Arthur Perryman

by Pete Nevins

When senior high school basketball players gather at East Stroudsburg University Sunday for a pair of all-star games, they will be honoring posthumously a member of the Poconos First Family of Basketball, the Perrymans. The players will compete in the first Arthur Perryman Basketball Classic at ESU's Koehler Fieldhouse. The girls game will start at 3 p.m. with the boys contest at 5. The event is being held in the memory of Arthur Perryman III, the all-time leading scorer in East Stroudsburg High School history with 1,735 points. He died in 1995 after a year's battle against prostate cancer. He was diagnosed in April, 1994 only a month after he led the Cavaliers to the PIAA District II Class AAA basketball title, first ever for an area team, and into the quarter-final round of the PIAA state playoffs. Arthur, the youngest of four Perryman children, broke the school record set by his sister Stacy. The two other Perryman girls, Felicia and Chris, also were players for the Cavaliers as was their dad, Arthur, Jr.. The five Perrymans scored a combined total of more than 6,400 points for East Stroudsburg High School basketball teams over a 25-year period. Felicia went to become the leading scorer in Muhlenberg College history with 1,690 career points. Stacy was a collegiate standout at ESU, setting a school single-season record with 571 points and finishing second on the school's career scoring list with 1,695 points. Arthur was expected to follow in his sister's footsteps. He originally planned to attend Millersville, but when he became ill, he decided to stay closer to home and expecting to recover, he committed to play at ESU. "He would have been a great, great Division II player and perhaps a sleeper at a Division 1 school," says Stacy. "In the PIAA playoffs, he outscored Richard Hamilton of Coatesville, who is now one of the leading scorers in the NBA." "He definitely had the talent, work ethic and desire. Size was the main issue. He was 6-0, but he was always bone-thin, long and lanky," added Stacy, now an assistant girls' basketball at Pocono Mountain West High School. Mark Brown, Arthur's high school coach and now athletic director for the East Stroudsburg school district, recalls not only his All-State third team guard's great skills, but also his overall contributions to the team. "He had a quality that he made all the people around him better. He was like a Larry Bird or Magic Johnson, those types of players," said Brown. "He also rose to the occasion in our biggest games. In the PIAA tournament, he had 30 points against Reading, 33 against Coatesville, and Richard Hamilton (now with the Detroit Pistons) only had only seven before fouling out, and 22 points against Chester, the eventual state champion," the coach continued. Sal Mentesana, the ESU coach the time, thought Arthur was headed for an outstanding career in the Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference. "Arthur was a talented kid who loved to play basketball. We had known him since he was a youngster as he used to hang around the fieldhouse. I really liked his personality and his approach to the game - he would have been a great fit with the players we had in our program at the time," Mentesana said. Just as his siblings did, Arthur learned to play basketball almost as soon as he could walk. "We lived only two blocks from Dansbury Park and that was like our back yard," Stacy explained. Although all the children were close, there was a special bond between the two younger Perrymans, Stacy and Arthur. "We did everything together. I'd dropped him at the playground or the mall. We used play a one-on-one challenge, but I never won. He always beat me, he was the shooter in the family," recalls Stacy. "Felicia was more a power player and I was more finesse while Arthur could stand behind the three-point line and just drain them," she continued. Stacy also said that Arthur was one of the smartest basketball players she's ever known. "He could outsmart defenders. He always thought a play ahead of everyone else. He was very creative. He would get in the air, change his mind, do something else and then make an amazing shot. I hate to use the term, but he was Jordanesque," she said. The game Stacy remembers the most is the night in which Arthur broke her high school scoring record. "He would kid me and ask each night, "How many points until I break your record?" I was always encouraging. The day of the game he was excited and said, "Today, I'm going to become East Stroudsburg's all-time leading scorer." We made a sign congratulating him. "It's something I'll always remember," Stacy says. This is one of many remembrances which all the Perrymans (Arthur Jr., Blenda, Felician, Chris and Stacey), the Poconos First Family of Basketball, have about Arthur. They are pleased and proud that the community has seen fit to honor the memory of their son and sibling with the establishment of the Arthur Perryman Basketball Classic.