The current Northeast basketball team shoots hoops with Mike Kamen’s grandson, Colby Saunders. PHOTO COURTESY OF ASHLEY KAMEN SAUNDERS
If you’ve never heard of Mike Kamen, that’s just fine. After all, Mike probably would have liked it better that way.
In a time where highlight dunks go viral on YouTube and Twitter, Kamen represented a throwback from a different era. If the basketball court was a construction site, Kamen would have been known as the guy who showed up with his hardhat and lunch pail every day, do his job (and do it well at that), go home and do it all again the next day. He didn’t have to talk about how good he was … his play did all the talking for him, as did his persona of a soft-spoken, humble gentleman who loved basketball as much as his daughters and grandchildren.
Last Friday morning, Northeast High School retired Kamen’s №33 jersey, which is believed to be the first official retired basketball jersey in the school’s long history. They did so posthumously, an effort spearheaded by a few dedicated individuals after Kamen passed away suddenly last October of Cardiac Amyloidosis, a heart condition. He was just 64.
The ceremony attracted flocks of family and friends from near and far. Some remembered a 6-foot-4 gentle giant who scored more than 1,000 career points (1,460 to be exact, the most in program history) during his varsity career from 1965–67, able to score 30 points and grab 10 rebounds in such an effortless manner. Some remembered the young man who led the Public League in scoring in 1967, only you’d never know it because of his sheer modesty. There were those who remembered him as a neighborhood basketball legend at Max Myers Playground, while others recalled Kamen as a doting family man to his two daughters, Ashley and Erin, and later as a proud grandfather to his five grandchildren.
No matter how you remembered Mike Kamen, the one universal bonding factor is that all the memories are positive ones. And now, his jersey will forever hang in the Northeast gymnasium, ensuring that while he may have passed far before his time, his presence at the school where he starred on the hardwood will be eternal.
“Here’s how I describe Mike’s game to people who never saw him play,” said longtime friend, teammate and college roommate Mike Tendler. “When Mike jumped, you could put a piece of toilet paper between his shoe and the floor. He moved very slowly and deliberately, but he had 30 points and 10 rebounds day-in and day-out. His jump shot was like radar … stone radar. As far as a guy, he was a total gentleman. Always compassionate, very soft-spoken. He never raised his voice. If you pissed him off on the court, he wouldn’t come at you with elbows … he would just humiliate and torment you with his game. He was almost too good to be true.”
In a day and age when egomaniacs like Kobe Bryant and LeBron James rule the basketball world, Kamen took the opposite approach. At one point in time, he was in the top 10 in points-per-game average in Public League history, with names like Wilt Chamberlain and Earl Monroe keeping him company. Kamen was respected by teammates and opponents alike; in fact, he beat Ben Franklin’s Ira Miles for the league scoring title on the final day of the regular season in 1967. Nearly 50 years later, Miles attended Friday’s ceremony to pay homage to his former on-court rival.
Ira Stern, the school’s current boys basketball coach, never met Kamen. Stern graduated from Northeast in 1973, six years after Kamen’s time there had ended. But along with Bob Caplan, an old friend of Kamen’s dating back to junior high school, Stern saw fit to honor a legend. Stern loves the game of basketball dearly, and he appreciates its history just as much.
“I never met the man, but I was so moved by the people who came out to share memories of him,” Stern said. “I didn’t expect all the people who spoke so highly of Mike Kamen the man; I was just so impressed. For me, there’s a strong legacy here with a lot of people who deserve to be remembered. It’s about a man who did something very special, well beyond the X’s and O’s. I was just so touched by the outpouring of love and care, and even though he’s passed on, I know he’ll be looking down on us from the sky and smiling when we play our next game. He will always be a part of the Northeast legacy, which is not just given to anyone. He was a very special man and teammate.”
Kamen’s sudden passing brought shock, sadness and disbelief to many who loved and cared about him. Caplan called his passing “earth-shattering” when he discovered the news on Facebook, which was met with a similar sentiment from Tendler.
“I was in stone shock when he died,” Tendler said. “Here was a guy who was just immortal, bigger than life. When he passed, nobody could believe it, because Mike Kamen can’t die. He had too big of a heart and was too good to die before the rest of us. He wasn’t egocentric or boastful; just an unassuming, soft-spoken guy who fit into the fabric of the team. When I signed my professional contract to play in Europe, Mike was the first person to call and congratulate me.”
