March Madness

I grew up with two sports - basketball and baseball/softball.  In the winter the focus was basketball and we often attended the home games of Western Christian High School.  My mom played basketball there when she attended in the 1940s!  Tuesday nights and Friday nights we would watch whichever team was at home, either the girls or the boys, Junior Varsity and Varsity.  When I was younger, the excitement was that I got a quarter to spend on treats.  It was enough for a 15 cent pop and either a 10 cent candy bar or bag of popcorn. You couldn't take the food into the gym so I usually didn't go for the popcorn.

I remember way back when I was really young, that the pop came in a big rectangular cooler and the bottles were lined up in metal tracks - almost like a maze.  When you picked your flavor the person selling the drinks had to move it through the track and then pop the lid on a little mechanism on the side of the cooler. The bottles were wet and cold.  Grape Nehi.  Yum.

As I got older, the drinks changed to fountain drinks in wax coated paper cups and the Nehi brand was lost to the Coke brand.  When I started high school, I joined the Pep Club and had to take my turn working in the stand selling all the goodies. The prices went up too.

The games were fun.  My friends and I gossiped and flirted with the boys in the stand and watched the numbers on the scoreboard to know what was going on.  We cheered with the cheerleaders and kept track of fouls.   The finer points of man to man defence verses zone defence were pretty much lost on me.

Its not that my dad didn't try to make me an athlete. He made sure I got to the Saturday afternoon practices when I was in seventh and eighth grade. We also watched the Big 10 conference games later on Saturday afternoons.  The Hawk-eyes against the Wisconsin Badgers or the Michigan Wolverines. Those were fun afternoons but also included a lot of instruction in again the skills of offence and defence.  With my lack of height and lack of eye-hand coordination, my dad's hope of a basketball player were never realized in me but I have come to appreciate a well played game of basketball.

Hank is a March Madness fan.  The games were on for most of the weekend and I watched a few minutes here and there.  But Saturday evening he discovered Iowa State was playing (oops, I forgot). There were only a few minutes left and Iowa managed to come from behind and win in the last seconds.  Like a true Iowan, I cheered for my state, even though it was the Cyclones and not the Hawk-eyes. It was fun and brought back a flood of memories of the good things basketball brought to my childhood.

Tomorrow, I'll write about balls and bats and gloves will come off!