Post-Game Punches In The Pub

Scan Ted Silary’s webpage for long enough and you’ll find a wealth of information on Philadelphia high school sports. But nothing — not even this baseball box score where Washington stops batting after five innings — tops Silary’s wealth of information on basketball. And the best stories and best nicknames always come out of the Public League.

The Pub has been in the news this week after a Sayre High School punched his coach after a game. He and his father were arrested.

Sayre coach Eric Hooks, though, is all understanding and such about being punched in the back of the head. Wow, coaching at a Public League high school and he’s turning the other cheek like Jesus!

“I feel for the young man,” Hooks said. “I don’t look upon this as being his fault.”

He added, “Generally speaking, I don’t feel this young man had good adult leadership. He was led down the wrong path. If not for the actions of certain adults, I don’t feel the situation would have come to that.”

Another coach, though, who came forward and said he was punched out last summer — by a parent upset his son was cut from the squad two years ago — went the woe-is-society route:

Elsewhere in the city yesterday, another Public League coach read about Hooks’ terrible experience and cringed.

“It brought it all back. Right there,” the coach said. “You keep asking, ‘What is this world coming to?’ “

Meanwhile, Sayre’s only 5-4 in the Pub’s third level. Hey, all that coach’s understanding has barely given the team a winning record! I bet that second coach’s team is awesome.

Meanwhile, I just did a quick scan of Ted Silary’s January Public League recaps and here are my favorite nicknames: Carl “Shiny Sneakers” Guignard, Cedrick “Bird Legs” Powell, Andre “He’s a Freshman!” Horne, Dan “The” Plummer, Courtney “Let Me Upgrade You” Havens-Dobbs. Thanks to that last kid, that song is stuck in my head again.