Penn brought Fran McCaffery home, where he can be near his brother, a longtime sportswriter recovering from a stroke

The McCaffery boys had a Saturday ritual. Fran and Jack would head to the Palestra with their parents, Jack and Shirley, to catch the Saturday doubleheaders. The brothers would try to get as close to the court as possible to take in the action.

“It wasn’t even a consideration that we would go anywhere else,” Fran said recently. “Just think of all the great players that we saw, the great teams that we saw, the great coaches that we saw, the atmosphere. ... It was also the Philadelphia basketball community coming to one place on a regular basis. You’d come together at the Palestra.”

It was a formative experience for Fran, who recently turned 66. “It made you aspire to one day be on that court, playing in the Palestra,” he said. Fran would go on to play at the Palestra as a Penn point guard before launching a coaching career that started at Penn and has taken him to Lehigh, Notre Dame, North Carolina-Greensboro, Siena, Iowa, and now back home to Penn, where he was named the 21st coach in Penn history in late March.

Those Palestra trips were also formative for Jack, Fran’s older brother, who was a good basketball and baseball player as the brothers came of age in Philadelphia’s West Oak Lane section but found his calling in making a life in sports via his writing. Jack has for more than three decades been a sports columnist at the Delaware County Times.

“He was covering the Big 5 when I was playing,” Fran said. “We’re connected to the Palestra. I’m coming to the Palestra to go to work every day. How great is that?”

On April 7, Fran stood on a stage inside his old gym and gave his first public remarks as the new Penn coach. And after spending much of the last three decades traveling to as many of Fran’s games and camps as he possibly could, where else would Jack have been?

There he was off to the side of the front row, sitting in his wheelchair with a red Penn hat on his head.

The return to Philadelphia has been a full-circle experience for the McCaffery brothers. But for Fran, it’s a chance to be closer to and be there for a brother who doubles as his “best friend.” On Jan. 4, 2024, Jack passed out in the Wells Fargo Center press box at a Flyers game and was rushed to a hospital. A stroke has left him unable to walk, and he hasn’t worked since that night.

How’s this for a basketball ritual? Fran started coaching at Siena College in 2005. Siena is just north of Albany, N.Y., and much closer to Philadelphia than Fran’s previous stop at UNC-Greensboro, though Jack made his way south plenty. Much closer, sure, but still nearly 250 miles.

When Fran was at Siena, where he coached until Iowa hired him away in 2010, Jack “would drive up for every game,” Fran said. “Four hours up, watch the game, turn around and drive home, get home at 2 in the morning. Every game.”

Sometimes the itinerary might have looked something like: Siena game on Thursday. Covering a Sixers game on Friday. Back in the car for another Siena game over the weekend.

“I really enjoyed the Siena years,” Jack said. “It was doable. It’s not that far. I wanted to support him.”

He always has. Jack would routinely attend Fran’s summer camps wherever he was coaching. He’d provide an extra hand as a coach or a referee. Jack and his wife, Sherrie, don’t have any children, but Fran always admired how great Jack was with the younger campers.

Fran gives Jack a lot of credit for helping shape him in different ways. When the two were kids, they’d play on some of the same teams at the West Oak Lane Boys Club.

“He was a phenomenal big brother,” Fran said. “It benefited me tremendously having an older brother because I was always playing with older guys. I was on teams with him and I was a little guy but I had to compete, and he looked out for me.”

Later in life, too. When Fran played at Penn, he spent a lot of time with Jack and his sportswriter friends. The fiery head coach has a unique understanding of the media’s job.

“Sometimes coaches can get paranoid about what they say or what this guy wants to write,” Fran said. “I never viewed it that way. I’m a professional. You’re a professional. You’re doing your job. I’m doing my job.”

Jack would periodically provide some advice, either when asked or unprompted. “If you don’t want to say something, you don’t have to,” Fran said. “That’s one of the things he would always say: ‘Say what you want to say.’”

“He’s natural with it,” said Jack, who was reluctant to take any credit for his brother’s relationship and savvy with the press. “He didn’t need my coaching. I watch him on TV doing his interviews and things, and his answers are better than the ones I would come up with.”

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Iowa wasn’t playing the night that changed Jack’s life. Fran’s phone rang late on that Thursday night. Sherrie was on the other end, letting Fran know his brother had suffered what at the time was thought to be a seizure.

“Initially I thought it was way better than it was because I talked to him,” Fran said. “That’s the first thing when somebody has a stroke. Are they coherent? Can you talk to them? He had his sense of humor and he could talk.”

Tests later revealed that Jack had suffered a stroke. Fran couldn’t get home right away. The Hawkeyes were off the following day but hosted Rutgers on Saturday, Jan. 6. They won, 86-77, and with their next game not for another six days, Fran got on a plane to Philadelphia.

“I sat with him all day at the hospital,” Fran said. “Then it became obvious that he wasn’t able to move his left leg. That’s why he’s in a wheelchair.”

Fran eventually flew back home to Iowa, but not much changed between the brothers.

“You coach with a heavy heart, but you know what he wants for you,” Fran said. “He watches every game. We talk before and after every game, and that didn’t change. I just kept coaching them up and I’d talk to him and stay in touch with him and go visit him when I could.”

