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 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."