Bleacher Report - Articles by vector4dz

Arkansas-Alabama: Running Diary

vector4dz — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 21:48:33 -0500

“In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If there’s a problem, yo I’ll solve it. Check out the hook while the DJ revolves it.”
Vanilla Ice

Northwest Arkansas is frozen tonight. The air itself is an icy, foggy mist. Light is refracting strangely, with distant streetlights sparkling and expanding in my vision.

For some reason all my senses seem clean and sharp, I feel the cold and taste the air. I can see forever.

Getting out of the car, I hit a patch of ice with my first step and suddenly my feet are in the air and I land on my backside with an inorganic THUD. Slush creeps into my pants and I’m pretty sure the fall has pulled my jeans down just a little bit. I am flashing a deathly pale hint of frozen butt crack.

My date is standing over me, hugging herself to control her convulsions of laughter. She is giggling so hard I fear she might wet herself.

Fayetteville and the UA campus really do look like a theme park of sorts. My father is giddy about the weather and I worry he may take off like an excited puppy to frolic in the ice-covered limbs. We may need to bump the dose on his medication.

Everywhere there are overburdened trees, limbs bending and sagging under the weight of the ice. The campus reminds me of a Christmas tree lot with all of the merchandise covered with that fake white snow. This makes me think of powdered donuts and I am suddenly kinda hungry.

My father actually does a slow twirl with his arms outstretched, saying something about a “Winter Wonderland.” My mother, his wife of 46 years, is moving crab-like away from him, appearing to reassess the past half century. I ask Dad if dementia is as fun as he makes it seem. He doesn’t find me amusing.

We are early for the game. The roads were not nearly as bad as expected. My mom, who works in Fayetteville, seems vaguely disappointed that we didn’t have a near fatal accident on the way up to meet her. She has been babbling about the treacherous ice for two days and we are mocking her caution.

We are brave explorers and cannot be stopped by mere weather calamity. I mention to my date that I think my undies have actually frozen and that this is leading to a friction rash.

Bama is on tap tonight. They just canned their coach and quite frankly they don’t have the look of a real contender. They have some nice players. Alonzo Gee and JaMychael Green are both excellent players with even more excellent names.

But we all know that the college game is determined by guards, and I really don’t know what the Tide has to offer in that area.

I am troubled as I watch the Hogs warm up. Stef persists with his headband that is clearly jinxed. Worse, Jason Henry has added a headband and he is wearing it low on the forehead like Michael Washington. It’s not a good look.

Mostly it serves to draw attention to two small circular bald patches in his scalp. It looks like he has mange or maybe someone put a couple cigarettes out on his noggin.

Multiple players have their warm up tops tucked into their pants AND the legs of the pants tucked into their socks. This is quite simply unacceptable. They look like the are wearing riding pants.

Brandon Moore and Marcus Monk are in street clothes, sigh. Moore looks really skinny in his civvies, his shoulders all sharp and pointy.

The mascots seem to have gone a bit batty. It started with Boss Hog, the giant inflatable dude, when we first came in. He was all up in my face, trying to get me to have a staredown with him. I think he sensed my fear of mascots and tried to spook me.

Then Boss started in on my Dad who just seemed confused by the whole thing, like maybe he thought it was a hallucination that no one else could see, a rubbery side effect of some medicine or another.

Next was the regular mascot, the one that bizarrely wears a basketball uniform and kinda looks like a bright red Teen Wolf.

He was crawling behind our seats and popped up to frighten us. It worked. I spit out my coke into my already cold and moist lap. Geez, I hate mascots.

The band is playing “Ring of Fire.” Interesting choices with the playlist this year.

Bama has sort of cool old-school unis. They look a bit like an ABA squad.

We need Henry and Andre Clark to play well. Bama looks kind of large.

I have decided that I want the hospital where I work to treat me like Bud Walton treats the Hogs.

When I show up for a shift, I want them to dim the lights and have the overhead speaker boom out: “Ladies and gentleman let’s give a big ER welcome to your doctor tonight.”

Then I’ll jog in while strobe lights flash, my scrubs on and my stethoscope twirling. Is that too much to ask?

Let’s get to it and play some ball.

TIPOFF

Knox and Green are both really big, but both of them seem to have weird legs, slightly flat-footed.

Rotnei is guarding Hillman. That is the only guy he can even try to guard, because he is 6’1” and the other two perimeter guys are about 6’6”. I’m guessing we end up playing a lot of zone or a lot of Henry.

Nice dish from Courtney to Sanchez.

I would really like to pass a team rule that forbids people from passing ahead to MW when he is ahead of the pack in the middle of the floor. Mike doesn’t control his momentum so well.

Andre Clark just blows an inbound pass to give up the lead.

RC misses a couple. AC with a deep shot. RC gets off the schneid.

FIRST TIMEOUT 8-9 Bama

Sanchez airballed a 17-footer. I’m glad he took the shot, but geez.

There is a dangerous thing going on. Teams are not guarding Fortson until he gets in the paint and he is afraid to pull the trigger.

Worse is the fact that teams aren’t guarding Sanchez at all either. His man is sinking into the lane as well which means things will be pretty congested in there for CF.

RC catch and shoot.

Henry doing a nice job on the boards.

My date mentions that the walk-on, Nolan, looks just like a guy she dated briefly in high school. She informs me he was a “horn-dog” and she had to dump him after the first date due to an over-large belt buckle. I don’t own such a buckle, so I think I’m okay.

RC and Stef both miss but RC cleans it up.

SECOND TIMEOUT 15-11 Hogs

Green has a great touch. Very good player.

MW handling the double better. He is looking backside a bit..

Nice head fake and drive by RC.

We have a four-guard lineup with Henry for Sanchez. I like it. Make them adjust to US.

Rotnei is playing okay defense. Nice steal. He slaps too much with his hands but he is a good off-the-ball defender.

Stef is WAY off.

My date just said that the Bama interim coach is a “cute little feller.” Alrighty then.

THIRD TIMEOUT 22-16 Hogs

Mike Washington! Little jumper. He is a solid, solid post player.

Welsh with a great dish to Sanchez.

Henry touching every rebound. RC transition 3. Finally.

RC again. This is his night.

Stef with another good dish inside to Henry. Good to see Stef shake off the bad shooting.

Stef feeds RC TWICE on the same possession but he finally misses.

I just noticed a young woman on the south side just looking around as she casually runs her pinky finger up, into, and around her left nostril. She keeps looking side to side to see if any of the 10,000! people surrounding her might be noticing.

LAST TIMEOUT 34-25

We need to close the half hard.

Alonzo Gee follow hoop. I think I will name my first born Alonzo Gee. It is just that fun a name.

Cox in and gets swatted. Who does he think he is? That is a Sanchez move.

CF with a bad time for a silly turnover. And it’s down to 4 points.

“Steven Cox is just really, really cute”, my date says. “I could do without the squatting though. He has a weird squat on defense.” I make a note to remember this.

Henry big 3. He has had a good half.

HALFTIME 38-31 Hogs

We look pretty good against teams that can’t shoot.

Great half from RC. We become a decent team when he is shooting.

They introduce all the athletes with a 3.0 GPA or higher at halftime. There are a bunch. I can’t decide if I am impressed by the number or simply shocked at how short a couple of the golfers are.

SECOND HALF

Sanchez takes a 3 because he was completely unguarded. he needs to take that shot. If he doesn’t become a threat he will have to sit. Of course it would help if he made one.

Knox has a nice mid-range shot.

Not sure MW can go left.

Not guarding CF again but Stef finally nails a big three then draws a foul.

We are getting KILLED in the paint but still up 6.

And then RC hits. That gives us a ton of flexibility.

But then Hillman just outmuscles RC for 2 straight buckets.

Then RC hits again and Hillman blows a jumper trying to post up RC. 10 point game

There is a fella sitting in the floor seats, a grown man with an unkempt mustache and chin fur, wearing a drab green warmup suit. I’m pretty sure he is a Russian mobster or possibly a Ukrainian flesh trader. Someone needs to look into this.

My date can’t stop laughing because I referred to the color of his warm-up as “olive.” Tough crowd.

FIRST TIMEOUT 54-44 Hogs

Henry and Britt in and another turnover trying to hit MW on the break in the middle of the floor. Why is Mike running the middle of the floor anyway? Ball should go middle and the other guys pick a lane to either side and a trailer spots up. Me no likey.