But the lack of Jack’s presence was felt. Iowa played road games later that season at Penn State and Maryland, easy drives from Jack’s Lafayette Hill home. But he couldn’t be there. A long hospital stay was followed by an extended stay in a rehabilitation facility. He still goes to the doctor about once a month and goes through daily exercises at home trying to work his way back.

The recent addition of a van has made traveling easier, but Jack can’t drive, and without being able to get around, he doesn’t want to go back to work and be a write-from-home kind of columnist. “It’s not the way I like to do it,” he said.

Jack is still hopeful he’ll be able to walk again. That would require another operation and some more rehab. The topic of not working again came up, but only briefly. “I definitely didn’t retire,” Jack said. “Tomorrow is when I want to be back.”

That’s not a surprising response to Rob Parent, the sports editor of the Delco Times.

“He’s stubborn as a mule,” Parent said. “There’s no doubt about it, and I don’t blame him. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, especially a guy that was so active and so involved.”

The paper misses him badly. Parent misses sharing laughs with him, but also reading and editing one of his favorite writers.

“I always maintained — and I worked at The Inquirer, too — that out of the two or three or four area newspapers that actually covered sports on a wide variety, he was always, to me, the best writer that I worked with," Parent said. “Sorry, Bob Ford, but that’s the way I looked at it.

“He just had a real flair with turning a phrase.”

No matter where he was.

“He never minded covering anything from a high school event on up to the World Series,” Parent said. “It just didn’t matter to him.”

Jack’s last column published on Jan. 4, 2024, on Jalen Hurts needing to prove he was worthy of his big contract with the Eagles, who at the time were spiraling toward an embarrassing end to a season that would lead to change and, eventually, a Super Bowl win.

The job of the sports columnist is to report and opine, and Jack would have had plenty to write about as Hurts and Co. flipped the script. But the former Sixers beat writer probably would have had a field day with this latest Sixers season. “It wouldn’t have been pretty,” he joked.

More than anything else, Jack said he misses the camaraderie of being at games and being around people.

“It’s been very difficult because I’m pretty independent,” he said. “I haven’t overcome enough yet.”

Yet being the operative word.

“That’s my plan ... [to] get this behind me and get back to writing and get to all the Penn basketball games I can,” Jack said.

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Fran’s oldest sons, Connor and Patrick, have always been close with their Uncle Jack. Shirley, Fran and Jack’s mother, would frequently rent a house at the Jersey Shore and Fran’s family would come to town. Jack would occasionally take them to Phillies games and get to their high school basketball games when he could.

After Jack went 14 months without seeing a sporting event in person, it was Connor and Patrick who got him out of the house and back into a gym. Fran called Jay Wright and needed a favor. Jack wanted to get to the Butler-Villanova game at Finneran Pavilion on March 1, and Fran wanted to make sure Villanova could take care of Jack.

Two of Fran’s longtime friends, Timmy McDonnell and Joe Hand, picked Jack up in Lafayette Hill on that Saturday morning, and for a few hours, Jack relished being back at a basketball game. He saw his nephews and caught up with sportswriter friends. The day almost went perfectly. Butler, where Connor, the boyfriend of Caitlin Clark, is an assistant coach and where Patrick finished his college career, lost to Villanova, 80-70.

Jack’s job doesn’t allow for sports fandom anymore, but he’s unabashed about his devotion to his family and their teams. He was probably the biggest Iowa basketball fan in the Delaware Valley, and he recently added Butler to the list when Connor and Patrick found their way to Indianapolis.

He took his job and the objectivity it required seriously. When Siena and Villanova pulled off first-round upsets in the 2008 NCAA Tournament and were slated to meet in the second round, Parent asked Jack if he could file something on the game to the Times since he was already in Florida anyway.

“He said, ‘No way,’” Parent said. “He always steadfastly refused to write something on Fran because he thought that was a conflict of interest.”

Fran taking the Penn job has been “a thrill,” Jack said, and while he wants to get back to walking to make getting inside and around the Palestra easier, he’s going to be at as many games as he possibly can. There’s a section in the second level of the building, behind the Penn bench, where wheelchairs can be positioned.

“Of all the jobs that were on the board, Penn was the one I was hoping he would take,” Jack said. “It’s a great basketball move. It can go nowhere but up right now, and it’s going to go up.”

For Fran, who was fired by Iowa in March after 15 seasons, coaching the Quakers was a chance to come home and so much more.

“It’s where I wanted to be,” he said. “There were other jobs out there. I wanted to come home. I wanted to be here, and of course be near him. That was a big part of it. You never know when you leave Philadelphia if you’re ever going to be able to move back. So I’m just thrilled to be here. It’s just great to be home. And home, obviously, Jack is a big part of that. I have some cousins still here, but it’s he and I.”

If and when Jack gets back to work, you’ll know which Big 5 team this longtime sportswriter is pulling for, even if he never writes about it.

“Go Quakers,” he said before a recent phone call ended.

Years ago, their father, Jack, a police officer, had a few different details at the Palestra. He guarded the referee’s room, providing security to basketball officials. Other times he collected tickets and guarded the back door of the gym, occasionally letting friends and family slip their way into a sold-out game.

More than half a century later, the McCaffery boys have the keys.