Charlie Tyra and Me

Horace Greeley

Last week I wrote about the Warriors taking Horace Greeley’s advice to “Go West, Young Man” by moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco. That move took place in 1962.

At the end of the article, I mentioned that the Warriors provided me with some memories that lasted a lifetime.

This is one of those memories.

Home Away from Home

To begin, we must go back to when I was four years old and my dad was an athletic director at Collingdale High School in Delaware County. Instead of hiring a babysitter, he took me to his football and basketball games.

Locker rooms became my home away from home. Players were walking around in jockstraps and putting on their uniforms. Coaches were giving pep talks. Players were going out onto the field, or onto the court, and I was watching the games from a seat on the bench.

By the age of ten, I was running water buckets onto the football field during time outs, cleaning mud out of cleats with a tongue depressor, and sticking smelling salts under players’ noses. I got to observe the players up close in the midst of battle and saw the dirt and the blood and the bruises on their sweaty faces. Like a sponge, I absorbed everything they said and everything they did.

During basketball games, I stood under the basket during warm-ups and tossed the balls back onto the court so players could keep shooting. I handed out towels during timeouts. I folded players’ jackets when they ran onto the court and handed the jackets back to them when they were replaced by substitutes.

NBA Double-Header

I called upon that particular experience when I was a ninth-grader and went to a Philadelphia Warriors game at Convention Hall. Actually, it was a double-header that Saturday afternoon. The NBA wasn’t very popular yet, so they ran promotions where you got two games for the price of one. Two NBA teams played the first game and two different teams played the second game.

Four teams played that day. I don’t remember who played the first game, but the New York Knickerbockers and Philadelphia Warriors played the second game.

The year was 1958 and security was both unnecessary and nonexistent. So I was able to wander down to the Knicks bench. I just acted like I knew what I was doing and nobody stopped me. When I got there, I did the same thing I’d been doing at my dad’s games for years. I took a seat on the end of the bench right next to the players and watched the action on the court intently.

Soon, the Knicks made a substitution.

The players on the bench slid up one spot, toward the coach. That left an empty seat between them and me.

Out of the game comes a sweaty number-14 walking toward me and he takes the empty spot between me and the rest of the players. In the header photo above, you’ll see the number-14 in question standing behind the Warriors Neil Johnston who’s chasing down the loose ball – although the photo was taken from a game in New York.

Number-14’s name was Charlie Tyra. He was an All-American center from Louisville who’d been playing with the Knicks for four seasons. Anyway, like I said, he was sweaty, he sat down next to me, and he started looking around for a towel.

As soon as he sat down, I got up and went behind the bench. I found a stack of towels on the floor, grabbed one and handed it to him. He wasn’t fazed in the least by having some strange kid hand him a towel. Visiting teams didn’t bring their own ball-boys on the road, so he must’ve figured the Warriors supplied me to hand out the towels. He smiled and thanked me.

Then I went back behind the bench and found a folded number-14 jacket lying on the floor. I put the jacket over Charlie Tyra’s hairy shoulders ─ a pair of shoulders that became indelibly etched in my brain from that moment on. The only other person I’d ever seen with hairy shoulders like that was the actor William Bendix in the movie The Hairy Ape.

Anyway, Charlie Tyra thanked me for putting the jacket over his shoulders. We talked and he turned out to be a funny guy. He told me some jokes and we laughed – and then the other players on the bench started heckling him about having his own private valet.

It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience that can never be duplicated today.

$5 Dollars a Week

To begin with, I was a fifteen-year-old kid who got an allowance of maybe five dollars a week. Yeah, that sounds about right – five dollars a week. Out of that five dollars, I bought candy and sodas and hoagies over the course of the week – and maybe a milkshake or two. But by budgeting my money, I made sure to have enough left over at the end of the week to go to a movie. On that particular week, instead of going to a movie, I took public transportation to Convention Hall and bought a ticket to see the Warriors play.

Pocket change went a long way during the fifties and fifteen-year-olds could afford to go to NBA games on their own – not so today.

Barry Bowe is the author of: