In 2001, ESPN’s Jay Bilas memorably listed the Reilly Center among his “Top 5 Hostile Homes” in college basketball.
Fifteen years later, the same network chose the RC as the Atlantic 10’s most treacherous venue for opponents and one of the top 10 most difficult places to play in the country. And both before those years and since, St. Bonaventure’s home floor has been viewed, both locally and nationally, as one of the more rabid environments in the sport.
But it isn’t just Bilas and the media that think so. Neither is it only the alumni and local fans.
The players do too.
And that’s become a theme on the “2 minutes in the A-10” feature on the A-10 Vault, a newer social media account dedicated to Atlantic 10 basketball both past and present.
AS PART OF the interview, host Nathan Mook has asked a handful of former players which arena they remember to be the toughest to play in, or which one might even have the “most obnoxious” fans.
Lamar Odom and Marcus Camby, two of the greatest and most well-known A-10 players of all time, were among those who sat down for the discussion. And their answer was hardly surprising.
“St. Bonaventure had a really hostile crowd, that really knew the game and had a (Cameron Indoor Arena kind of atmosphere,” said Odom, who in his lone year in the league (1998-’99) was the A-10 Rookie of the Year and named A-10 Tournament MVP after leading Rhode Island to the conference crown. “They really knew the stats and they were really hip to maybe even what you were doing off the court.
“They had a really hostile environment … I really liked kicking their (expletive) up there (Odom had 20-plus points to lead URI to a 77-70 win in his only visit to the RC, on Feb. 16, 1999).”
Camby, the 1996 Naismith Player of the Year who guided the Minutemen that year’s Final Four, mentioned the RC before the 14,000-seat West Virginia Coliseum, saying: “Well, I’m gonna have to say, up in Olean, New York, at St. Bonaventure, they’re pretty rowdy up there.
“Back when I played, West Virginia was in the A-10 and they were really rowdy down there, especially when the guy was shooting off the musket in there, so that was really intense.”
But it wasn’t just those two.
FORMER SAINT Joseph’s standout Langston Galloway, the leading scorer on the Hawks’ 2014 A-10 championship team, mentioned the home gyms of former league heavyweights Xavier and Temple, but then said, “St. Bonaventure’s another tough arena.” And Jimmy Baron, the former local kid and Rhode Island star who holds the conference record for 3-pointers, of course concurred, noting: “St. Bonaventure, just because most of the people in the crowd I knew and (they) definitely had a personal touch when heckling me.”
Baron also chose Bona as the opponent he most enjoyed playing against and “always seemed to regularly light up the.” In that same interview, he vividly recalled his most memorable experience from the RC, and it wasn’t from his four-year career as a player, but rather as an eighth-grade ball boy for his dad, former Bona head coach Jim Baron …
It was the game that most Bona fans remember fondly: The infamous “Cookiegate” contest against John Chaney’s nationally-ranked Temple team that ended with J.R. Bremer’s game-winning 3-pointer.
“IT WAS, I don’t know why I remember this date: Jan. 15, 2000,” Baron noted. “Game’s going back-and-forth in the first half and then they start to pull away about five or so minutes into the second half …
“Now, I believe this is true, but at the Reilly Center that day, I believe there was some sort of a bake sale, so everyone had cookies and different sorts of food and everything. About 12 minutes to go in the game, (Chaney) gets hit with a cookie right in the side of the head, and the thing falls on the floor and there’s crumbs and everything, and he’s yelling at the refs, trying to get their attention, 12- to 13-point game at the time. Finally, one of the refs looks at him, and he grabs the cookie and throws it on the floor right in front of him. Boom, technical foul. Now, he’s flipping out.
“We go to the line, we make two and I think we come out of that and hit a 2 or a 3, so it was a decent little swing, I think we got it to single digits, and then the momentum just shifted into our favor, we started making shots, they started missing shots. And then we win on a last-second corner 3-pointer from J.R. Bremer.”
And that remains one of the most iconic moments in what even the A-10’s legends will tell you is the most hostile place to play in the league.
(J.P. Butler, Bradford Publishing Company group sports editor, can be reached at jbutler@oleantimesherald.com)
