Before he stepped foot on The Liacouras Center floor, Temple Basketball legend Khalif Wyatt spent his summer days at the now-named Danny Rumph Recreation Center to watch the Danny Rumph Classic. The Norristown, Pennsylvania, native watched the Pro-am basketball that featured the best hoopers in the City of Brotherly Love.
Each summer, Wyatt watched from the sidelines and saw his Philadelphia counterparts dazzle the crowd of whichever arena could hold them.
Only college grads could compete in the festivities, so Wyatt looked forward to when he could don a jersey and compete against the city’s best.
“It’s just as fun,” Wyatt said. “It’s an atmosphere that you grew up playing on the playground. Everybody’s talking, everybody has an opinion. The crowd stands up, and it’s a one-on-one matchup. It’s just an environment that you like to play in.”
Wyatt’s ambition to play in the tournament is something that he shares with many other basketball players in the city. The Rumph Classic first started as a way for a group of friends to remember three childhood friends they had lost, and has now stood the test of time and turned into the premier Philadelphia basketball tournament.
Danny Rumph had just finished his junior year at Western Kentucky, when he went to play basketball with some friends at the Mallory Recreation Center in Philadelphia.
Rumph spent the afternoon with his friends, even sinking the game winner to close out the game. But that was the last shot he ever took. Soon after he passed out on the court and his life was tragically cut short at just 21 years old.
Rumph passed away from a heart disease called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which went undetected throughout his life.
“For just such a tragedy like that to happen, and then for it to turn into somewhat of a positive for the community. It’s just unbelievable,” said former Temple Men’s Basketball guard Shizz Alston Jr. “There are so many tragedies in Philadelphia that we don’t turn that into positive lessons or positive moments for the city.”
Two more tragedies struck around the same time Rumph passed. Michael Blackshear, a former Temple Basketball player and friend of Rumph’s, was killed in a shooting four days before Rumph passed away. In December of that year, Tyree Wallace, the cousin of professional basketball player Rasheed Wallace, also died in a police-involved shooting.
All three passed away in a span of six-months, leaving the group of Mike Morak, Justin Scott, Sharif Bray, Sharif Hanford and Brandon Hough wondering how to honor the friends they had just lost.
The brainstorming session didn’t last long. All their ideas started and ended with the sport all three held in high regard — basketball. Thus the Danny Rumph Classic was born in the summer of 2006.
“It was kind of a way to heal,” said Morak, the tournament’s founder. “Keep the community together to make sure everybody knew that we were still really strong as a community. We had a chance to be together in a way we knew, at that age was just to play basketball. So it was just us getting together, and getting some T-shirts and some referees.”
The tournament spread like wildfire, and people from around the area began wanting in on the action.
Soon the crowds were too big to fit in the old rec center and the venue had to change, going from Arcadia University to La Salle University and the Community College of Philadelphia. More teams began joining and what was at first just a community game became a full-fledged tournament.
“When we started out, there was no expectation for it to take off or what it’s gotten to,” Scott said. “We all grew up playing together, we wanted to keep our friend’s name alive. We just wanted to have a tournament to remember his name with the people that he played against. As it started to progress, you could kind of see that it was going to a different level.”
The tournament reached yet another level when the best of the best began to compete in the it.
Hakim Warrick, a Philadelphia native, began to tell his NBA counterparts about the tournament and the courts were soon filled by NBA stars who wanted a piece of the city’s best.
During the next decade and a half, stars like James Harden, Jayson Tatum and Jalen Brunson followed suit by taking part in the weekend-long event. But it was still the local hoopers who got the best of the elite, a testament to the importance of the sport in the city.
“I think it’s the nature of who we are as kids in Philly,” Morak said. “We always have a chip on our shoulder, We’re a show me city. Anybody can get on the court with anybody and there’s some magic there.”
That so-called magic came from the big crowds the tournament drew. No matter who was on the court, there was always somebody in the bleachers begging to see more, because when they came to the Rumph, their NBA pedigrees were tossed out the window.
It could be a player like Harden, a 10-time NBA All-Star and future Hall of Famer. If the crowd wasn’t moved, they would let the players know, because a local player could come to dish the same move on the opposite end of the court.
“I think we are a competitive city with everything we do,” Alston Jr. said. “We have stars here too, sometimes all you need is opportunity. So on any one of those four or five days, you can play against the NBA All-Star.”
The 19th edition of the tournament takes place Aug.1-5, and while basketball is why the majority of the people come, the main focus is to remember Danny and make sure no other athlete suffers the same fate.
The Danny Rumph Foundation was formed in conjunction with the tournament, with most of the proceeds going to charity.
The foundation is run by Danny’s mother Viola Owens and uncle Marcus Owens, and with the money raised they help provide free CPR training, making sure there are emergency defibrillators at every rec center in the city — something that wasn’t present when Danny passed away.
“Our friend died,” Scott said. “We’re trying to raise awareness around why he died. We’re trying to do preventative things and make sure it doesn’t happen to other people, particularly youth athletes.”
Just 19 years ago, five friends started a tournament for a childhood friend they lost, just hoping to keep his memory alive through the sport they all knew best. The group did just that with the rec center where Rumph passed away, which was eventually renamed after him.
Nearly two decades later, the tournament has transformed into something nobody could have imagined, impacting not all the ones who started it, but an entire community in the process.
“That’s what kind of makes Philly basketball, especially summer games, special,” Morak said. “It’s like trash talk, fun and crazy environments, but it’s a lot of love. So to be able to do stuff this long and to do it together is also really special.”
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