A lesson on the circle of life was delivered Tuesday morning.
Even as I talked with callers alerting me to the passing of Paul Litwalk, my wife and granddaughter number three were outside helping a neighbor who had a deer deliver two fawns in her fenced yard. The doe was able to hop the fence when the woman came outside to do some work, but the little ones needed some assistance in escaping.
I was struck that the older a person becomes, the greater the impression such comings and goings make. I am reminded of attending a Joe Paterno press conference on a day Paterno had gotten word that yet another man he once had coached with, had passed away.
Paterno noted to the media that the problem with being as old as Paterno was simple; it meant that almost all one’s friends and family had died.
Litwalk was not family, but he was a friend. I’ve known him since I was a teenager at Johnstown High School, when he was the relatively young basketball coach.
He probably long had forgotten it, but I remember once, during a study hall of mine that he monitored as a teacher, I was lecturing Litwalk about staying in a zone defense against State College High School and its star shooting guard, Mike Fergus.
Litwalk was patient with the brash teenager, but put me in my place by noting A) Fergus eventually cooled off. B) Litwalk’s team won the game. C) Litwalk didn’t have the players to play man-to-man defense and asking them to do what they could not would have been a great mistake.
My senior year, 1972-73, Litwalk’s team was arguably the greatest in school history. Led by senior Don Maser, who would go on to play at Duquesne, and 6-9 junior Pat Cummings, who had a lengthy NBA career, the Trojans went unbeaten through the regular season.
That included winning the prestigious War Memorial Invitational Basketball Tournament by beating St. John’s of Washington, D.C., and eastern Pennsylvania power Chester.
The Trojans won the District 6 title by pummeling Johnstown Vo-Tech before 4,000-plus fans at the War Memorial Arena. That Vo-Tech team’s five starters all were Johnstown kids, meaning this district championship would have been an intra-squad game a few years earlier, before Vo-Tech opened.
Johnstown was ranked No.1 in the state for a time, but the run to an anticipated state title ended with a shocking loss to Sharon, before an even larger War Memorial crowd.
Litwalk endured many heartbreaks in intervening seasons as an Altoona program often got the best of Johnstown in District 6 play. Altoona’s rosters included players such as Doug West, Danny Fortson, Mike Iuzzolino and Johnny Moore, all of whom went on to NBA careers. There also was an abundance of eventual Division I college players such as Lou Schmitt and Ricky Tunstall.
Late in his career, Litwalk began to win more District 6 titles, including one that left a memorable impression on me.
I was a sportswriter in town at the time and stopped at the elementary gym Johnstown played at in those days to get some information for a preview of yet another District 6 championship game vs. Altoona.
There was a freak March snowstorm and the team’s leading rebounder and second leading scorer hadn’t showed up. Litwalk gathered the team to tell them that the absent player wouldn’t be starting. As Litwalk continued to talk, he kept ratcheting it up.
The player was not going to play. They had made it to practice. He could have, too. But they were going to go to the game and win it — without him.
They did. And the next year, when that player was a senior, Johnstown won the district title again. He had an outstanding game and rode the team bus back to Johnstown cradling the championship trophy.
Litwalk loved to tell that story. It spoke volumes about a coach who held his players responsible, even if it might affect the chances to win in the moment.
I’ll miss him.
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