Caplan had fallen out of touch with Kamen, who started his college basketball career at Temple before ultimately starring at Millersville. He and Tendler got some old friends together for a memorial service, which happened about a month after Caplan had a chance run-in with Stern at All American Sporting Goods on Cottman Avenue. The two had discussed fundraising efforts for the basketball program, and when they found out Kamen had died suddenly the following month, they accelerated those efforts to get Kamen’s number retired. Caplan and others donated money for new jackets and warm-up attire for the current team that recognized Kamen’s contributions to the school and basketball program.
“It all just snowballed in a perfect way,” Caplan said. “I always like to give back something if I can, and I’ve been pushing the alumni from my class to do the same. Now, there’s talk of doing it for other players in the future, someone like (four-time NBA All-Star and Northeast grad) Guy Rodgers, so they can be remembered the same way Mike will be. It was a total labor of love. I always try to be a team player, and Mike would have liked that because that’s exactly the way he was.”
The journey culminated with Friday’s ceremony, which included family from all over the place. Ashley Kamen and her husband, David Saunders, as well as their two children, Colby and Poppy, flew in from suburban Denver; Erin Kamen, her husband Jonny Karpuk and their three children, Shea, Hudson and Walker, did the same from Napa, California, along with Mike Kamen’s widow, Barrie Shea Kamen, who resides in Florida but has lived near Erin’s family in Napa since her husband passed; siblings of Mike and their children came from Lancaster to the west and New York to the north, and Barrie had siblings and cousins come in from New Hampshire, Maryland, New Jersey and Oregon. If that’s not a testament to how much Mike Kamen the family man was loved, then nothing is.
“The entire ceremony was just fantastic,” said Ashley Kamen Saunders. “It was very bittersweet for my family, because we’re devastated over the loss of my father. But at the same time, we were so proud to celebrate and honor him by connecting with people from different stages of his life. I always knew he was a great basketball player, but he was an even better dad and amazing grandfather. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect going in, but to know that his jersey will always be there for others to strive for greatness the way he did … I just keep going back to how incredibly proud we are of him.”
Ashley shared fond memories of her father offering his tutelage to she and Erin’s own athletic endeavors, first as youngsters playing catch in the yard and later as star high school (at Central Bucks East) and Division I tennis players. He would take them to practice tennis as early as 5 a.m. before the sun was up to ensure they got it right, while never pushing them in an overbearing manner. Kamen carried that on to his grandchildren, and the last time he visited Colorado two months before he died, he was out in the driveway shooting hoops with Colby.
“The first book he ever read us as kids was The Little Engine That Could, and he always drilled ‘I think I can, I think I can’ into our heads,” she said. “But at the same time, he never pushed us; he just wanted to pass on to us the same love of sports that he had. When someone came close to breaking one of his scoring records at Northeast, he wasn’t threatened. All he said was, ‘I got a lot of enjoyment out of playing basketball. I hope this kid is, too.’ That’s who he was; he preached to love what you do, and do it because you love it.”
It’s always difficult to say goodbye to someone before his or her time, especially when that person had such a profound impact on so many lives the way Kamen did. But, on the flip side, not everybody is lucky enough to be remembered so fondly by so many. It’s what we as human beings strive for, and Mike Kamen accomplished this task beautifully, as Friday’s ceremony indicated.
“He wasn’t a man of many words, so I think the ceremony may have made him a bit restless,” Tendler said. “How could a man of so few words thank so many people? But I do think he would be beaming. He’d be so damn proud and excited that his family, friends and neighborhood lifted him above.
“I don’t even think he told his family what kind of player he really was, because he would never say, being as unassuming and low-key as he was. He moved slowly, but at the end of the day he’d have 30 and 10, game after game after game. That’s Mike Kamen.”
You may have never heard of him, but at the same time, all this and more makes Kamen impossible to forget. ••
Follow Ed on Twitter @SpecialEd335
A well-deserved honor: Mike Kamen’s №33 Northeast jersey has been retired by the school. Kamen, who died in October at age 64, scored the most points in program history. PHOTO COURTESY OF ASHLEY KAMEN SAUNDERS
