© 2015
Author's Note: First, a HUGE apology to all of my readers. I was shocked this evening to discover that it has literally been two days short of TWO MONTHS since my last post. I knew that I had been very busy with my new job and I knew that it had been a while ... but I swear that I didn't realize that it had been THIS long.
For the few fans who have written me asking about it, let me also add that the updated and expanded version of my most popular essay "Umbrellas, Spaghetti and Spacetime" is in fact finished (and has been for weeks). I haven't published it because I haven't decided whether or not to try to get it published as a Kindle Single yet (trying to make side money as a writer is important to me, and while my first novel is selling well, it's not doing that well).
Anyway, this week's essay is something of a cheat too in that I didn't just write it. In fact, I wrote the original version of this essay in early 2004 (the night after attending the Missouri Class 1A and 2A high school basketball championship games, which were, at that time, held at the Hearns Center on the University of Missouri campus in Columbia, Missouri ... which, of course, is where I lived at that time). Unfortunately, that original version has been lost to history. The version below is an edited one that I made for it to be published in 2010. I thought of it the other day when a coworker and I were discussing basketball, and I thought it was worth digging up and posting on my blog. I hope you like it ... and I promise to get my act together and start writing again.
The essay was originally called:
1A Sports
The night of the class 1A boys and girls basketball championships at the Hearnes Center has become one of my favorite nights of the year. You might find that odd coming from a man who grew up in a city of millions (Chicago), but the truth is that there is no more pure an experience of what is good and right in sports to be found on the planet.
Everyone from each of these little towns is here. Grandparents, parents, children, friends, relatives, the entire student body ... I have an image of four towns with just a lone policeman driving up and down their empty streets to make sure no one steals the whole town while everyone else attends the game.
There aren't any slam dunks, no shoe contracts and no showboating. But there's also no talking back to the officials (there was one technical foul all night), and the players always help each other off the floor when they fall. It means every bit as much to them as an NBA Championship (and indeed, for many, this is that moment for them), yet they still manage it with more grace and maturity than the vast majority of professional athletes.
There's something unique in these games, something abjectly pure, perhaps because there's nothing else here but the game. And they love it, and you can feel that they love it.
At halftime of the 1A girls championship, they brought out the 1984 1A final four girls. The girls from Lincoln High School all wore the same shirts. They huddled on the floor and cheered after they were announced. These ladies are all just a year or two younger than me. They're bankers, realtors and housewives now, held together forever by a few moments here on this floor two decades ago. And they still feel it. As the game continues I look over at them and I can see them, watching the game, watching themselves, remembering all the pain and joy, the winning and losing that seems to mean so much more in a smaller town.
As the end of the girls championship game gets closer, I start paying closer attention to a girl on the team that's going to lose. She's clearly one of their most talented players, and her attitude is easily understood by everyone in the building; she's going to lose over her dead body. As the game gets more "out of reach" (they will lose), she seems completely oblivious. I never once see her look up at the scoreboard. She doesn't know the score. She doesn't care. There is no score. She just wants to play as hard as she can for every second she has left on the court. I ask the person next to me with a program "who wears 14 for Walnut Grove?"
"Amber Blunt," he replies, "she's a Senior."
A Senior. These are her last moments in her last game in high school, and she gets to spend them losing the championship. And yet I see no fear or agony or disappointment or sadness in her eyes as the minutes become seconds. I see only drive, intensity and focus. It's impossible not to be amazed, humbled and inspired watching someone with such a focus on excellence, such a pure, unadulterated passion for the game. That's why I come here, every year.
When I was younger I wanted more than anything to be President, for a million reasons. Today when I think about it, I have fewer reasons, but there is still one thing I would do as President; I would come here on this night. And I would bring the media, and invite some big star to come in and sing the national anthem. And I'd congratulate the winners and the losers. And they might be excited by all that (certainly the fans would), but then the game would start, and we'd all see what I come for each year; a reminder that there's still a place in the world where sportsmanship and the love of the game still reigns.
