HIS STORY IS AREA HISTORY
Former Allen standout Pat Sewards reflects 50 years after his record-breaking 62-point game
“I’ve always said the whole thing was a fluke. I just happened to get hot and scored 39 points by halftime.”
How fast does 50 years go by? “For me, it went by in a heartbeat,” said Pat Sewards. On Feb. 19, 1971, Sewards scored an East Penn League record 62 points for Allen High School in a game against Tamaqua at the Canaries’ Little Palestra. The Canaries won the game 139-72. “It’s hard to believe it’s 50 years later,” Sewards said. “It’s like when I was in high school and talking to someone who graduated in 1921 and you’d ask them ‘Did you even have basketball back then?’ It’s a long time gone by and it happened quickly.”
Sewards, the son of the late Allentown and William Allen High School coaching legend J. Milo Sewards, averaged 21.1 points per game was voted the EPL MVP that season in which the Canaries finished 20-5.
“I’ve always said the whole thing was a fluke,” Sewards said. “I just happened to get hot and scored 39 points by halftime.”
And that nearly was it.
“My dad wanted to take me out at halftime,” Sewards said. “[Assistant coaches] John Donmoyer and Ken Wildonger convinced him to let me stay in to see if I could break Tim Schmeidel’s single-game scoring record. Tim had 49 the year before against Tamaqua.”
Sewards surpassed Schmeidel’s record just two minutes into the third quarter and again Coach Sewards, who had friends from Tamaqua, didn’t want to embarrass anybody and wanted to take his son out.
“My dad summoned Bob Handschue to go into the game for me, but Handschue refused,” Sewards said. “Handschue knew the league scoring record was 59 points by [Liberty’s] Don Rodenbach and he wanted me to get it. He wouldn’t go in until I had that record.”
Sewards scored 62 and left the game with 3:35 left in the third quarter. He didn’t go back in.
The 3-point line was introduced to high school basketball in 1986-87.
Sewards doesn’t necessarily agree with those who say he would have scored at least 15 more points against Tamaqua had the 3-point line been in place in 1971.
“Most of my shots were 3-point shots in today’s world,” he said. “But if you look back at that era, if you were shooting from that far out, the other team would let you. It was a bad percentage shot and it was only worth two points. You had more leeway to shoot from out there. Today, they just don’t let you shoot a 3-pointer. They come out to defend you. So we had a lot of guys score in the 40s back then, but you don’t see it as much today.”
Jim Emery, another senior starter on Allen’s 1970-71 team, remembers Sewards made a lot of layups that night as well as long-range jumpers among his 24 field goals, He said he kept passing the ball to Sewards.
“We had a lot of fastbreaks and easy baskets and, of course, Pat was shooting the ball well,” Emery said. “It was kind of amazing he scored that many points because he only played 2 ½ quarters. To think he had 62 points is still amazing 50 years later. I don’t think I scored 62 points the whole year.”
Sewards said Emery had close to 20 assists that night and added that Emery was Allen’s senior athlete of the year in 1970-71 because he was the starting quarterback on the football team and a starter on the baseball team.
“When we were in junior high school, he was the star,” Sewards said of Emery. “Even when we were sophomores, he was much better than me. I didn’t play much as a sophomore even for Donmoyer on the JV team.”
Sewards didn’t play a single varsity game in 1968-69 when Allen went 23-2 and won the league championship, but was stunned by Ross Moore and Dieruff in the District 11 semifinal after the Huskies lost three previous times to the Canaries that season.
As a junior in the 1969-70 season, Sewards played in just 12 games and scored 24 total points. Schmeidel was the team’s star that year, scoring 758 points, which remains a school single-season record. Allen went 21-6 that season and repeated as EPL champs, but again lost in the district semifinals.
“Because we had such talented players on teams the two years before, none of us on the 197071 team had really played a lot of meaningful minutes in games before that season,” Sewards said. “We were all like rookies. That’s why when the season started, no one thought we’d be any good at all. But we had practiced against some really good players the year before and we kept getting better and better as the season went along.”
Unfortunately for Allen, things went downhill after Sewards’ record-breaking night.
His performance came in the regular-season finale and the final game of his career at the Little Palestra, his favorite gym.
From there, the team suffered back-to-back playoff losses at Pottsville. First, the Canaries lost 74-63 to Hazleton, denying the team’s bid for a third straight league title and then fell to Palmerton 74-62 in the District 11 quarterfinals.
“We went flat after that Tamaqua game,” Sewards said. “Hazleton and Palmerton were good teams, but we lost our edge. After the 62 points, the dynamic of the team changed and it was like the guys stood around waiting for me to do something and I certainly wasn’t going to repeat that night against Tamaqua. Our offense stalled a little bit.”
Sewards attended the University of Pennsylvania and continued his basketball career for one more season. Penn was nationally ranked and featured legends Chuck Daly as head coach and Rollie Massimino as an assistant. Ray Carazo, a Palmerton native, was the freshman coach.
“I think I had an overinflated opinion of how good I thought I was being the league MVP,” he said. “Penn was a real eye-opener. I think we had three All-Americans on our freshman team. I made the team but came off the bench. It was a good experience to see what real elite players were like. They were good, real good.”
One of the highlights of that freshman season was getting to play against his former Allen teammate, Tom Donley, in a game at Princeton’s Jadwin Gym.
“We actually guarded each other for a while in that game,” Sewards said. “That was pretty neat.”
Sewards didn’t play after his freshman year at Penn, deciding to concentrate on a medical career that led him to become an orthopedic surgeon.
He still follows today’s game and wishes current players could play in front of sellout crowds almost every night the way teams often did back in the early 1970s.
“The kids today are very talented, but things have changed, and the atmosphere isn’t the same,” Sewards said. “It was a packed house for almost every game and people to sneak in the backdoor at our gym and over at Dieruff if they wanted to get in. Those were special nights and a lot of fun to be a part of.”