We are pressing a bit now. Interesting. Wait until late so we don’t wear out.

Clarke can’t miss. Good lineup – Henry, Britt, Courtney, RC, and Washington.

Green is gonna be a pro.

Nice outlet to Britt for a layup.

SECOND TIMEOUT 64-54

Sanchez misses a pair. RC has 26.

Andre Clark blows a dunk and Bama scores. We aren’t putting them away.

We are trapping some now.

Nice move from Sanchez. Aggressive.

There were NO BURGERS at halftime. I repeat, NO BURGERS. After last week I was looking forward to one the whole first half.

THIRD TIMEOUT 72-60

The band was running around the court during the last break. That should be a pay-per-view event. “Band Guys Running.”

Green and Knox are scoring at will.

Stef 3 then Knox again.

Gee blows by Rotnei for a jam.

We have been playing mostly zone and it has been fairly effective because Bama can’t shoot. When we try to switch to man we have match up problems, Gee being the main one.

My date has started a new game. We pick out some guy in the crowd and try to decide if he is wearing a rug or just has horrible hair. This is making us feel better about ourselves.

LAST TIMEOUT 75-67

They are going right at Rotnei every time, or at least for the last 3 possessions and it’s a 6 point game.

RC is out.

We are milking clock and I hate it.

“Stop slowing it down!!”, my mother screams. “We SUCK at slowing it down!!” That’s my momma. (And she has a point)

We are making FTs.

RC comes back in with 20 seconds left. I guess it is a question of whether he can play crunch time minutes if we don’t have confidence in his defense. It will be a problem if he has to be involved in offense/defense substitutions.

FINAL SCORE 89-80

So what have we learned? Not much. We learned RC can shoot but we already knew that. Good to see it happen though. We learned that we have defensive match up problems but they don’t stand out against poor shooting teams, but we knew that too.

We learned that Sanchez is going to be more aggressive offensively, which he must be or he will sit. And he would sit because of the next thing we learned which is that we are at our best with Henry playing big minutes at the 4 and Britt getting big minutes backing up the other 3 guys.

Finally we learned that squatting looks funny, toupees are a bad idea, and grown men shouldn’t wear warm-up suits to public events.

Until next time...

Arkansas-Auburn Running Diary

vector4dz — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 04:31:59 -0500

“If you want to destroy this sweater,
hold this thread as I walk away.”
Weezer - “The Sweater Song”

Slumps tend to get reduced to clichés, to their most basic level. “The Hogs are losing because their shots aren’t falling.” “They have been hurt by injuries and suspensions etc.” “They aren’t giving effort.” “They aren’t playing defense.” “Pel sucks.”

All of those things may or may not be true, but as analysis they are meaningless. Those things are, for the most part, results. They are not the causes.

When looking at the cause of a failure, be it a basketball team or a Big Three auto company or the banking industry, it is dangerous to be TOO reductionist. This is an essential truth in a TEAM sport.

Basketball, like just about everything else, is a “system” for lack of a better term. It is not a series of individual events or shots. It isn’t just matchups. The way someone shoots depends on where they get the ball, what the score was, what kind of defense was being played, whether the seams of the ball were lined up nicely when the pass was received, whether the shooter’s legs feel bouncy, whether their girlfriend may or may not be cheating on them.

Further, the way that shooter is shooting affects everything and everybody else. What defense do we play after a make vs. a miss? What kind of shot does the opponent get off a long rebound? Does the shooter pass up the next open look, or does he jack a bad shot because he feels hot? Does a player on the end of the bench lose a girlfriend because being a baller for this team has suddenly lost its cachet?

What I am saying is that these things are complicated. There are hundreds if not thousands of important variables on every team, in every game, on each possession, on each shot. And each of the variables fundamentally affects all of the others.

This is, at least in part, Chaos Theory, and it is the central reason team sports can be so exciting and so maddening. They cannot be accurately predicted. This is the nature of any “system.” It tends towards entropy, to disorder. The coach and the team are always trying to rein this in, to harness its power.

Let me offer a couple of examples in basketball.

The Houston Cougars of Clyde Drexler and Phi Slamma Jamma made three straight Final Fours and two straight finals. They were the dominant college team for two-plus years. Before and after this period they were nearly irrelevant (save the Elvin Hayes era). But I would argue that the overall talent in the program changed very little from year to year under Guy Lewis.

The results, however, were completely different.

Houston teams were notorious for looking great at times but being unable to get a big stop or a crucial basket. These teams tended towards entropy, to disorder. When they needed to buckle down and focus, they couldn’t. This made them vulnerable.

During the Drexler years this changed. I would argue it changed for two fundamental reasons, one well known and the other overlooked.

The well known change was Hakeem Olajuwon showing up. From his first day he was an intimidating presence. Early on his offense was nonexistent, but his defense was game-changing. Hakeem instantly made that club a credible defensive team. The basket was protected, and the rest were free to roam.

The less talked about change was Alvin Franklin. He was an absolute bull of a point guard with a nice jumper, and with him running the show, all of a sudden Houston would buckle down on big possessions on both ends. They had someone to take a clutch shot and exude calm.

Think of it as the difference between a team led by Kenny Hutchinson to a team led by Corey Beck. It is hard to think of one individual skill in which Beck was a superior player, but nobody who watched them play would ever take Kenny over Corey.

Alvin Franklin and Corey Beck CONTROLLED disorder. They reined everything in. Established limits. In doing that they allowed the rest of the team to run free and be loose and confident.

The other major example of controlling disorder is the NBA. The players are so good, and the teams so ever-changing, that the only way to know what you are going to get every night is to reduce the game to matchups, one on one plays. It would be great to run a “system” with that level of players.

To an extent Sacramento did just that during the Chris Webber years, and it was beautiful to watch. Unfortunately the system was too fragile. It broke down under pressure and with the loss of even one player of their top eight guys. Bobby Jackson getting hurt would cripple them.

Billy Gillispie at Kentucky does something similar. Each season he has two and only two major offensive players, usually one inside and one outside (this season Jodie Meeks and Patrick Patterson). The team will fight and struggle until they get comfortable with this, but then they produce extremely consistent results.

This was also the Eddie Sutton way. Players have to wait in the wings as role players and hope to be tapped for stardom later in their careers.

And so I come to my beloved Hogs, a team of interesting parts that seems to have lost its way. The thread has been pulled, and the fabric has come apart. Weaving it together again falls on two people: John Pelphrey and Courtney Fortson. Those two guys control more variables than anyone else. They can create controlled chaos.

All the talk of Stef and RC and Washington and our struggles at the 4 are interesting and important, but in the end irrelevant. Courtney controls the team on the floor, and Pel controls it off.

Arkansas’ struggles are the direct result of having a freshman point guard that, as of yet, doesn’t understand the overall game. And just as quickly as it has gone south, it can turn great again if (and when) the light goes on in Courtney’s head.

Now on to the Auburn game. Similar in many ways to Miss. State, they are a perimeter team. But they lack Jarvis Varnado and have been mired in a culture of losing and living and dying with jump shots. We SHOULD blow them out, but my confidence is shaky.

I’m tired for this game. Very tired. I worked all night, and I am getting old. I bought an “energy drink” thinking it could pep me up. Instead I found out it tastes like a combination of liquid bubble gum and urine. I’m not a fan.

Beautiful day in NWA. Cold in the shadows and warm in the sunlight. I think that might be a metaphor for something.

The crowd isn’t great, but it’s not horrible. Maybe two-thirds full. Aesthetically we don’t measure up to the OU and Texas crowds from a couple weeks ago. I think the pretty people must have dates.

Stat Girl is here and behind the scorer’s table. She looks good, although I think she is wearing the same outfit as the last time I saw her—short black tunic and black slacks. I think maybe you become an official stalker when you figure out the outfit rotation of someone you’ve never met. Is there a stalker’s union or something I need to join? Maybe a group that offers my kind free legal representation when the inevitable happens. Just wondering.

Stef is wearing his headband again. He also wore it at Florida and Ole Miss. Coincidence? I think not. This is bad. Is there not a coach in charge of sartorial mistakes? Someone that looks out for jinxes? I’m available if you need me Pel.

Monk is in street clothes, no idea why. Yikes! (Although it is troubling that I feel reliant on a football player who has only been with the team a couple of weeks.)

Let’s play ball!

Tip-Off

Stef nails his first jumper. Sweet. The crowd is into it. We need to pressure these guys and roll them.

Auburn has some serious shorts. Calf-length. At what point does wearing a mid length “skort” begin to hinder movement?

RC hits a deep one. This is good.

Sanchez faces up and gets fouled. His post moves are glacier-like. (That isn’t good.)

Waller buries a shot from deep while leaning to his left. Ugh.

Horrible turnover on a CF pass to Stef. Bad pass from CF and bad awareness from Stef. Sometimes I question Courtney’s understanding of good passing angles.

Waller again. Might wanna get a hand up fellas.

FIRST TIMEOUT: 6-11 Auburn.

We seem to be the cure for other team’s shooting woes. Our man is a bit soft, and we aren’t handling screens well. We go under or switch, so it is easy to get mismatches with our little guys.

Henry in. If he can play well he is the solution to many, many problems.

I’m thinking more Britt today as well. Maybe some Henry and Britt together with RC or Stef. That fixes the size and we still have some shooting. Marcus has to be willing to take a mid-range jumper though.

We ran a different set the first three possessions and got good looks. Lots of motion. We are back to pick and roll now. Stagnant.

Waller again. Oh my! That was against a zone, and I’m not sure CF has any idea how to cover the left wing out of a zone.

Courtney gets a couple nice buckets.

SECOND TIMEOUT: 12-17 Auburn

Henry got his pocket picked for a dunk and missed badly on a three. He needs to work his way back.

Lefty hits a deep one for Auburn. We are playing soft zone WHY!

Waller another one.

Washington responds poorly to double teams.

RC hits a deep one that they call a two. We HAVE to press and push. That is the only way to get open shots for our guards, but we are sitting back on D.

Andre Clark is active. Out of position but active. He needs minutes.

Another three and we are down 10.

Stef comes back.

Stat Girl just walked right in front of my seat. Just a hint of a jiggle. I could have reached out and touched her or maybe thrown popcorn at her.

Stef cuts it to five but blows a layup.

THIRD TIMEOUT: 21-26 Auburn

Jeff Lebo looks a lot like Donald Pleasance—the guy that played the psychiatrist in Halloween. I don’t think that is a compliment. His face is very shiny.

RC with an airball. He was wide open and missed by two feet. WTF?

Another three and it is back to 10. That was against a man defense.

Stef misses. We are missing open jumpers now and are down a dozen.

On the positive side I think the band is playing a song by Pink. So we have that going for us.

Auburn has a really tall skinny assistant or redshirt in a suit with a hanky in his pocket.

I point this out to my date, but she thinks he is too old to be a player and not involved enough to be a coach. “I think he might be a semi-retarded guy that just wandered out there and is pretending to be part of the team,” she says.

I have no response to that.

Stef goes down HARD. He’ll be sore.

RC with a drive and dish to Sanchez. Michael draws the foul, but he needs to explode up and finish.

We have lots of chances but nowhere to go for a bucket.

LAST TIMEOUT: 27-36 Auburn

There is a women walking up the steps on the south side wearing a top that makes her look like Santa, and if I am not mistaken she has on black stockings and little else. I realize I’m tired, but I think I hired her for a bachelor party once.

CF is taking WAY too long before he shoots.

Now Stef with an airball. “Goodness Gracious,” my mother says. Can’t disagree with that.

Pressed a bit there and fell back in a zone, but CF makes another silly pass in transition.

HALFTIME: 31-38 Auburn

Honestly, it should be worse. Aubbie won’t shoot like that in the second half, but if we don’t create turnovers we can’t score consistently, and we won’t create turnovers with this defensive game plan.

There is clearly a good book on how to play this Hog team now, and we have to figure out how to make that work for us.

Everyone will bang Washington and double him when he gets it in the post. They will sink way, way off Courtney and dare him to shoot (while getting an extra defender in the paint to help with double teams). When CF takes up the slack and tries to penetrate, they will let him get deep and take their chances with him making those dipsy-do shots. (It appears that he won’t get many calls on those anymore. That is probably as it should be because he is creating the contact by jumping in.)

My date was craving a hamburger at halftime. I argued that concession stand burgers are pretty much a vector for food-borne illness. She persisted and WOW. I just ate a really tasty burger. Who knew?

The dance squad is very sparkly in their outfits at halftime. I think their dance is a tribute to “working women.” I’m not sure how much of a “tribute” it is since they have on big eyeglasses to show they are smart and are spinning around and thrusting in bedazzled dresses that stop short of their thighs.

Hey, I am all in favor of some good objectification of women, but I just think that when people talk about “working women,” they don’t really mean Hooters waitresses.

Speaking of objectifying women—a new one caught my eye. She is redheaded and a bit athletic. She seems to be like some kind of boss to the ushers, or maybe a coordinator. She is in all black and has a walkie-talkie on her hip. The whole effect is very much one of authority, like a female cop. (Is that another stripper fantasy?) I want her to scold me. Let’s hear it for the ginger people.

SECOND HALF

Come the eff on boys. This is silly.

Courtney is just off. He can’t shoot and he is making bad passes. I think he needs to sit for a bit.

Stef is missing catch and shoots now. Pelphrey is freaking out.

RC has his leg collapse on a three, and MW gets his shot blocked like three times. Auburn is winning in the paint. Ugh.

We look awful in half court, partly a function of our roster. I hate our tempo. It is defeatist.

Auburn has gone cold but we can’t score. Sanchez is active. He could be a good role player on a good team. But on a borderline team like this he is just another position where we don’t get enough production.

FIRST TIMEOUT: 36-42

Should be worse. CF missed a toss. Courtney throws a full court pass to SANCHEZ. He needs to know better.

And we are back down 10.

There is an avenue for a win here because I don’t think Auburn will score a ton, but we are impotent.

A minute ago I was excited because we got the ball to Sanchez in the middle. Things have gotten exactly that bad.

Sanchez gets rejected and again collects the honorary Charles Thomas/Jonathon Modica award for getting faced. If he keeps this up we may rename the award for him sometime in his career.

Stef finds the range. He is playing OK. He has missed quite a few, but they were all wide open.

We can’t get a stop.

SECOND TIMEOUT: 34-42

We are all waiting. Just waiting for a run. A couple of stops and a couple of shots is all it will take, but I just am not seeing it.

Stef again and we are down five. We get a stop but give up the offensive rebound. Killer.

No Henry in second half so far. Hurt?

RC can’t hit. When CF drives they don’t pick him up until he gets past the three-point line.

Sanchez a little lefty.

Ugh. And one for Aubbie. They are making the plays.

MW with a bad shot. Stef with a travel. We have opportunities.

We have had three chances on O down seven but have barely even gotten a shot.

THIRD TIMEOUT: 49-56

(I wrote a bunch of stuff here, but it got kind of mean and frankly profane and isn’t really fit for public consumption. Suffice to say we scored two points the rest of the way and went the last six minutes scoreless. We missed good shots and bad shots, made bad turnovers and were forced into a couple. Auburn made some big plays but also just let us collapse.)

FINAL SCORE 51-73

All in all that was the worst performance I have ever seen at home. There have been teams that played worse (specifically maybe when Georgia came in Stan’s first year and they were up by 30 early in the second half), but never a team that I thought was pretty decent and should win easily that just didn’t show.

Like I was saying in the beginning, systems are fragile things. They exist in delicate balance sometimes. The fabric of this team has clearly unraveled.

The good thing is that the solution is relatively simple. Courtney Fortson has to be the best and most in control player on the team, and the rest of the guys need to feed off it. The bad thing is that CF is a freshman, and I’m not sure he knows how to do this yet.

Until next time.

Arkansas-Mississippi State Running Diary

vector4dz — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 05:52:55 -0500

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...

Mississippi St. Running Diary

"And the shadow of the day, will embrace the world in gray."

—Linkin Park

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.

TIP-OFF

Well, we aren't going to jump on them real quick. Courtney misses a three, Stef misses a three. Washington battles but can't score inside. Sanchez tries to make a post move on his smaller defender but walks.

It is interesting to look at the matchups early on. State has four perimeter players and Varnado. All four of the outside guys have just a bit of size, or at least height. This means we have an offensive mismatch at the four (Sanchez), but he is our most unpolished offensive player, and I doubt we can take advantage.

