John Reagan is into Georgetown basketball. He graduated from the McDonough School of Business in 1984, having capped off his senior year by taking one of the University’s charter flights to Seattle, where he slept on the floor of a local gym with other fans and watched the Hoyas win their only national championship.
Now he lives in Dallas and works in IT. In the mid-90s, he helped an alumna from Connecticut set up the sports pages at hoyasaxa.com, where students and alums can discuss Georgetown sports online. Earlier this year, he launched an additional website, the Georgetown Basketball History Project, at hoyabasketball.com.
The basketball history project has an impressive amount of information about all things Hoya basketball. It has data on every player and every game. It includes Georgetown’s win-loss record against all opponents, ever (36-28 against Pittsburgh, but only 8-11 against Carnegie Mellon). It has bios of every All-American, from Ed Hargaden, whose height is unknown (please e-mail Reagan if you know), to Mike Sweetney, who is 6 feet 8 inches tall, and second on the Hoyas all-time list in career average points per game, with 18.2. It has information about the life of every head coach, from Craig Esherick back to Maurice Joyce.
Getting all this data in one place involved spending a lot of time in public libraries, perusing game data from press guides and old issues of the Washington Post, Washington Star and The Hoya. Reagan also read biographies of men like Joyce. Consequently, he knows his stuff.
“He had a very rich life,” says Reagan of Joyce, who brought basketball to Georgetown in 1907. “He was a U.S. Marshall, he was a circus trapeze artist in his early years, he was active in what became the FBI. He learned about basketball by writing to James Naismith and asking for information about the sport.” Naismith, a gym teacher, is generally credited with having invented basketball in 1891.
Joyce read about Naismith’s new game in a magazine article. “He writes to Naismith and says, ‘you’ve got a game here that seems to be very good for maintaining physical fitness,’” says Reagan. “At the time, and this is in 1892, it was a nine-on-nine game: three guards, three forwards, three centers. It was actually Joyce that suggested to Naismith, ‘you got too many guys on the court.’ Five was a better number because it allows for more movement on the court and better physical shape.”
Georgetown further contributed to the development of basketball as we know it when John Colrick, hired away from Notre Dame to coach for one season (1930-31), decided to try the aggressive “Western-style” offense.
“That was a phrase for an up-tempo game in the ‘20s,” Reagan explains. “Basketball in the ‘20s, they just stood there. People didn’t move, they just passed it around. They didn’t have jump shots then, all set shots. Notre Dame’s approach was to move around on the court.”
Apparently the Hoyas had excelled in the world of stationary basketball. For the first few decades, the team destroyed all up-and-comers. They managed to play all but a handful of their games at home, which, in the era before professional officiating, was even more of an advantage, and dominated visiting teams from across the South. The Hoyas’ main rival, George Washington University, was finally shamed into refusing to play the Hoyas again after a 54-8 Georgetown victory.
But the Hoyas had other forgotten eras of dominance, like the 1942-43 season, when they went 22-5 and scored the first 100 point game in Georgetown history, against American. The score was 105-39, but the local papers assumed the number was a typo, and most decided on 85-39. From more vivid days of basketball success, Reagan has posted full-on narratives of key games, like the 1982 loss in the NCAA championship game to a jumper by Michael Jordan.
But the site’s best feature is still the overwhelming quantity of statistical information. Did you know that Dikembe Mutumbo holds the record for most blocked shots in a game, with 12 against St. John’s in 1989? Or that Craig Shelton hit 21 consecutive shots over a three game period in 1979? Or that Courtland Freeman is the only Hoya ever to wear the #2 jersey?
Finding all this took some time, and the website isn’t yet done. Reagan has more narratives and pictures to add, and is hoping to have it finished by 2007, in time for the program’s centennial. He is a man from another era, when 2,000 students would trek across the country to watch a game. So he doesn’t even consider himself a particularly rabid fan. “For me, I’m not anything out of the ordinary in terms of the fans,” he says. “I just had the opportunity to use the web to get the word out about the programs.” Reagan still follows the team, making it to a few home games every season, and he and some other fans still attend the Big East tournament every spring. “There’s a group of class of ‘84 people that have been there basically since freshman year.” These days, that’s out of the ordinary.
Bill Cleveland is a senior in the College and a contributing editor of The Georgetown Voice. If he thinks he’s going to shave the word “P-I-M-P” into someone else’s head alone, he’s wrong.
