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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 5, 2018)
1C THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, JANUARY 5, 2018 CONTACT US Erick Bengel | Features Editor ebengel@dailyastorian.com WEEKEND BREAK FOLLOW US facebook.com/ DailyAstorian FRIENDS IN COURT In small towns, basketball has its own gravity I myself never played (too nearsighted to see the basket, too vain to wear my glasses back then). Yet in little towns, basketball has its own gravity. For a couple of games a week, the gym is the place to be. I was in the pep band, and then the boys team manager so I could still be a part of it. I’ve never thought of myself as a fan of basketball. I’ve never watched a full game on TV. Yet there is something different about watching the game in person. I moved to Naselle during the Lyle Pat- terson era, a time when the little town was known on the far side of the state for consis- tently great basketball. Patterson was hired as a football coach and math teacher at first, then took over basketball duties when the position opened up. Over the next 32 years he took little Naselle to the state so many times that they planned the school calendar around state tournaments. His 623-228 record is the fourth best of all time in the state of Washington and includes a mountain of district and league titles as well as five appearances in the championship game. After Naselle he helped Knappa win back-to-back champi- onships in Oregon. What’s fascinating about Patterson’s success is that, in such a small school, you have to make due with the kids you have from year to year. Short kids, tall kids, fast kids and slow kids; to consistently come up with 30 years of winning from such uncer- tain talent speaks volumes. By ED HUNT For The Daily Astorian I t is dark and raining sideways, yet there is warmth and life inside the gym. Honey-colored wood glows and shines under the lights high above. Neigh- bors align themselves on long wooden benches close enough to visit and catch up, but most eyes are on the floor where boys and girls run about in summer shorts and high-top shoes on cold winter nights. Basketball knits little towns together. Invented during a snowy Massachusetts December in 1891, Dr. James Naismith’s game was a way to keep restless athletes conditioned during the winter months. His superiors at the YMCA International Train- ing School requested a game that was not too rough, would keep track and field ath- letes in shape without getting injured and could be played within a standard-size gym. The gymnasium came first, believe it or not. It’s hard to imagine a high school gym without basketball hoops, but I’ve been in some of those old gyms where the out-of- bounds line was just inches from the wall, built in the days before fast breaks and diving saves were likely to take a player careening out of bounds. Originally, things were a little different. There was no dribbling, only passing. The first game was nine players on each side. Yet even the first public game reportedly drew a few hundred people to watch. Spread by the promotion of the YMCA, the game took root in the still largely agri- cultural U.S. It spread to high schools out- side of cities and found a special place in the hearts of little towns all over the Pacific Northwest. It required only five players, so small- town schools could easily field a team. The equipment needs were not great: orig- inally two peach baskets and a soccer ball, replaced in 1906 with metal hoops and nets and a “Spalding ball.” At a time when the railroad was the fastest way across the country, basketball spread to every tiny town with a gymna- sium — and towns built gyms so they could play it. Girls basketball developed not long after that first YMCA game, the “gen- tle” wintertime sport being well-suited to Northwest farm girls. As Rachel Bachman wrote for the Ore- gonian in 2010, when Naismith was still alive and coaching in the 1920 and 1930s, Oregon girls high school basketball had become so popular that some schools had two teams. In towns with just a few doz- ens students in the whole school, two-thirds might play the sport. As Louise Leininger, who played for Mosier High near Hood River in the mid- 1930s told Bachman, basketball was a nat- ural for the resilient girls of rural Oregon. “We were farm girls,” Leininger said. “We were hoisting boxes with fruit in it and things like that.” A backlash against the “unladylike” sport grew in the cities after World War I, but girls basketball hung on longer in rural areas. The traveling basketball teams, and the fans that followed, provided a vital social outlet in the 1930s. A ‘sport for the lonely’ Damian Mulinix photos The Naselle Comets celebrated after a win in overtime. The Naselle bench and fans reacted as time expired on the Comets’ 2016 season. The gym is the place to be When I was growing up in a small town surrounded by other small towns, we had to combine with the neighboring high school just to get enough players for a football team. Yet when basketball season came, each tiny school could find enough boys and girls to put on the court. Rivalries grew up over generations with the next town over. Often, schools like Wishram or Klicki- tat might only come up with five players, so if someone fouled out, they had to play one short. I recall one game in Wishram’s tiny railroad town gym where they played the whole fourth quarter with three against our five, and nearly won. Yet rural towns, where winters are dark and inhospitable, were fertile ground for basketball to take hold and rich soil to cul- tivate new players year after year. Every kid probably had a hoop up in the hay barn where they could practice their shots and imagine high school glory. Basketball stars could be discovered in lower grades, their talent followed by a community. Basketball so easily became the thing with the ability to draw neighbors out from their homes to sit side by side on uncomfortable benches amid the staccato and the shouts, the squeaks of sneakers and the cheers and groans of the crowd. The journalist David Halberstam wrote all this much better years ago. Examin- ing Indiana’s fascination with the sport in a 1985 article for Esquire Magazine, he observed: “(S)mall towns, villages often, neither grew nor died; they just stayed there sus- pended between life and death. In an atmo- sphere like that, where so little meant so much, there was only one thing that male and (often female) children did, and they did it every day and every night, and that was play basketball. It was a sport for the lonely — a kid did not need five or six friends, he did not even need one. There was nothing else to do, and because this was Indiana, there was nothing else anyone even wanted to do.” Yet if the culture of small-town basket- ball developed because of its accessibility, it became a part of the small-town com- munity because adults “needed to see it, needed to get into a car and drive to another place to hear other voices” — rituals essen- tial to fending off the loneliness of long, hard winters. “There were few ways for ordinary peo- ple to meet one another … Guests and visi- tors were rare. There was church, and there was basketball, gyms filled with hundreds, indeed thousands of people, all excited, all passionate. In a dark and lonely winter, the gym was a warm, noisy, and well-lit place.” The echoing wooden box Now I sit in the Lyle Patterson gym and watch my 13-year-old daughter who has come to love this sport. I sit with my A Naselle Comet got a hug from his mom in the stands as other fans affectionately looked on. See BASKETBALL, Page 2C