I still have my sweatshirt with these words: "Hancock's at state in '88." It was the Hancock girls basketball team reaching that pinnacle. Somebody had better make sure that history is preserved.
The Owls went through an incredible chapter of success with a particular coach, a coach who abruptly had to leave the scene due to - ahem - legal problems. It ended with prison. But along the way the Hancock community sure enjoyed salad days. How those Owls ran and pressed.
The standard thing to say whenever student athletes do well is that they're "talented." We don't wish to take anything away from their accomplishments. Still, I'm sure when it came to the private feelings of school administrators in this part of the state, they knew something else was going on. The very shrewd coach of Hancock had a "formula" for maximizing success.
The problem was that it led to an "ugly" form of basketball, one accenting steals, fast-breaks etc. His program could have been inserted anywhere and with basically the same results. It did call for a pretty substantial commitment by the players. The Hancock student-athletes decided to be responsive to it. Good for them, except I'd argue that they and their parents did not adequately weigh the very limited, let's say negligible, value of this time-consuming activity for future life.
The immediate glory of winning got them mesmerized as it were, and it's hard to blame them. You only live once. Go for it. And the Hancock girls ended up "going for it" at places like the Met Sports Center and Williams Arena.
The Morris girls hoops program was quite pedestrian at the same time. "Pedestrian" might suggest average. Really we were below average. And for me to say that out and around, left Morris people in a mood to want to burn me in effigy on main street. Imagine the howling mob bearing torches like in "Frankenstein." Really it almost seemed that bad.
The juxtaposition today
So, my friend was looking at an early edition of the Anfinson regime in the local print media. At the time I really hadn't done an analysis myself. Then on Sunday morning at church - I'm one of those "liberal" ELCAers - I glanced at the sports section. My goodness, a huge banner headline about the Owl football team! And in contrast, there's a mere one-column headline about the Tigers who had beaten ACGC.
BTW my post on the ACGC game was put up on the afternoon after the game. These days I appear to be beating the local commercial media in getting lots of sports journalism put out. My ACGC game review is on my "Morris of Course" site. For a long time this was a secondary or "backup" site for my journalism. Unfortunately, since Mom has been gone for the last 1 1/2 years, I have more time and get more rest and thus I can write a little more often. Mom was almost certainly the reason I became a writer - she forced me to read aloud from books that were a year above my normal reading level.
My review of the ACGC game can be viewed with the permalink below:
My friend reminded me of times he'd hear about an alleged bias on my part favoring Hancock, land of the Owls. I responded and told him of a particular dimension to keep in mind, a dimension outside of mere winning. To elaborate: A critic of mine back in the day claimed I wanted to "ride a winner's bandwagon." Silly rabbit, cliches are often misleading. When Morris loses and Hancock wins, and when the discrepancy is substantial, we have a situation where Hancock's season lasts much longer.
We always had a sports section to fill. We were twice a week back then. Heck, our overall product had to be at least twice as much as today.
So I'd often fill the sports with whatever teams were simply "alive" in competition. If Morris had fallen by the wayside, well that was too bad. "Some gotta win, some gotta lose." Was that the name of a song?
I write about sports without ever having dealt with the on-field pressure myself. So, I never got concussions.
It's too bad if local people allege a certain fault with the Morris paper and then say it reminds them of me! Hancock had its own paper in "the old days" and I actually did a lot of work for that paper. Jim Morrison owned it. I worked closely with Katie Erdman. It appears Katie had to parachute from the Morris paper in its Forum incarnation. She landed in Elbow Lake and now she's back here - wonderful resolution of it all. I have sent her two emails in the spirit of "welcome back" and she did not answer. No point in answering a has-been, I guess.
The Morris paper has to be in a challenged financial atmosphere. So I probably should feel thankful I'm not part of it. A layoff or two could be in the cards, merely as an act of business necessity. Newspapers are in rough waters now.
I could write a book about my background. At present I love sharing journalism the best I can, as a 64-year-old who never tires of school activities. Today the Morris girls teams, unlike pre-1987, can hold heads high in terms of competitiveness.
The days when so many generous headlines had to go to Hancock are over. Or are they? Just consult the recent Morris papers. The ghosts may be hovering. We're into the month of Halloween.
So, I could write a book? Sometimes I joke with friends that the title of my biography would be "Add Dreams of Glory," a line from Jim Bouton's "Ball Four" book of 1970. I cut my teeth during Watergate, when reporters were made to feel like they could attain glory. It was not a healthy yearning, most practitioners of the craft would argue today.
Update: Just looked at the new, Oct. 1 issue of the Morris paper, and there appears to be no relief from the Hancock vs. Morris positioning in sports. Hancock gets disproportionate emphasis. So, no phone complaints after the previous week? Are people apathetic? Too bad Hancock doesn't still have the "Record." Too bad I don't still labor hard every week filling two pages of sports for it.
Addendum: The headline for this post uses the term "deja vu." Isn't it amazing how the expression "deja vu all over again" which was an obvious joke, has increasingly come to be used by people who don't realize it's a joke! Hear it enough and you might think it's legitimate. In case you need a heads-up, it's a joke because it's a pure redundancy.
- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesots - bwilly73@yahoo.com
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| No problem covering this team: 1960 Morris High School basketball, coached by Truman Carlson! |
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