Tag Archives: Lewis Katz

06.02.24
by

Temple: The Unluckiest School in the history of sports

Yankee Stadium’s tribute to Lewis Katz, Temple great and part owner of the YES Network.

On the precipice of winning a national title in basketball, John Chaney recruited two of the top big men in the nation only a decade apart.

Robert Liburd, the 7-foot-2 High School Player of the Year in New York City, and Marvin Webster Jr., the 6-11 power forward and stretch five and son of the great Marvin Webster, were two of many McDonald’s All-Americans (others included Kevin Lyde, Donald Hodge and Mark Macon) who committed to Chaney.

Liburd and Webster tragically dropped dead before they ever got on the court for the Owls.

That robbed John Chaney of his national championship IMHO.

Fran Dunphy’s best recruit was Trey Lowe out of Trenton, N.J. and he never made an impact because of a car accident. Lowe was a top 150 high school talent who maybe might have worked his way into being a top 15 college talent.

That robbed Dunphy of his deep NCAA tournament run.

With some of that knowledge behind me, I got to thinking Temple sports was cursed but it really hit me the day Temple was the only football team to get kicked out of a major conference in 2002 when the Big East pulled the plug.

Fortunately, Temple made its own luck when Bill Bradshaw hired Al Golden (not a buddy) and Golden beat that conference’s Fiesta Bowl rep, UConn, 30-10, in 2010.

More luck was made by a Golden disciple, Matt Rhule, who beat Penn State, 27-10, in 2015 and got the Owls on night prime time TV after the program was celebrated all day on the major networks as Philadelphia turned out big time for ESPN College Football Game Day.

Unfortunately, Temple’s biggest athletic booster, Lewis Katz, never got to see that day because he died in a plane crash on May 31, 2014.

He did, though, live long enough to see his beloved Owls accepted back into a major conference (also the Big East).

No prouder New Yorker than Lewis Katz to see this big sign in Times Square welcoming the Owls back to the Big East.

He did not live long enough, though, to see his AD hire a guy to be head coach who left 18 days later for Miami. That might have killed him.

If that didn’t, surely what happened 18 days later–Pat Kraft hiring an Indiana buddy off a Manny Diaz rebound–would have.

Or maybe if Katz was here all of that would not have happened.

More bad luck.

If luck is the residue of design, Temple owns that, too.

Temple never learned from the bad Karma of the buddy system of hiring and allowed another buddy, Arthur Johnson, to hire another buddy, Stan Drayton.

Maybe that wouldn’t have happened if Katz was here but we will never know.

Now, in an NIL/Transfer Portal Era where the Lew Katz’s of the world are buying the best players, Temple’s luck might have ran out.

Temple needs a new Lew Katz more than ever and, sadly, there are no Lew Katz’s around or no one wants to step into that void. Those of us who do want to step in do not have the funds to own an entire TV network, as Katz once did.

So maybe Temple is the unluckiest school in the history of sports. Given what’s happened, I challenge anyone to find an unluckier school.

My fervent hope is that Temple’s luck has not run out. It is also my biggest fear.

Friday: Poor Survivors

Monday: State of the Union

06.02.14
by

Lew Katz: Winner and Still Champion

Yankee Stadium's tribute Sunday to Lewis Katz, part owner of the YES Network.

Yankee Stadium’s tribute Sunday to Lewis Katz, part owner of the YES Network.

For someone I never met, I felt I knew Lew Katz very well.

At least well enough to call him Lew.

Four days after Dr. Peter Chodoff sat in his folding chair at Lincoln Financial Field and said to me, “Mike, I think you have a first-class blog” I got the same message in an email from Lew Katz: “Mike, I think you have a first-class blog. Keep up the good work and go Owls—Lew.”

Now I don’t know if that was just a heckuva coincidence or Dr. Pete and Lew talked, but I could not have been more flattered.

If there were ever two champions of Temple football during the darkest of dark times, it was Pete and Lew.

I guess you could add the late  great Howard Gittis, who, as Board of Trustees’ chairman, thwarted every effort by then President David Adamany to drop football at Temple University.

Gittis, thankfully, was Adamany’s boss. When Gittis said jump, Adamany said: “How High?”

Gittis said he was not dropping football on his watch and fortunately he had allies in Katz and Chodoff. If he had not had those allies, Temple University would be NYU–a university in a big city without football.

That was only one of two emails I ever received from Lew Katz. The other one was steering me in the right direction toward my coverage of Temple joining the Big East on March 7, 2012. He then said he knew I worked at The Inquirer and asked me for my thoughts on how to improve the paper. I told him you cannot do wrong by going local, local, local and he said he felt the same way. He wasn’t very active on Facebook (and probably had too much else to do), but he did extend a friend request that I eagerly accepted.  I am proud to have been one of his 351 Facebook friends.  I’m sure he had 10x more “real”  friends.

I then invited him to join our tailgates and he never did, but I knew he would eventually. I know he was proud of the way the Temple tailgate scene exploded during the Al Golden and Steve Addazio years. When he said he was looking forward to “kicking Villanova’s ass” on the football field with the Villanova president in attendance, I could not have been prouder of a fellow TU graduate.

Lew Katz “got” Temple, the same way John Chaney, Wayne Hardin, Skip Wilson, Pete Chodoff and Bruce Arians “got” Temple.

Our in-person meeting was only a matter of time and time ran out on Saturday night/Sunday morning when he died in a tragic plane crash.

It was my loss, and more importantly, Temple’s. RIP, Lew.