High School Basketball The Hard Way

Let me start by saying that my father did his best when it came to raising us kids. His growing up years were spent as the eldest of eight children with a devoutly Christian mother and a...problematic?...father during the Great Depression.

That was followed by time un the U.S. Navy during World War II, toward the end of which he was serving on a ship that was sunk in the South Pacific by the Japanese. He survived, but it is safe to guess that many of his shipmates did not. Is it any wonder that by the time he got back to Montana and began running his own ranch in 1946, he had to struggle with the adjustment?

And then he had to deal with ME?!

I'm not saying I was a "bad kid". Truthfully, I don't for one second believe that term would apply. But I did "want what I wanted" and would go to fairly extreme lengths to reach my own goals. When those goals and Dad's goals were not precisely the same, things sometimes got...interesting. By the opening of my Sophomore year at Drummond High School, basketball was set to become the focus of lots of strain between us.

My Freshman year had been horrible. I'd come home from school that first autumn day in 1957 to announce that I'd signed up to play basketball. Dad exploded.

"You're not playing basketball!"

Say what?

With considerable emphasis on ruling his roost, Elvin M Baker laid down the law. His oldest child and only son (me) already had band. The ungrateful brat (I paraphrase here) was needed on the ranch. He could not be taking all those extracurricular hours away from ranch work. Only one! Can't have two! Basketball plus band makes two! Therefore, NO BASKETBALL!!

To say I was furious would be like saying Hillary Clinton was a little less than Monica Lewinsky's bestest girlfriend. I did understand Dad's viewpoint to some degree: If the cows needed to be fed before dark and I was away at practice, guess who would be stuck with the job? Duh. But I did not--and do not to this day--believe for one second that he saw where I was coming from.

Firstly (and worst to admit), I was a lousy basketball player, having never had any opportunity to learn the game except for a few gym classes. I would need EVERY BIT of practice I could get to become any good at all. So I'd been playing clarinet in the school band since I was a fifth grader.

So?

So I laid low for one full year. When I came home from that first day of school in 1958, my Sophomore year, and cheerfully announced that since I was only allowed one extracurricular activity, I had dropped band and signed up for basketball, Dad spluttered and fumed and all that...but as I had long since learned to do, I'd trapped him in his own words.

"You said only one, and I signed up for only one!" I protested, all wide eyed innocence. And I was in. Still didn't know how to play the game, only had three years to learn it well when four would not have been half enough, but I was in. Bob Cousy, eat your heart out.

Like every aspiring team player, I aimed to be the best. Never mind that at 15 years of age, I was incapable of dribbling the ball the length of the floor without bouncing it off my knee and out of bounds. (Yes, that happened... not just once, either.) Never mind that the players from Drummond's 1957 Class C State Championship team had all graduated except for Frank Struna. And never mind that even the players we did have were still above my skill level.

None of that mattered. Thankfully, Drummond had few enough available players that pretty much all you had to do was not quit, and you'd get to play some, sooner or later. Maybe only in the B Squad games, but you would play.

Quitting never crossed my mind. Not even when Frankie ran over me like a drunk driver mowing down a reflector post on a highway shoulder. Having been the sole reason we'd placed in the Distrcict Tournament that year, he was definitely our lone varsity super star. Everyone knew it, and no one held it against him. One of the finest men I've ever known, a heart of a lion and a heart of gold all rolled into one, he definitely had my respect.

But that did not mean I was going to get out of his way. The season was essentially over, but we still had scrimmage. Frank came roaring down the length of the court on a fast break, no one in the lane between him and the basket but me. He expected me to get out of the way. He really did. So, probably, did everyone else in the gym.

No way. Set perfectly, left knee a bit forward, hands high in solid defensive position, I took the charge and the offensive foul like a pro...and went flying over backward, my forward knee flaming in pain. Mere days earlier, a nervous colt I was breaking on the ranch had slipped in late winter mud and fallen against a plank fence, smack on that same knee.

Ouch.

I wasn't able to recover fast enough to take my own free throws that day, but it was still a turning point: Everyone including our coach knew I still couldn't hit the floor if I dropped the ball half the time, but hot diggety, I could and would play credible defense. It wasn't the State Championship...but it was a start.

During my Junior Year, things were really looking up: I made the team! Not the starting five, not that, but the second five, the boys at the back of the bus but on the bus. And I got to play a lot. Remember the earlier comment about there not being all that many players available? Our school--and others in our District--made fifteen players into two teams of ten.

Huh?

Like this: The second five (of which I was now a member) would play the first and third quarters of the B Squad game. That way, we still had half a game's worth of eligibility, allowing the Coach to use us as substitutes for up to half a game's worth of the A Squad (varsity) game. We seldom got to play that much in the main game, but we did all right.

