 of last year.
“I’m hanging in,” he said.
“Cognitively, he’s in a pretty good place,” Fran said. “You never know with strokes. You can have a conversation with him. He’s aware of everything that’s going on. He’s got his sense of humor.”
Sure, the wheelchair sucks. And he’s not able to drive.
“But,” Fran said, “he’s perfectly functioning otherwise.”
Able to get out some. Able to get to the Palestra every game night. Which is exactly where he needed to be.