On the other end they are bigger than us at all three outside spots, which means they can shoot over us. For instance, RC is guarding Barry Stewart, and I just don't see that going well.

Speak of the devil—Stewart buries a 3 over RC.

Uh-oh. Another three and a couple fast transitions, and we are down 10-2. WTF! We look a bit slow, but worse, we lack aggression. We should be running up their backs, not the other way around.

RC with a pretty little baseline J.

Washington with a smooth three. That is one way to pull Varnado away from the hoop. Wash can do that quite well.

But Courtney gets beat for a hoop and a foul by Bost.

FIRST TIMEOUT: 7-12 Miss. St.

Stat Girl is back at the scorer's table. She is wearing her cute little headset and a sleeveless black blouse and gray slacks. I wave, but she isn't looking at me. But my mom said I was handsome!

State has two guys with knee socks. Unfortunately they don't have the sweet Darrel Walker knee pads. I'd get behind that sort of thing.

Monk scores off a nifty dish from Stef.

RC with a great runner. He is looking for his tweener shot, which is good. State is covering him with a guy about 6'5", and unless we play someone (Henry) that can demand the opposing three cover him, then I think we will see this all year.

They are doubling Washington as soon as he touches it. It's coming from a couple different places, and he isn't reacting well. We should DESTROY a double team with Stef and RC hitting threes.

RC misses two good looks from three.

SECOND TIMEOUT: 11-14 Miss. St.

Stewart has seven I think. We will have to either switch Stef's and RC's assignments, sub, or come up with a new plan altogether.

Dang—another three from State. I hate to say it, but I kind of like their style—just fling that sucker up.

Stef gets off the schneid with a nice little drive and fade.

Varnado is a gifted shot blocker, but he is an odd-looking fellow. Looks a bit like a young, awkward bird. When resting he puts his hands high up on his hips but he rotates his hands so his thumbs are in front and his elbows stick straight out.

Sanchez scores a layup on a beautiful dish from CF. The guy next to me is bitching that Courtney didn't pass it to RC. Besides the fact that RC had a guy shading him and CF never had a sight line to him, WE GOT A BARELY CONTESTED LAYUP.

Henry is in. That changes all the matchups to our favor.

CF ties it up with a drive, and NOW we are going.

BANG I should shut up. Another three for State.

But Courtney scores again and feeds Wash for another, and we have a lead. Henry pretty steal.

THIRD TIMEOUT: 26-23 Hogs.

We should really push the pace now.

GEEZ. Another three from Stewart. That was against a zone.

Oh my we are cold—just globally frigid. Stef misses again—that is four or five good looks he has missed. Henry misses. Wash tries another three and misses. CF tries a jumper, but he is pausing before he goes up. He doesn't have a shooting rhythm.

Stef runs a bit of point. Good penetration and dish.

LAST TIMEOUT: 28-30 Miss. St.

Monk is getting better and better. I could make an argument for him getting more minutes than Sanchez.

The scoreboard doesn't seem to be keeping stats for the State players. Stat girl needs something like a Bat Phone so I can call her and update her on stuff like this. Sigh. I see a restraining order in my future.

Monk has six points.

The ushers are wearing snazzy red sweater vests instead of the old yellow USHER garb. It seems like they are undercover ushers. I'm not crazy about it. They look comfortable, but nobody is ever really comfortable in a Christmas sweater, are they?

HALFTIME: 32-34 Miss. St.

Could be a lot worse. I feel good. We HAVE to shoot better in the second half. If we turn up the defensive pressure and get transition shots, that problem will be solved.

I'm a bit concerned that they are backing way off of CF. He was shooting well enough for a while that people were crowding him, but he is hesitating, and I can't remember his last made three. He can close the distance on the defender but then he is covered instead of in the clear when he gets to the lane. The pick and roll becomes much less effective as well when the defender can casually go under the screen.

I think the stores must have had a run on women's red wool peacoats. The look of the day is a red coat, distressed jeans, and heels. Hmmmmmm. There seem to be a fair number of Cougars on the prowl in this outfit. Feel like a missed a memo.

Halftime entertainment is four kids from Chicago, the Bucket Boys. They play drums on upside down plastic buckets. This sounds stupid, but they are outrageously good. They get a standing O.

A couple of the Cougars sitting courtside are looking at these kids as if they might devour them. I'm predicting some action at the Holiday Inn bar tonight.

They did the "Fan Cam" again in the first half. At the same time they were throwing t-shirts into the crowd. One lady was apoplectic because she couldn't decide whether to push over a small child to grab a $6 t-shirt or preen for her possible moment of fame on the big scoreboard. I'm hoping to see someone actually climax or soil themselves on fan cam before the season is over.

Just a question I thought of because the Hogs didn't get to shoot free throws on the seventh team foul because it was offensive.

Aren't ALL fouls "player control" when you get right down to it? I think this nomenclature unfairly singles out some infractions as worse than others.

My date that is home sick just texted asking the score. When I answered she replied "S***! What the hell is wrong?" Have I mentioned that years ago she was a two-time all-state point guard on one of the best Arkansas Girls High School teams ever? Two Overall state titles and one loss in two years. Top 10 nationally in USA Today. She has a bit of a competitive streak this one does.

Her follow-up text is what melts my heart. "I can't get the stupid PS3 to work. Did you do something to it?" Worried about hoops and playing videogames in a Tussionex fueled fog. Ching-ching.

SECOND HALF

I'm thinking we draw Varnado to the perimeter with Wash and post Courtney up in a two-man game with RC. I guess I might watch too much NBA.

Sanchez draws a cheap charge. We have kind of gotten the breaks from the zebras tonight.

Ouch! Varnado just slapped a Sanchez shot into the third row. That's ok. We knew it was coming sooner or later. Good to get it out of the way.

RC with a nice runner.

Stef gives us a lead!

RC buries a three from the top with a nice shake move. The place is warming up now.

Stewart answers. Craptastic.

FIRST TIMEOUT: 41-40 Hogs

The band is running around. They wear red shirts tucked into these black plastic warm-up pants with elastic waistbands. I'm going to go ahead and say that this ensemble doesn't flatter the typical band member physique.

Big three by Bost and Welsh misses on the other end. All of a sudden we are down four. Stef misses wide-open rhythm three and Bost buries one on the other end. He's a good player.

Britt is in for RC and Welsh is covering Stewart now.

Bost scores again, and I think we could actually lose.

Stef scores and gets fouled but misses the toss.

RC with a nice steal and Wash scores. He is deep into another double-double.

SECOND TIMEOUT: 45-52 Miss. St.

We have to make some shots. That simple and that difficult.

I'm eating Butter Rum Life Savers that I picked up on a whim at the gas station. They are DELICIOUS. Butterscotch is such an underrated flavor. There is a party in my mouth, and everyone is invited.

Gracious—another three from State. Then Bost hits another after Henry made some tosses. It is a double-digit deficit (a lot of alliteration).

Every Arkansas player on the floor just missed makeable shots over two possessions. RC missed a BIG three off a Henry steal that could have cut it to six. Washington eventually finished. We are in deep trouble.

CF misses a pair and Stef misses an open three. Yikes!

LAST TIMEOUT: 53-64

At this point we do nothing. More misses until RC hits a meaningless three late.

This is a butt whipping. At HOME.

FINAL SCORE: 56-70 Miss St.

I would be inconsolable save the fact that I took a couple of muscle relaxers and I have another roll of Butter Rum Life Savers in my pocket.

It boils down to terrible shooting, but you have to find other ways to score—particularly at home. Usually you do that with pressure D and transition O. But we seemed reluctant to turn up the pace. State would have run with us.

I guess that disappoints me more than anything else—the fact that we lost without pushing it.

It was to be expected though. The team Thurman's freshman year beat Memphis, Mizzou, and Arizona pre-conference and then laid some eggs at home during conference. I will continue to cling blindly to the hope that this team is mirroring that one.

Until next time.

