The so-called Telstar game will go down in the annals of high school basketball lore, because we bossed them at home something like 95-48, they were that bad. They might have been good at skiing, landscape photography, hiking in the woods and raising sheep, but they didn’t have much of a student body to draw from and thus it was inevitable that their basketball team would stink. During the away-day late in the season we couldn’t get out of gear and even though our opponents hadn’t improved much, we still managed to lose 64-59.
The varsity dropped points to a middling Richmond team in the final contest of the regular season, thus limping to a 12-6 record overall. We made the playoffs, but fell at the first hurdle to Medomak, despite a “courageous” effort. However, Telstar. It wasn’t merely the long bus ride that caused stiffness in the players’ lanky arms, but somehow they managed to smoke up a storm without it wearing off by halftime, when they presumably lit up again. Long nights, impossible odds.
This scandal, losing to Telstar rather than the drinking and smoking by the star players, was the final nail on the coffin for Coach Gut, who was summarily dismissed. So much controversy and furore over his coaching and motivational skills and who would replace him. So much attention and he loved it, which he declined to hide. The larger controversy though was whether the Junior Varsity coach would step up one notch, whether the young but can’t-miss Freshman coach could be elevated by two notches, or whether the school would consider outside candidates. The wisecracking JV coach was up to his eyeballs in cross-border slang, and had a habit of soothing the feelings of the victims of his rapier wit by clarifying that if the student was not sure whether a jibe was meant seriously, then it wasn’t.
That’s enough of that, because the eventual outcome is not so interesting. Just the same for how Gut was appointed tennis team coach during its maiden season – no one else wanted to do it and he could use the stipend being without the high profile varsity basketball gig – but I give him credit for doing a great job, brain dumping his teaching career during changeovers in an unexpected no “i” in “team” fashion, and leading us to the division title.
He wasn’t so low key as a basketball coach, being a proponent of the fast break offence. When TR grabbed a rebound and passed it to Vinnie, Gut would shout “Move it! Move it!” if he had ideas about bringing the ball down slowly and running the staid half court offence. It became like the chorus of a stadium rock encore. By the second half of the season, any rebound passed to Vinnie would immediately be followed by synchronized shouts of “Move it! Move it!” from the home-town audience.
I drove to the Telstar match in the house wagon but as I valued my life and my license I let someone else drive back. We were stoshing and boshing as much as the starting five less Fitz, though our presence was demanded in the stands, rather than on the court, to cheer heartedly and in the event the game and not the drive home came down to sudden death overtime. The profile of the passengers was the same as that in the Pokorny and Williams car, but I’ll take the capacity of Brian Smith to drive while intoxicated over that of Bret Pokorny, whose SIP color was also blue, ten times out of ten, and I’m here to tell this story. After all, Brian wasn’t prone to “seeing babies dancing in the midnight sun,” while driving. We’d have been in trouble if the driver had been breathalysed on those country roads with no one sober to back him up, but to be fair, no one blew his brains out in the car.
Enper was besties of the junior Mike in my crew, NH Mike, largely because they were next door neighbors near the pond. Mike used to ridicule Enper’s father behind his back all the time, gaggingly labelling him an undiscovered stud, I suppose because they hung out in each other’s houses a fair amount, implying a like amount of chop busting, and Mike’s father may have been bland in comparison. However, one day the music stopped and Enper skipped town, once the rumors were confirmed that Enper’s father had been molesting his sister from a young age. I didn’t hear Mike bring up any of the Enpers again.
Sometimes I remember things, sometimes I have to write them down and sometimes I forget things completely, even a few minutes after I’ve thought of them in the first place – which is why sometimes a story can continue for three fluid pages, and other times four sentences without connectors or segues is what I can muster.
Accordingly, when I met Dan for “one for the road” aka “first call,” my rhetorical comments were a mix of ex-temp and quick gazing down at the shorthand on our table below. This was necessary, relying on crib notes that is, because Dan’s a skilled wordsmith, and only a fool would try to keep up. For example, he’d ask rhetorically if proverbial protagonist/antagonist were engaged in a thumb war or arm’s race, and smirk while mockingly congratulating their “bad assery.”
This is how I tried to stay at least competitive.
Why are they called white supremacists if every last one of them is mentally retarded?
The worst thing about the far right is that they make the far left look tame by comparison
Of course it’s a witch hunt; she’s a witch
and
Why do they laugh nervously but vociferously when I confirm I’m the person they would like to speak with?
However, the final comment refers not to a lark over DIPAs with Dan but rather something which happens frequently believe it or don’t, in this instance a cold caller from Cebu City who has dialled m’number numerous times in the past, we recognize each other’s voices by now after the first beat – and I wish I had outsourced negotiating with Comcast to a call center in Cebu City: claiming to be based in Indiana, but nearly hanging up when Comcast asks what happened to his Mid-Western accent. I can picture him and his brother brainstorming about next generation internet catchphrases to stay a step ahead of the competition, when you and I tune out to locutions such as “We’d like to show you notifications about the latest …,” etc.
In the meantime, when I confess light heartedly that I am who he is asking for - “the person you are trying to reach is available” - he chuckles, as if this is funny, though perhaps also to get the tension out before he begins reading from the script. I ask him to send me an email, because if he has my phone number, he for sure has my email address. And I always give him plenty of rope – all rope and no hope.