i love morris: What exhilaration with Iowa women!

Tuesday, April 2, 2024

What exhilaration with Iowa women!

What a wonderful morning in early April as we know spring is surely arriving. Irony: After a winter in which the biking/walking trail was 100 percent open - and I mean 100 percent - yesterday it was closed off in places by snow accumulation! But of course that won't last long.

Pretty soon we'll rejoice in seeing all the dog walkers making their rounds. Is there a bigger source of joy?

Well I might cite just one bigger source of joy: We awaken this morning with the satisfaction of knowing Iowa women's basketball won last night. That calls for a real high-five! Really I was somewhat skeptical last night as game-time approached. I thought Angel Reese and her LSU mates might well prevail. And I'd say "congrats" if they had. A talented group to be sure.

Something about Iowa has sort of galvanized many of us though. The particular talent of this Caitlin Clark would seem to be the wellspring. Such uncanny skill with putting up the long-range shot. Highlight reel material for the ages.

Iowa beat LSU 94-87.

Now I'll venture into some thoughts that I feel are appropriate from someone like me, a 69-year-old male. We have more thoughts about masculine and feminine than the younger folks do. Also, more thoughts about how to subjectively react to a female. I fully realize what the new standards are. And, nothing really wrong with this, as I suppose it has always been rather improper to judge women by standards of the old "Dean Martin Variety Hour" on TV.

We might expect top female athletes to be rather non-feminine. This would be according to the old template. This template was very real and we should not deny it. We might expect top female athletes to be musclebound and with very short hair and a husky voice. You think I'm a rare case of someone thinking like this? Oh I'm not. It's just that I'm not writing for a newspaper or any commercial entity now. So I'll share thoughts that are just floating in my head.

I remember during the 1980s, being en route to an out-of-town Morris High School athletic event. I was in a party of 4-5 people as I recall. One of them was a very highly regarded MHS coach of the time. He has had stuff named for him. At the time, Hancock girls basketball was on the rise. Morris to be frank was totally dormant - that's just a fact. Dormant and with not a ray of hope for the foreseeable future.

Odd: we had administration that most surely supported equal rights for girls. The countervailing philosophy here was that while equal rights was totally the thing, higher competitive standards in terms of striving for wins with an aggressive program was anathema. This attitude finally got shot down in our school system after several trying years. It came to a head in the late 1980s. And things did not turn around overnight - it never happens this way.

Anyway, we're en route to Montevideo for a football game when the coach of whom I speak decided he did not want to be charitable about the Hancock girls. So he said they were "ugly." I turned to face him as if to subtly suggest anything but approbation. I remember he didn't make eye contact, then he elaborated on his original thought to describe the Hancock girls as "Amazons." So did that explain their athletic prowess? That they gave the impression of being "Amazons?" In other words with traits that might be seen as masculine?

Now I wasn't born yesterday so I'll suggest there's likely a backstory here, one of jealousy. I think Morris coaches could see what was happening: Hancock as the small town with more traditional values allowed a program to get going that was pretty aggressive and ambitious. Many Morris people would have felt our school was "above that." I was close to the situation with my perch from the newspaper. It grated on me especially as time passed and the status quo was not going to budge.

Well, finally it did budge. All the pretentious academic folks had to compromise some.

I had a teacher friend who wanted to give his colleagues a break by offering an alternate theory. Nice guy, he was - he's deceased now. This friend said that many of the teachers had been here a long time and their own kids had graduated some time ago, thus they just didn't pay as much attention to sports as they might. Therefore, he explained, they might schedule a "big test" on the day of a "big" game, just because of being out of circulation.

Innocent.

There might have been some truth to that. But my initial thought in response was "why schedule a big grueling test at all?" Back off on the kids, don't make life so unpleasant for them. I think during the Cold War years, our education system felt it had to be onerous with standards imposed on young people. I think I was a "victim" of that, I really do. We had to "beat the Russians." And so we sent waves of young men to Vietnam to die because we had to "resist communism." It was all a lie, a big pregnant lie.

I certainly am digressing here.

When I look back on times when misogyny was allowed to float around just a bit, I hope you'll understand some naked and frank thoughts from someone like me who is 69 years old. Someone who watched the old "Dean Martin Variety Hour."

So having shared way too much background with you on this pleasant April morning, let me just say this: The Iowa women's basketball team has great athletic prowess but its members are totally "girls." They might be considered attractive girls.

I'm sure they would not feel flattered by any such comment. But truly I am not isolated thinking this way. They are not "Amazons." They would not appreciate a post like what I am writing this morning. But if my online writing has stood for anything, it has stood for appreciating culture and lifestyle changes of Americans over long periods of time.

So many of us get locked in the present. Some people tell me I'm strange for wanting to remember so much. It's just me. I think the outlook truly has some value.

So while female athletes will not appreciate my perspective, I'll say anyway "congrats to Iowa women's basketball. It is super, it is transformative."

Our MACA girls basketball team lost in the first round of the tournament. I think we had greater potential than that. Let's try to get a graduating senior from an NCAA Division I program to come here and light a fire under the program. Oh, the Morris teachers would hate me for saying that.

The Morris teachers are preoccupied at present with showing discontent with their contract, their pay and benefits. Over and over we hear about this. Such demonstrations should not even be allowed at our school board meetings. The teachers can all go sit under a cow.