Sidestepping: Arkansas Basketball's Journey to the Tourney

vector4dz — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:45:30 -0400

"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 at a time like this? I got STUFF going on. Can't they see? It's MARCH for goodness sakes

This business of being worried about conference tournaments is weighing on my soul. It's pushing me down, making my trudge more of a crouch or even a slither. ARKANSAS should not have to worry about getting IN the dance. We should worry about how we DO in the dance. This situation I have found myself in for the past decade is unnatural and unnacceptable. I tell this to the patient in trauma 4

He is unimpressed and tells me that THIS is the Hogs level in the SEC. That the early '90s were a pipe dream. That I should just settle in and accept that we live in Wildcat country now. That THIS is in fact natural

I thank him for his insights and we go to discussing the good ole days in the SWC when we dominated teams featuring Terry Teagle, Ricky Pierce, Vinnie Johnson, Rudy Woods, Bubba Jennings, the legendary Otid Birdsong and even the not so legendary but still very good Dennis Nutt. We talked about the Houston teams with Drexler and Micheaux and Benny Anders and how Alvin Franklin really made that team go. We talked of Texas and Johnny Moore and Jim Krivacs and Ron Baxter and LaSalle Thompson and Abe Lemons going after Darrell Walker.

He asked me when I was going to drain his peri-rectal abscess and I told him that "I just can't right now. I'm too depressed about hoops."

For some reason this upset him and he called me several ugly names, but I told him that I don't think a 300 lb 50 year old pre-op tranny with male pattern baldness, double-d breast implants and green pus draining from his rear end has much room to talk. He agreed this might be so.

I asked if he wanted to watch the Vandy game in the lounge with me and he said sure, as long as I would give him some "Morphine - I mean for serious"

So I watched the game in the lounge with Melvin, my new friend. And as the game went on we started to become proud of our team, the way they dominated on the boards and scrapped for loose balls. The way they didn't let their shooting get them down and how guys like Welsh and Hunter made nice contributions. As the hogs started draining free throw after free throw to seal the victory a morphine crazed Melvin was standing on the lunch table screaming about being "King of the Coffee" and I was so pleased I almost didn't notice the stench of Melvin's weeping sore

"There was never a doubt, Melvin", I said. "We were never on the bubble. We are a tourney team for now and forever. Never a doubt!"

"For certain doc, for certain", said Melvin as he struggled to get his fat body off the table. "But this morphine is kinda wearing off. Where do you guys keep it."

Turtle Dreams: NCAA Tourney Revelry

vector4dz — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 03:16:10 -0400

"I dream I never know anyone at the party
but I'm always the host."

-Counting Crows "Mrs. Potter's Lullaby"

The fog is thick and damp and it is beading up on my windshield as I motor West on I-40. It is early in the morning and I’m on my way home from work. The mist caught me by surprise rolling off the river and into this valley. There is something weightless and timeless about being in a dense fog. Motion seems to cease and sound is distorted and muffled, as if I have taken a left turn into the pages of a bad English novel. There is blood on my pants and I'm pretty sure it isn't mine.

Up ahead there is the glimpse of taillights. Red and fading away from me like the backpedaling eyes of a playful demon they appear and disappear as if by magic. I start to chase them. I want to catch the lights, those eyes, before I get home. I begin to think my sanity depends on it.

“Can you hear me now?” I ask my brother. It is 5am in his part of the world and he is awake feeding an angry and embittered child. He calls me to share the experience.

“YES! I can hear you. Don't yell. You have to trust the Bluetooth headset or just not wear it. Is it that little crack pipe looking one they sell with your iPhone?”

“How do I sound? Is my voice crisp and authoritative? Is there any static on the line? Can you tell I’m already drunk? I need the sort of advanced technology that lets me remain inebriated throughout the day yet allows me to sound urbane and knowledgeable.”

“No static and NO you DON’T sound drunk. That is one sweet phone. It might even be worth the $500 you paid for it.”

“$600” I correct him. “I was an early adopter.”

“Hey, play some music. How does Miley Cyrus sound on that thing?” my brother asked. “I bet even SHE sounds good on that phone.”

“Nope. She still sucks. Even Apple can’t fix her.”

“When does she reach the age of consent anyway?”

“Dude! That is borderline inappropriate.”

“Hey we need to know these things. One day the Olsen twins were cute little girls looking at cue cards on tv with John Stamos, pushing him to acting heights he only dreamed of as “Blackie” on “General Hospital”, and before I knew it they were slutty lushes with eating disorders, boyfriends ODing in their apartments, a staggering array of sexually transmitted diseases and really large heads teetering atop frighteningly tiny bodies”, my brother gushed as he ducked cheerios being thrown at him by his own devil-spawn. “And the younger Spears sister – she didn’t even make it to 17 before she was knocked up, had a drinking problem and was generally considered the most “adult” member of her family. You have to get in early if you want a shot with these girls.”

I nodded my head silently. My brother often brings wisdom to the gray area between teen sex and pedophilia. “Should you be talking about this stuff in front of Fletch?” I asked. Fletch is the little creature that haunts my brother's house. He knows one word, "turtle", and uses it to describe everything from the dog to his own poop.

“He has to learn about skuzzy chicks sometime. He thinks the Olsens are skanks anyway.” There was a high pitched "TURTLE!" from Fletch in the background.

“He just turned one”, I argued.

“Yeah but he’s very advanced.” Lawson said. “Chicks dig him already. He RULES daycare. Friday he pushed off his diaper and peed on the rug. Everybody just stood and watched. It was a powerful moment for me as a parent.” He paused. “How’s your girlfriend, what’s-her-face?”

“As good as can be expected.” I answered. “I just bought her a new set of dentures and she LOVES them. She hardly ever goes without her teeth anymore. She has almost completely stopped going outside with no pants on. And we set up a neighborhood watch type thing in case she wanders off in a meth dementia again, just the usual girlfriend/boyfriend stuff.”

“What about the restraining order against her ex-husband?” Lawson asked. “Is it still valid now that he’s off parole?”

That’s my brother, always thinking about the little things. That’s why I love him so. “No worries,” I said. “He got picked up for felon in possession of a firearm. Unfortunate traffic stop.”

“Good times!” said my brother, smiling and clapping his hands like a trained monkey to amuse his son.

“Good times!” I agreed while I swerved because traffic seemed to be coming AT me from the fog.

“TURTLE!” said Fletch and dumped a bowl of milk on their sleeping dog’s head.

"So you're ready then?" asked my brother.

"Packed and booked" I told him. "Fletch should be excited. This is like his first one." Last year at this time he had just been expelled from my sister-in-law's uterus in a bloody gooey rush of funk, an event the whole family has watched enough times on videotape that none of us can look Lawson's wife in the eye anymore.

"Any trouble getting the time off from work?" he asked.

"Yeah. Nobody understands. But I gently explained that this is my religion and I need time to worship with my family."

My family "gathers" at this time every year. We climb on planes in Boston and Arkansas and Seattle and fly someplace. Any place really. As long as there are HD TVs and fast internet connections.

My sister and her husband will traipse cross country with my 3 little nieces, KiKi, Boo and Maddog. Flight attendants will cower and curse and consider expelling them from the flight.

Fletch will toddle onboard a jumbo jet at SeaTac with his sickeningly proud parents and impress everyone with his four-tooth smile and then projectile vomit somewhere over the Rockies.

My parents will change flights in Dallas and get lost in DFW even though they've been through there a hundred times. They will bicker and fight and give each other the silent treatment yet remain at each other's hip as they have for 45 years.

I will tell the hospital that I will be gone for two weeks, no matter what. I will leave the coughs and the fevers and the stab wounds behind. I will forget about the lame suicidal gestures and the strange shaped objects lodged in orifices that physics says shouldn't accommodate them.

We will come together in Colorado as we always do. Pale women with raccoon sunburns will be everywhere and they will all ignore me because I am old.

Online gambling accounts will be set up and illegally funded. (Did I say that?)

Then the basketball games will tip off and everything will be right with the world.

For two weeks every year we come together to watch the first four rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament (and maybe ski). We will follow the real life drama from the early Cinderellas to the big boys of the Elite Eight. It will be PERFECT even if the games are terrible.

"Tell Fletch that I'm looking forward to seeing him," I say to my brother.

"TURTLE!" I hear Fletch yell.

"I would," says Lawson, "but he just turtled on the floor."

Bubblicious: Anticipating the NCAA Tourney

vector4dz — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 21:40:16 -0400

"In all our quest of greatness, like wanton boys

whose pastime is their care, we follow after bubbles,

blown in the air. "

-John Webster-

It was 75 degrees today. Trees were still leave-less and bare, flaunting their winter nudity, but it was 75 degrees just the same.

