Rich Hofmann | Do you know this man?

THE MEMORIES are of cold nights and weak lights that were the curse of every news photographer in town.

Matthew Brady couldn't have gotten a good shot of anybody in that old barn, but these guys somehow did. Whatever illumination there was shone only on the court itself. The seats, all hard benches, lay in darkness.

A bad back was your destiny after too many nights on those benches. But it was exquisite agony. They were the greatest nights, all sweat and sound and Big Al up in his TV perch, and the newspaper guys typing like madmen behind the visiting bench as deadlines slipped away, and these epic, bruising, bewitching doubleheaders that ended with the big, heavy doors throwing open and 9,208 spent fighters being flung out into the frosty night.

I never saw Howard Porter play in the Palestra, but I can close my eyes and see him. You know what I mean?

Porter is in a Minnesota hospital today after having been beaten nearly to death. He is perhaps the greatest basketball player in modern Villanova history but he was missing for hours over the weekend, found only after his picture was broadcast on television, after police sought the help of the public.

Do you know this man? My God.

In March of 1971, everybody knew Howard Porter. Time is relentless and the decades are unforgiving and we all know that - but this is stunning. Do you know this man? Everybody knew Howard Porter - everybody here, everybody in the country after that 1971 NCAA Tournament was over.

Porter's story is like all Philadelphia sports stories; that is to say, it is complicated. It turns and it turns: glory before the fall, despair before the dignified redemption. He was the Most Outstanding Player of the 1971 Final Four, where Villanova lost in the championship game to storied UCLA. He never received the trophy after it was determined that he signed an American Basketball Association contract in December of his senior season.

The wins by Villanova were forfeited, the accomplishments of the team and the man "vacated." Splendid term, that - as if a memory could be erased by a word, as if the $15,000 that Porter took, that any poor kid would have taken in the liars' bazaar that was the bidding war between the ABA and the NBA back then, could somehow mean more than the 25 points and eight rebounds that Porter put up against UCLA, more than the seven points and nine rebounds to which Porter held the Bruins' great Sidney Wicks.