Not that making it to practice was always easy. Oh, I didn't shoot the full length mirror with a revolver the way I'd done in the seventh grade while practicing my fast draw and nearly giving my Mom a heart attack. Nothing like that. But sometimes after practice I did have to hike home the full six miles to the ranch when Dad was too cranky to come get me with the pickup.

Or too busy. The second time that happened, I found out he really did have something more important going on. A truck had run off the curve atop Rattler Hill, ending up shiny side down in our hayfield, its load of lumber scattered all over the place. Dad was out there, helping pick up the pieces. Whether or not some of those pieces included the driver, who knows? My old man never talked about stuff like that to us kids. He just did what he had to do and went on with his life.

By the end of that Junior Year, my two best friends and I had all lettered in basketball. This authorized us to uncover one of the white stripes on our deep blue school sweaters, a proud day indeed. Besides, Jack had been a little better than me at the start of the season, and now I was a little better. No, I had not improved that fast--it was just that he'd had a setback early in the season, losing a few weeks after he did shoot himself in the knee while practicing his fast draw.

At last we were SENIORS! Kings of the Hill! Oh yeah! It would be GOOD!

Or...not.

Several times early on that year, I had an honest shot at the starting five. My shooting was still inconsistent: On target one day, not quite there the next. My footspeed made a tortoise look like a jackrabbit with a firecracker under its tail. But overall, I still had a shot.

Of course, every time the Coach did start me in a game, I promptly blew it due to nerves. I wanted to succeed so badly that I'd make a few bad passes, get the ball stolen from me a time or two, and wind up right back in that "second five" group. Which was still...acceptable. Barely, but I could (sigh!) live with it.

Until The Gold Creek Dance. The "wide spot in the road" named Gold Creek had a dance hall some miles east of Drummond. Dances at Gold Creek were good times, whether you were looking for a fistfight, a Deer Lodge girl to dance with, or just a chance to get drunk with every other teenager from a thirty mile radius. Naturally, that also meant the Coach had put Gold Creek dances off limits to all athletes during basketball season.

So of course we all went. Or at least, most of us did: That particular snowy Saturday night, six members of the ten man team were at the dance. Unfortunately, it was my aged Dodge hardtop that would not start after the dance. By the time a local Highway Patrolman stopped by and helped out with a push (back then Montana Highway Patrol cars actually possessed bumpers strong enough to use for that purpose), it was way past curfew.

When things like that happen nowadays, I just grin and think, karma! In 1961, however, it seemed more like the Universe was plotting--no, not the Universe. The coaches. Jack had ridden to the dance with me. When I dropped him off at his parents' home in Drummond, my rumbly-rattly car was noisy enough to catch the Assistant Coach's attention from right next door. The Assistant told the Coach, and we were busted.

Busted and, like most fools caught in their own folly, enraged. The Head Coach moved us down to the B Squad, right where we'd been as Sophomores, for the rest of the season! Which meant no more travel squad, no lettering in basketball that year, and no logical way to reverse the man's decision.

Even worse in a way, we knew why he'd done it: With us down in the ball playing cellar, he could give his clumsy Freshmen more playing time--which would help build his teams for the future. No big loss, either, because we weren't good enough to win anything at even the District Tounament level that year.

We could have just quit. We did talk about it, Jack and I, but quitting was never really an option for either one of us. Instead, we just decided to hate the Coach's hypocritical guts (our view) "forever"...and have some fun with it.

Boy, did we.

In one scrimmage, we and a handful of Freshmen kicked the starting five's tail all around the court, pulling up twelve points ahead of them at half time. Well, hey. The Coach couldn't have his dregs pounding his aces, now could he? No way! So he sat down our back court Freshmen, replacing them with a couple of kids who were really uncoordinated. The varsity guards began stealing the ball from these boys left and right.

When the final buzzer sounded, the starting players were finally ahead...by one point. Ever after, the Coach called us his Tiger Team, but he did not give us another shot at playing on the travel squad...and he did not ever match us up again in a full scrimmage where we could make his "top picks" look bad.

By year end, we were satisfied. Our "A Team" had a record of 3 wins, 21 losses (counting District tournament). Our lowly "B Team" had a record of 9 wins, 2 losses. One of those losses came early in the season at Frenchtown, the night before we suddenly "gelled" as a team against Alberton, winning in overtime and never losing again. The other loss we did not count, as only underclassmen (Freshmen and Sophomores) were allowed to play in that one.

You know how bittersweet Baker's chocolate tastes? That's pretty much the flavor of my high school basketball experience. No, we did not get our sports letter that final year. I grabbed my beautiful blue school sweater and ripped the covering off of that second white stripe anyway. And I do thank our Coach for two very important escapes: Jack and I were not part of the team that was behind Superior 31-1 at the half, nor present when Corvallis buried our squad 105-35 in a road game.

Thus I can now sincerely say, Thanks, Coach. In the end, you really did make it possible for me to play on a winning team during my Senior Year.

Thanks for reading,

Ghost32