BEACH BALL

“It really started when Steve Gepp’s brother, Vinny, who was working for me at the time, approached me about backing in a team in the late 1960s. He said he could get his brother, who was coaching St. Rose at the time, to coach the team, and he could get Bob Verga. And I said ‘Bob Verga? Really? Well of course I’ll back the team.’ That first year we had guys like Jackie Nies and Walt Mischler and we traveled around playing pickup games against these other teams, and then we decided we would make it more formal. But I never could have imagined it becoming what it did.’’
JERRY LYNCH

How one end of the court was higher than the other at Jimmy Byrne’s Sea Girt Inn, or the scene along Springwood Ave. in Asbury Park’s West Side in the early 1970s before a Friday night game at Big Bill’s. The intensity in Mo Layton’s eyes as he tried in vain to guard Bob Verga, the sound the metal backboards made when Kenny Wilburn banked one home and the antics of characters like Donald Ward. “It really started when Steve Gepp’s brother, Vinny, who was working for me at the time, approached me about backing in a team in the late 1960s,’’ said Jerry Lynch. “He said he could get his brother, who was coaching St. Rose at the time, to coach the team, and he could get Bob Verga. And I said ‘Bob Verga? Really? Well of course I’ll back the team.’ “Wingo stops and takes a ball in left hand,’’ King said. “Then he calls for another ball and tucks it under left arm pit and then calls for third ball. The crowd is now going nuts. He starts around midcourt and takes these large strides toward the corner, then comes along the baseline and throws the first ball down. As he comes across the front of the rim ,third ball in his left hand.’’ They’ll wax poetically about the 1975 Campbell Supply team, Campbell’s Kids as they were known, with the all- high school team becoming the league darlings. Of course, three of those players, Hudson Catholic teammates Jim Spanarkel and O’Koren, along with Perth Amboy’s Chad Kinch, went on to play in the NBA, with players like CBA’s Bob Roma rounding out a team that came within a whisker of knocking off Royal Manor in the playoffs. They’ll tell you they were at the Headliner in 1978, where the games moved that summer, the night Ward, Neptune’s Jerome “Flip’’ Williams and a bunch of nobodies pulled off the league’s greatest upset ever back in 1978, beating a Phoenix Business Systems team that was the top seven players Rutgers’ 1976 Final Four team, along with several other pros including Charlie Criss, and were coached by Ron Rothstein, currently a Miami Heat assistant. It would end up being their only loss of the summer.

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