The clean sun burned holes in the coldest season, burrowing tunnels of warmth to welcome in SPRING.

College-aged kids are playing Frisbee football on a campus near my house. Their legs are shockingly white from the winter hibernation and their shorts are a bit snug due to the seasonal layer of fat.

The sun is trying to awaken ALL of this. It is quite a burden.

An adorable co-ed has her hair pulled back in a sloppy ponytail as she runs with a slightly clumsy gait and her leaden (and strangely HUGE) feet, wrapped with black cross-trainers, make a CLOP! with each step.

She stumbles and sort of tackles a gawky tall fellow with a bushy reddish Afro, like Will Ferrell wore as "Jackie Moon."

Somebody's little brother—who looks like he might be "kinda touched" or perhaps the product of cousins getting too familiar—hangs upside down in a nearby tree, swinging in a steady rhythm with his knees locked around a thick branch.

His movements and expressions bring to mind a three-toed sloth, and I think of a Wild Kingdom episode in which a lion chased a sloth in a pathetic race up a tree.

I always thought of that lion as a sad schoolyard bully. I wonder if this kid is little more than a tasty morsel for the Big Cats of this world.

The male students are playing without shirts, except for the chubby guy that looks like the kid in Superbad. He appears to be taking a stand regarding the public unveiling of his man-breasts.

They all seem disgustingly pleased with their youth and this makes me despise them just a little. A group of three scrawny guys stand at the periphery, laughing at nothing. Every kid out there has a tattoo of some sort. Every single one.

The girl who tackled "Jackie Moon" is pretending she didn't mean to and the guy is soaking up the attention as everyone else gets sick of their flirting.

People standing still in the shade get suddenly cold, bolting for the superficial warmth of the sunlight.

I am recollecting a lifetime of "first days of spring" and getting depressed and just a bit wistful. My brother sends me a series of texts from Seattle and they say:

"I think the homeless dudes outside my office are trippin'.

"They have a huge bubble maker and they are running around popping bubbles with their grimy fingers.

"They're eating ice cream with little plastic spoons and it's dripping all over their facial hair. It's SPRING baby.

"You know it's spring when the bums start eating dairy products."

I text my brother back. "It's spring here too. Semi-attractive people are running around partially clothed and retarded kids are swinging in the trees."

"Sweet," my brother answers. "You know what this means."

I smile to myself and and watch a stocky fellow dive, just missing a spectacular catch. He gashes his elbow on a rock and it bleeds a surprising amount, dripping onto his socks as he stands up.

The stocky guy just stares at his elbow as it oozes, as if he is shocked that his body contains this strange liquid.

All of the kids stop at the same time and stare. The strange kid in the tree even stops swinging. The whole scene becomes a frozen tableau—a perfect silent moment held a couple of extra beats.

"Spring means hoops," I text to my brother. "Morning, noon, and night. It means HOOPS baby."

A Shoe Story

vector4dz — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 13:23:45 -0500

"If dreams are like movies, then memories are films about those."
The Counting Crows (Mrs. Potter's Lullaby)

Somewhere in my mind I hear the squeak of my basketball shoes on the gym floor. That is the strongest memory I have of my pathetic little athletic career. I love that sound. I'm not so sure I loved it back then, but I desperately love it now.

During practice we would spit on the floor, then rub the treads of our shoes in the saliva to get the perfect bite from our hightops. We did this all practice long, hundreds of times a day. It was like some sort of giant microbial cesspool, a TB experiment gone horribly wrong.

When we got too dry, we would dribble water from our mouths at the water fountain to make a good puddle on the ground, then squeak our way through that. Truly excellent traction!

For games, we somehow found our manners, and would lick our fingers and wipe the bottoms of our shoes. I don't see professional players do this. Do they maybe have somebody who licks their shoes for them? I would probably do it if I could be in Sam Cassell's posse. Maybe their shoes are just a little bit better than mine. That would figure.

Nothing was better than the feel of a clean basketball floor and a leather ball perfectly inflated. The gym empty and only partially lit, with the bleachers pushed back into the walls. The extra goals would be hanging down screaming, "We Play BASKETBALL Here!". Every dribble would bounce perfectly and echo forever.

I own Danny Fortson's shoe. There, I said it. His right shoe, game-worn. I know this, because it came with a piece of paper that tells me so. I don't think he got to play much in that game, because the shoe looks pretty fresh. It is a big shoe and it is signed, but it is not superhuman big—maybe a 15 or 16. It is the centerpiece of my living room. This shoe sits in a glass case between my two tvs.

You do know who Danny Fortson is, don't you? I hope so. Nobody else seems to. They all just think I'm weird for having it.

Memories are strange. I remember the squeaks on the floor and the ballgames and everything was happy. I rarely think about how much I dreaded practice every day. How these men that were supposed to be teaching me about sport and life instead just taught me that if I wanted to play the game I loved, first I had to survive. I HATED almost all of my coaches. They took the fun out of basketball, which I thought was impossible. At the time I thought the things they did to us bordered on abuse. Approached the line of cruelty.

I'm not entirely sure anymore. But maybe I am.

When my brother was in ninth grade, one of the coaches lined up four of the kids (including my brother) and began swatting them with a big paddle as part of a "Kangaroo Court". It was supposed to be funny.

The next day my brother and one other kid could barely walk because the backs of their legs were swollen with hematomas and their skin was split. Everybody still thought it was kind of funny. My mom didn't.

In front of the whole class, she laid hands on that coach and asked if he wanted her to swat him. He just stood there, always a weakling and a coward when not intimidating children.

Fortson's shoe was a gift from my brother. Sports are important between us. Basketball says things that words cannot. Nobody understands why he bought me Danny Fortson's shoe, even after I explain it to them. I explain it to women as a sort of test, to see if they "get it." They don't. Kind of like when I was in my twenties and I would have women read "Fisher's Hornpipe" and see if they laughed at the right places. They never did.

See, the thing is that it doesn't have to be Danny Fortson's shoe. It could be almost anybody's shoe. As long as they aren't a superstar or my favorite player or something like that. It needs to be the shoe of somebody who is kind of anonymous now, almost a nobody. But at some point, at some level, they were a star. They meant something in the sports conversation if you were paying attention. They remind us of a specific time and place because they never went anywhere else. Danny Fortson was a BEAST at Cincinnati. He's an undersized, overpaid hothead now. These things are important in my world. If someone understands who Danny Fortson is, then I know they are in my tribe. Do you see?

The shoe could be Ledell Eackles' (which would be way cool!), or Jerald Honeycutt's. It could be Chris Washburn's or maybe Derrick Chievous' or the crown jewel, Fennis Denbo's. It just has to take you to a place that few can go. Do you see?

In Arkansas lore, it would be Lawson Pilgrim's or David Scott's or Trey Trumbo's. Maybe James Crockett's or Ray Biggers'. Do you see?

I love the echo of a dribbled basketball. It is the sound of footsteps in Valhalla. When I close my eyes to sleep I see a crowded gym. Two dozen balls are bouncing at random. I try to synchronize their beat until it is a syncopated rhythm. Do you remember that? When it would happen ever so briefly? All the balls being dribbled in unison. Maybe one just slightly off so the sound was like that of heart valves closing—perfect, but not simultaneous.

And then the rhythm breaks down and it all becomes random again, and I wonder if I imagined it to begin with. In some ways that is basketball to me. Or maybe that is life to me. I get confused sometimes.

Danny Fortson's shoe is a bridge to things, a bridge to basketball, to my brother, to humility, to the tribe of sport. Sports are a bridge as well. Not a wall, not a moat, they are no kind of barrier.

Does this mean I'm looking for a Cinderella to fit into Danny Fortson's shoe?

Bottle Cap Thieves: An Arkansas Basketball Story

vector4dz — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 19:20:27 -0500

"In ancient times cats were worshiped as gods;
they have not forgotten this."
-Terry Pratchett-

Years ago, I had two cats. I don't have them anymore. They went away one at a time.

Cats are like that sometimes. They don't do something so dramatic as die. Things such as that are beneath them. They just go away and leave their legacy open ended.

I got them as kittens when I started med school in '91. We lived together in a tiny apartment in Little Rock. They never went outside because there was too much traffic in the neighborhood. As far as they knew the whole world was air conditioned.

