Sidestepping: Arkansas Basketball's Journey to the Tourney

"History is the short trudge from Adam to atom."

Leonard Levinson

I was trudging through the long ER corridors today.  The light was fluorescent and flickering, creating shadows that came and went in aging and unseen corners.  There were doors. Everywhere doors.

Glassed and curtained and half-open and exuding beeps and blips and a goodly number of moans these doors were like arms reaching out to grab me and pull me into their depths.  My world smelled of antispetic and wax and vomit, just a sprinkle of urine and feces and, if I really concentrated, death. 

Irregularly patterned linoleum covered the floor.  The overhead bulbs reflected off the tiles but it was diffuse and dull and a little bit sad.  They were cleaned and buffed endlessly by men in hats and khakis but they never truly got clean.  Specks of blood and tissue and phlegm and smears of microorganisms were too embedded to ever really come up.  They were just waxed over instead, creating a paraffin museum of gunk and disease that anthropologists in 1000 years will squint at and puzzle over.

I trudged because I am a trudger, always have been.  I come from a long line of trudgers on both sides of the family.  We trudged through potato famines and welfare lines.  We trudged as we farmed in the Pennsylvania hills and as we drank the Syracuse bars dry.  We trudged down the aisle to marry not too distant cousins.  We trudged into town to bail our inbred offspring out of the hoosegow.  We trudged to good hiding places during the Civil War and we probably trudged as feudal serfs (displaying our other family trait known in those times as a "crappy attitude").  We just trudged.  I suspect members of my clan invented pants pockets into which they could thrust their hands and thus improve their trudging.

As a young man I used to amble or even hop.  I was also known to sidle when feeling frisky. I even skipped once after a particularly interesting night involving multi-colored pills, a veil, a Samoan woman, a big wooden spoon, Nintendo and Lime sherbert.  But I don't think my heart was ever really in it.  I knew even then what I would become, a trudger.

My amble turned into a saunter and I experimented with a shuffle and a limp.  I staggered for a while and lurched quite a bit.  I hobbled through 1992.  In '95, during a beautifully degrading affair with the wife of a bowling alley owner, I strutted and was even accused of a swagger.  But I always knew I would return to the trudge.  It is my default gait.  It soothes me

And so I trudged the halls, trying to get some thinking done, some thinking about basketball and emptiness

It can be hard to think in the ER, what with the blood curdling screams and crying infants and all.  On the whole patients are a needy and self-centered group.  Me, me, me.  That's all I get from these people.  Why don't they ever ask how I am? Don't they care what I am thinking and feeling as I trudge past their rooms and ignore their cries of pain?  What about ME?  Once again I find myself following a basketball team planted squarely on the Bubble, at best an 8th seed and a national afterthought.  How can I concentrate on kidney stones and bed sores and vaginal drippings a

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