The University of Pennsylvania’s Division of Recreation of Intercollegiate Athletics (DRIA) and the men’s basketball program were saddened to receive news about the passing of Jack McCloskey Ed'48 GEd'52 on Thursday, June 1. McCloskey played basketball at Penn, lettering in 1943-44, and was head coach of the men’s basketball program from 1956-57 until 1965-66, garnering a 146-105 overall record that included an 87-53 mark against Ivy League opposition. 

“I had the opportunity to meet Coach McCloskey when I was an assistant coach here,” said Penn’s current John R. Rockwell Head Coach of Men’s Basketball, Steve Donahue. “In my mind, he was the man who really began the historic run of Penn’s basketball success. His leadership in the 1960s made Penn basketball a national product and set the stage for those incredible teams we had in the 1970s.”

Perhaps most notably, McCloskey was the head coach when the Quakers won their first Ancient Eight title, in 1965-66. That team, of course, was denied an NCAA Tournament bid when then-athletic director Jeremiah Ford—along with every other Ivy League institution—refused to comply with a new NCAA rule requiring all student-athletes to maintain a minimum grade-point average of 1.6. 

As Dave Zeitlin C’03 wrote in the Penn Gazette in 2016, in a feature story he did about that 1965-66 team, “while in practice that would not have been a problem for Penn’s players, the University’s beef was that the national organization should not determine institutional policy. The rest of the Ivy League shared this view—but Penn’s team was the one that got sacrificed to principle.”

“I forget things,” McCloskey, who was living in a facility that cares for Alzheimer’s and dementia patients at the time of his death, told the Gazette for that piece. “But I’ll never forget that.”

“They were not only good basketball players but they had a sense of humor,” McCloskey said of the 1965-66 team in that Gazette piece. “One time I mentioned to them that we were going to be the best. And that became a theme with them. One day, they said, ‘Hey Coach, do you still want us to be the best?’ I said, ‘Yeah, of course I do!’ If they did something else, they’d say, ‘Hey, was that the best, Coach?’ It was fun. It was great.”

As a player, McCloskey lettered for Penn in 1943-44 when the Quakers went 10-4 overall and finished second in the Eastern Intercollegiate League with an 8-2 mark. He served in World War II with the U.S Marines, then played one game in the NBA where he scored six points for the Philadelphia Warriors in a 72-61 loss to the New York Knicks in 1953. 

McCloskey left his coaching position at Penn following that 1965-66 championship season to take over as head coach at Wake Forest, where he spent six seasons. He is perhaps best known in basketball circles as the architect of the Detroit Pistons’ “Bad Boys” teams that won NBA titles in 1989 and 1990. With “Trader Jack” as general manager and another former Penn head coach as their head coach (Chuck Daly), the Pistons made nine straight playoff appearances, with five straight trips to the Eastern Conference finals and three straight NBA Finals appearances. McCloskey was honored with a banner at the Palace at Auburn Hills in 2008 in honor of those teams.