They were brothers (litter mates) and best friends. They were my companions during med school. Hanging around my Big Chair as I studied. Purring in my lap as I napped. Shredding my curtains for no apparent reason, pooping and urinating in various corners in clear violation of the "Litter Box Doctrine".

Standing at the door whenever I got home, pretending to greet me but actually making a break for the outdoors and FREEDOM! Scrambling in fear from my squirt gun. Knocking things off my tables because it was always important to take off from a sitting position really, really fast. Shedding hair 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Coughing up strange things from the depths of their intestines.

Scaring me as they jumped on top of my shower to watch with amazement as I covered myself with the water they themselves so feared. Making me feel kinda weird because they were seeing me naked. Possibly engaging between themselves in the love that dare not speak its name. Staring at me with that singular look of big-eyed cat disdain every time I tried to explain that they needed to "Get Down". And stealing my bottle caps.

That's right, stealing my bottle caps.

I used to drink quite a bit. I don't drink at all anymore but that is another story. Back in those days I liked to sit in my really big chair and sip beer and smoke cigarettes and study and watch basketball. It was all very sophisticated. And since it was sophisticated I drank imported beer and I drank it from bottles. That's just how I rolled. (I think if I met my 1993 self today I probably wouldn't like him very much but that is also another story. I think he would also wear much smaller pants than I do.)

When I twisted or popped the caps off of these bottles of beer I would just drop them next to my Big Chair, with the idea that I would pick them up later. But I never had to pick them up. They just disappeared. I didn't question this. I didn't think it was magic or anything like that. I just thought they were falling into whatever vortex or wormhole ate my socks and remote controls. This made sense to me at the time.

So my cats and I watched the '92-'93 Razorback Basketball season together. This was the season prior to the National Title team and it remains my favorite Arkansas sports team of all time. It was Che and Goo's favorite basketball team as well, though they both preferred tennis due to the rhythmic ball movement. Che and Goo were the cats' names. Actually their full names were Che Guevara and Augusto Sandino. Che and Goo for short.

You might ask why I named my cats after dead Latin American communist revolutionaries. You could just as easily ask why I had a ponytail, an earring and wore flannel all the time. Some questions have no adequate answers.

The team that season was everything that a Nolan Richardson team could be. They were smothering on defense and streaky on offense, unbeatable one night and horrible the next. They had a budding superstar in Corliss but the rest of the team was a weird amalgamation of juco talent and lightly recruited "finds".

People always talked about Nolan having the best "athletes". I always thought this was a way of belittling the accomplishments of his teams because they were rarely "athletic" in the true sense of the word.

Scotty was too slow, as was Corey Beck. Clint McDaniel could barely dunk. I'm not sure I EVER saw Dwight Stewart get over the rim. Roger Crawford was a pretty good athlete but barely average for the SEC. Darrell Hawkins was a great leaper out of high school but injuries slowed him down before he ever got any real playing time. Robert Shepard was extraordinarily quick with his hands. Warren Linn and Davor Rimac were two of the best athletes on the team in terms of quickness and jumping but nobody ever wanted to notice because they were white.

The simple fact of the matter was that the players on those teams excelled because they played harder with a better plan than anybody else.

That team beat Penny Hardaway's Memphis team at home. They beat Missouri and Arizona on the road. After a mid-season swoon they upset Kentucky in Bud Walton and Darrell Hawkins jumped on the press table and pumped his fist at the crowd.

At its best that team was like crazed dogs. They would have 10 to 15 steals a game. Robert Shephard, Clint McDaniel and Corey Beck TERRORIZED opposing guards to the point that they would throw the ball up for grabs because they didn't want it any more.. Shephard in particular went wild that year. He had a couple of games that he simply took over defensively. It was beautiful to watch. His arms were so long it looked like he could tie his shoes without bending over. And his hands were so quick and strong the guys he was guarding would look violated after games.

Che and Goo would listen to me scream and yell all season long. Sometimes they would scramble away in fear because of my outbursts but more often they would just look at me with feline disgust and the go back to licking each other. That was our system.

When the Hogs went to the NCAA tournament they blew out Holy Cross in the first round. In the second round they played St. Johns and actually played bad most of the game but made a little run to take about a 6 or 8 point lead with about a minute and a half left and St. Johns just quit because they were tired of getting beat on. They didn't foul or anything. They just quit. It was one of the most extraordinary things I have seen in college basketball.

And so this completely revamped team of odds and ends and a somewhat injured freshman all-american (Corliss) made it to the Sweet Sixteen to play the #1 team in the country, North Carolina. That was the team that beat Michigan and the Fab Five in the final game when Webber called the famous timeout they didn't have. UNC had Eric Montross, Derrick Phelps, Brian Reese, George Lynch, Donald Williams and a few more. They were stacked but had actually been an underachieving group so far in their college careers.

The night of that game was one of those nights that just seems to stand out in my life. It had sharp edges. Beginnings and endings.

We finished a series of tests that day so I had absolutely no studying to do over the weekend. I tried to convince the woman I was in love with to stay in town for the weekend and watch the game with me but she decided to go home and try to convince the man she was in love with to leave his wife. I decided I wasn't drinking nearly enough.

I went to a sports bar with a friend who graduated from Vanderbilt. Vandy had a fantastic team that year with Billy McCaffery and had won the SEC. They were in the Sweet 16 as well. By the time the Hogs tipped off I was urging my buddy to sing a Phil Collins song on Kareoke, I was hitting on an extremely questionable looking and dentally challenged waitress, and Vandy had been upset. I held out little hope for my beloved Pigs.

I was wrong. They came out on fire. Shephard buried deep shots. Phelps couldn't handle the pressure. UNC couldn't get into their sets and thus couldn't pound us inside. We were up double digits before I knew what was happening. The whole bar was standing and screaming with every possession. We were also just waiting for UNC to wear the Hogs down.

Eventually they did. Early in the second half Carolina evened things up and I was sure the Hogs were doomed. But they bounced right back into the lead and went punch for punch with the best team in the country. Right down to the last possession when Carolina pulled out to a three point lead and Arkansas got the ball back with a chance to tie. Shephard panicked for what seemed like the first time all year and got caught in the air and traveled. Ball Game.

It was a weird feeling after that game (besides the nausea and drunkenness). I had rarely if ever been that sure before a game that the Hogs would lose so I wasn't crushed. And I'm not sure if I have ever been as proud to be a fan of a team as I was to be a fan of that group of players. At the same time they were done. They had lost. And I was alone.

A friend dropped me off at my apartment and I went in through the back door. I went in this way quite a bit as it was closest to the street. It was actually a patio and then a sliding glass door into the apartment. On this night the door was WIDE open. It was so unusual that at first it didn't quite register. But soon enough it did. I'd been robbed.

My TV was gone, my computer was gone, my stereo was gone, all my CDs were gone. Even worse Che and Goo were gone. I spent an hour looking for them and after the cops left I spent the rest of the night walking around the neighborhood calling their names and whistling (as if they had ever come when I called). I never found them. It was that kind of sharp edged day. One where your favorite team loses, your girl chooses someone else, and your pets run away. It makes an impression.

The next day I was digging through the closet where I kept their litter box, looking for an old stereo I had stashed away. I needed something to pierce the silence. In the far corner, under a cardboard box, were hundreds and hundreds of bottlecaps, horded like nuts in a tree.

Until I graduated and moved out I would randomly find bottle caps in that apartment. They would show up under the bed or in the kitchen or near the couch. Maybe it was magic or a vortex but every time I found one I thought of those cats and those Hogs.

LSU-Arkansas: A Purple Hazy Recap

vector4dz — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 17:21:56 -0500

I'm driving up I-540 to Fayetteville. I just tried to spit a bitter hocker out the window and the cold rushing wind blew it back on my jacket. My body aches with residual flu. The February Arkansas air has a bite and the world has that hazy blue look it gets before we have a winter storm.

Skeleton trees cover the rolling Ozark hills and the occasional black smoke plume rises from prehistoric shacks that dot the valleys and mesas. Rusting Ford Escorts and partially disassembled Pacers ornament the distant yards. Cars seem to have abnormally bright and streaky paint jobs as they zoom past me.

Tom Waits is on my stereo growling about a "Downtown Train". The SUV in front of me is flying a Razorback flag and has a license plate that says "TRIPPIN". It is a college basketball game day. Maybe I shouldn't have had that second bottle of Nyquil.

