Arkansas-Mississippi State Running Diary

With all apologies to the master and my hero, Bill Simmons, I do running diaries of most of Arkansas's home basketball games, and I thought I might share some of them here.  I write it in notes and shorthand at the game, and then organize it and polish it a bit at home. So without further adieu...

It is full-blown January in Arkansas.  It blew in last night—maybe around 8pm.  It is cold but clear and crisp.   Trees are bare and lifeless; they look starved and lonely.

There is huge anticipation for basketball.  The air is thick with it.  Anticipation and hyperbole.  It's palpable.  

There is little else to sustain us until Spring, unless you count friends and loved ones, and to be honest, I prefer a good Hogs basketball team to a crowded living room any day.

And this team has looked good. Scrappy.  I suspect my hopes have gotten a bit too high, but I can no longer imagine us losing a game at home this season.  I doubt the crowd will let them.

Basketball is part of the conversation at work again.  I overhear talk about Michael Washington's Mao-like Great Leap Forward, about Stef's defense, about RC's shot, about Sanchez's hair.  

I am on my own tonight, as my date begged off at the last moment, something to do with a 102 degree fever, a headache, and vomiting.  Women—what are you gonna do?

Eschewing the possibility of meningitis, I have her adequately sedated and tucked into bed.  She gave me her blessings to attend the game, although she may have been hallucinating because she called me by her son's name.  Regardless, I have official permission and I am on the road.

The moon is freakish.  It is full and low and huge and yellowish-orange. It looks heavy and distorted, as if smeared by gravity and the atmosphere, almost like a blown glass ornament dangling by an invisible string from the heavens, a tired deity about to let it drop.  I suppose this could be an omen of some sort.

The interstate is easy, and the tunes are good.  Van Morrison is "Cleaning Windows" on the "Bright Side of the Road."  The opaque, jaundiced light of the giant moon is silhouetting the low hills of the Ozarks.  Packs of cell phone towers reach up and blink unevenly from the horizon, steel-framed aliens desperately trying to communicate with their indifferent moon god. Rows of taillights are forming tracers as SUVs zoom past.  I think maybe I took too much cough medicine.

It is a rowdy and expectant crowd.  We are sensing a win coming, and we want to be part of it.  The crowd is also quite good looking.

This is a weird phenomenon.  You can't swing a dead cat without hitting a cute coed or a slightly sluttily dressed divorcee.  It's like an organic supermarket in LA here.

Early in the season our crowds were kind of whacked with an ugly stick.  Seems like front-runners might be a good looking crew.  Us diehards are a mite jealous.

Stef makes his last shot in warmups today.  He gave the ball to a guy sitting in the courtside seats and had the guy feed him a pass and then he buried the shot.  That was kind of cool.

Stef has on knee sleeves.  Does he always wear those?  And black socks.  Could I have been missing that?

I am strangely confident and serene considering how young and unaccomplished this team is.  I am seeing Mississippi State as a game we just won't lose.  If we play good, it is a blowout; play bad, and we find a way to win.  That's how it works, right?

We have the gray-haired ref from the OU game and the peg leg guy from the Texas tilt.  I'm not feeling great about that pair.

My mom leans back and asks me if one of the Miss. St. assistants is a former player she should know.  I don't recognize him, but I ask her if she thinks all tall black guys are athletes she should know.  She gives me one of those looks that tells me she is a bit sorry she ever birthed me.

Just before tipoff they get an extended shot of me up on the scoreboard.  I miss it, but mom turns around and tells me that I looked very handsome, so I have that going for me.

During introductions I get the feeling that the fanbase is getting to know these guys, to recognize them as individuals.  We wildly cheer Washington because of his yeoman work and the killer move against Texas.  We cheer the fact that he carried us against North Texas.

We cheer Stef's incredible defensive performance, his hustle and perseverance, the fact that he is finally hitting some jumpers.  We cheer Rotnei almost as we would a novelty, a trick shot artist at the Fair, the one player that looks the most like us, yet UN-like us he has this extraordinary skill.

We cheer Courtney because he is our heart and our face.  He is what makes us unique among college teams.  We cheer Sanchez because, well, because he seems a genuinely nice fella, and we all feel bad about his haircut and the shots he will inevitably have blocked by Varnado.

Let's play ball.

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