LSU is in town and it's a must-win game, but aren't they all when you seem to be a team that has spent the last three years on the proverbial "bubble"?

They fired the annoying John Brady who always looked like he had a chaw in his cheek and a painful prostate infection. We will miss him as a villain and we will miss his smokin' hot wife as an object of juvenile leers and the occasional drool.

His replacement is long time assistant Butch Pierre who has, along with a FANTASTIC Louisiana name, a truly weird hairline that calls to mind the actor Bill Duke (who hunted the "Predator" along with Arnold Schwarzenegger). Butch frightens me just a tad and in my current state he looks a bit like he belongs in a comic book with a black mask and maybe a lightning bolt across his chest worrying about a girlfriend named Tanya Tiger.

As I make my way from the parking lot to the stadium I pause to watch thick bottomed women play lacrosse in the cold. Geez I miss college.

Bud Walton Arena is about three quarters full for the game. People are shedding coats and their heads seem to bob just a little. The players are finishing warm-ups and their uniforms and the basketballs seem to be leaving tracers behind them, like shadow images that my brain can't process at the proper speed. Jump shots leave a visible arc so I can study their path.

The Hogs are going to win this one going away. I can feel it.

Michael Sanchez is launching dubious threes and grinning broadly. Vincent Hunter laughs and hugs him as he WHOOPS a cheer for Steven Hill's senior video. Sonny Weems and Ervin are tossing up half court shots. The whole team seems strangely happy and loose. Yup, this one's gonna be a blowout.

Coach Pelphrey's comb-forward is looking just a bit strained tonight. There are whispers in my area that our fearless leader will soon have a major decision to make regarding his "look".

The game is slow and lacks rhythm for the first six minutes. Randolph and Johnson are fantastic looking players for LSU but they are both painfully thin and weak. The Tiger's guards are competent but just don't bring anything to the table. Amazingly John Brady never understood the importance of solid guards in the college game.

Gary Ervin got the start tonight for the first time since very early in the year. He is hustling and playing tough defense. Steven Hill is altering almost every shot in the paint.

The air in the arena seems dark and miasmic to my senses. Diseased respiratory droplets hang in the ether as the sluggish crowd coughs and sputters with the team. A dark haired goddess in a belted sweater/skirt with black stockings and a red scarf makes her way down the bleachers and belatedly finds her seat not far from me. She crosses her legs and I can't take my eyes off her shiny black ankle boots. My medication soaked brain wants to snuggle with what I imagine are her brightly painted toes. She digs in her GIANT purse for her phone and immediately starts texting.

There is a deadness to the crowd tonight and it seems at first that this will carry over to the players. The score is tied at 14 with six-plus minutes gone when the Hogs explode. Beverly hits a layup after a fantastic steal, Welsh hits, Weems continues his stellar play, Vincent Hunter buries a couple from deep, Welsh hits another, and even Gary Ervin gets in on the act with a three.

There are a couple of things going on here. The Hogs are just hot and the LSU defense is atrocious. These shots are uncontested. Arkansas's defense is good but LSU's ball handling is god awful and their shot selection isn't much better. After four minutes and a 21-0 run the Hogs lead 35-14 and the ballgame is over.

The rest of the half (and game) are passed mostly with watching the blond girls in paint and sports bras try to discover an elusive rhythm, seeing if anyone will dare talk to a grumpy looking Ken Hatfield, trying to figure out what happened to my favorite stat girl's complexion, and wondering why the quite good pom pom squad decided to do their halftime dance in those high waisted dresses that Lauren from "The Hills" wears.

As time leaks away and the crowd staggers home after an 87-61 Hog win, the Razorback mascot is suddenly at my side and I think I might SCREAM and soil myself in fear and confusion. He is talking to the people next to me in a very human voice and I am more than a little disconcerted.

I decide to scurry away before more weird stuff starts to happen. Besides, I need some more Nyquil.

Back Beat

vector4dz — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 20:54:29 -0500

“Show me how you do that trick, the one that makes me scream, she said. The one that makes me laugh, she said. And threw her arms around my neck. Show me how you do it and I promise you, I promise to run away with you.”

The Cure “Just Like Heaven”

I got dumped for a drummer. This is worse, I think, than getting dumped for a lead singer or a guitarist. Probably not as bad as getting dumped for a bass player but I've never heard of anyone getting dumped for a bass player. I'm concerned this is a reflection on how far I have fallen in this world but she tells me it is something else, something deeper. She says he understands the back beat, the underlying rhythm of things. She says that he "gets it".

I remind her that unlike the drummer I have a J-O-B. I ask if her musician friend “gets that”. This doesn't seem to impress her.

She lives in Seattle, this woman who dumped me. The skies are soft here. They drizzle and darken and cloud and sometimes even rain but rarely get up the energy for a full blown storm. It is more like a great, furry deity is constantly toweling off just over your head, shaking himself free of the last clinging droplets of moisture. I think the softness of the weather, or perhaps being constantly dripped on, has clouded her judgment.

She takes me for a walk downtown to give me the news. People everywhere are walking their dogs, wrapping themselves tighter in their coats and showing the dominance of pedestrians by lingering in crosswalks a half-beat too long. Crowds are not smiling but they look good. They look satisfied. The whole population of this city seems ALMOST beautiful.

A ferry horn blows in the distance and I look towards the Sound and study the heavy chop of the water. Float planes buzz in circles then line up for landings on the lake in the distance. They skip across the water like well thrown stones.

The crack-heads have an unusual pep to their walk today. They aren't shuffling so much as skipping, as if to an internal dance groove ripped from one of those maddening children's TV programs. Perhaps the underlying quality of rock cocaine has improved. That would be nice for the junkies. Small favors and all.

This woman, the lady that is dumping me for a drummer, isn't really all that. Her black hair is loose and flapping in the wind, free strands get caught in her mouth and she picks them out and tries to tuck them away. Her skin is pale but slightly chapped and reddened from the cold and the rainy season. She looks at me when she talks but her eyes are elsewhere, looking to the future and a time when I won't be there, when she can close her eyes and listen to the drums. The rumbling beat of simple things pulses within her heart and her muscles, freeing her brain from the weight of indecision.

I'm wondering if I will get a pity poke goodbye.

Maybe this is what she means when she says that I don't “get it”. It is hard for me to say since I'm not listening very well. I'm kind of obsessed with her dark stockings and sensible shoes right now. I like the way her fleece coat insulates her slightly chubby and mildly tattooed body.

She is still talking, I think.

She talks with her hands. They flail about as she is trying to make some point or another. I am sure she is explaining exactly what is wrong with me and on the outside chance she actually knows I should probably be paying attention, but I cannot. She smells of salt air and coffee breath and I can't stop looking at her teeth and wondering if she flosses enough, wondering what the drummer's dental hygiene is like and how it compares to mine.

I hear words like “connection” and “spirituality” and think maybe someone must have the volume on their television turned up WAY too high as they watch Oprah or Dr. Phil but then I realize it is still just her. Talking.

For a moment I tune in to her voice but I am pulled away by the scene of two power lesbians chatting while their dogs take tremendous dumps on a small bush. For some reason the sight of this brings me joy. I'm not sure if it's the way the lesbians are leaning on each other or the boldness of the public defecation but something is resonating with my soul. A curtain begins to lift from my heart. I can't remember why it was that I started dating this woman to begin with.

She is still talking. Something about writing a new chapter in her life. I tell her I think I need to go. She looks at me with her heavy, dark eyes and a mixture of scorn and pity and I'm thinking I might just get that poke.

“U-dub (Univ. of Washington) has a game in two hours and I have tickets,” I say. “Mid-court row 7.” I look at her a moment and wait for a response that doesn't come. “I need to take off now.”

“Who are they playing?” she asks, chewing the fingernail on her left thumb.

“Nobody” I say, “Oregon State.” I shrug, and start to walk away.

She grabs my shoulder and stops me. “I saw them play Oregon” she says. “They suck but they have this ball hog of a point guard that is fun to watch.

So we begin to walk together, discussing the bad things Spencer Hawes did to the program and wondering whether Durant can save the Sonics. I remember why it is I like this woman.

She pulls out her cell and calls the drummer. Tells him she will be late tonight. She is going to a basketball game.