ON THE AVENUES: I've got the spirit, but lose the feeling.

Aimlessness, ennui, and frustration.

These three words don’t begin to describe my mood during the year or so immediately following high school graduation in 1978. You’d need to add measures of angst, disaffection and frustration to the mix, not to mention an ongoing, crippling shyness.

To be more succinct, I was an extremely unhappy camper -- and then, as now, I detest camping. I hadn’t the slightest idea what I was supposed to do with my life.

Small wonder The Who’s quintessential Quadrophenia album spoke to me so insistently at the time.

I am not the actor
This can't be the scene
But I am in the water
As far as I can see

Of course it’s been 42 years since then, and honestly I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. The difference between now and before is sheer stagecraft. I’m much better adjusted to performing. As an adult I've become the actor. At some point along the way I learned that people can be shy extroverts, and there’s no law against faking it until you make it.

In fact, faking it has served me quite well.

But in 1978, I was at sea. For my inaugural semester at Indiana University Southeast, I signed up for four evening classes. It was a disastrous foray into academia. I failed one and managed somehow to beg an incomplete out of another. Such was my dysfunction that I derived no solace from solid academic performances in the other two, English Composition and Intro to Philosophy.

In fact, these two courses were harbingers of a future pathway forward, even if I couldn’t see it. In retrospect, I just didn’t know myself. Self-knowledge came only with time.

I’m a slow learner, which means that almost always, I’m also a late bloomer. If you want fast, decisive decisions, look elsewhere, because I may not be the best choice. I’ll hoard every last second you give me to think about it, then run the variations through my head multiple times.

Once focused, that’s where I remain. Getting focused can be an ordeal.

In addition, that horrid shyness made post-high school life challenging. The IUS class I failed in the fall of 1978 was Public Speaking. I should have refused the option when the counselor suggested it to me, but I couldn’t find the words to express my terror. I didn’t know what to say to myself, much less to other people.

To be truthful, coping mechanisms for shyness didn’t become clear until I was well into my twenties. In the beginning, I needed barriers to survive: a teacher’s desk between the students and me, the counter separating the liquor store clerk from his customers, and a nice row of taps like a picket fence from behind the bar.

I’ve proven to be a patient adult, and things gradually fell into place, although four decades ago shyness made it excruciatingly hard to find new friends. At first my friends after high school were the same as during high school, at least the ones who stuck around and didn’t go away to university.

Maybe all of us who stayed here had certain socialization issues.

---

The year following my high school graduation, I joined with a few of these friends to stage what we referred to at the time as a “commando raid.” It was juvenilia to such a brain-dead degree that my adult brain fairly recoils from the memory.

It seems that rudimentary steel gates had been installed at the roadway entrances to Floyd Central, our alma mater. This struck us as the first step toward a future police/education state; a blow needed to be struck for freedom of mobility, and who better to do it than us?

Besides, we were underemployed, bored and profoundly misdirected. Our bizarre conclusion was to advocate freedom of movement by preventing the school buses from leaving. The gang pooled pocket change, bought a few padlocks and coordinated our watches.

Just as the closing bell sounded one spring afternoon, we descended from three directions and padlocked the gates shut, reasoning this would make us famous.

A senior mole still on the inside subsequently reported a farcical outcome as annoying as it was utterly predictable. The bus drivers saw everything as it unfolded, and our cheap padlocks were no match for humongous bolt cutters wielded by yawning janitors who came trotting from the building within seconds of our getaway.

The whole episode lasted a few minutes at the very most, and we looked so foolishly impotent that the administrators didn't even bother tracking us down. For me, the exercise actually generated a learning point, which was profound embarrassment. I no longer was in high school, and evidently needed to broaden my horizons.

After all these years, and quite apart from the youthful idiocy of our ill-fated stunt, the stated purpose of those schoolyard gates recently has come back to me. They were supposed to help secure the grounds at night and on weekends, when no one needed to be reposing on school property anyway.

However, if my memory is to be trusted, the gates seldom were used. It quickly became obvious that school activities ran seemingly around the clock, and students, teachers and staff were coming and going at all hours. The gates soon were padlocked open, and started rusting. Taxpayers griped in letters to the newspaper: why waste a thousand bucks on gates that weren’t being used?

All of it -- the gates, those objections and our commando raid -- seems ridiculously quaint looking back from the vantage point of 2020.

Nowadays when topics of school security and safety arise, we're no longer talking about three or four flimsy gates, but armed guards, weapons, x-ray machines and in all likelihood quite soon, the micro-chipping of humans in the same way we did our cat at the vet last week.

Not to mention mental health services and counseling, the proposed funding for which comprise the bulk of monies being sought in 2020 by the school corporation via the current “safety” referendum ballot issue.

Damn straight; we do live in a different world. See what four decades of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and proliferating neoliberalism can do to a society’s sanity? When RayGun took office in 1981, the disassembling of America began in earnest. Joe Biden’s dementia-accented ascendancy this week seems calculated to assure there’ll be a two-party continuance of the fundamental neoliberal rot, with maybe a symptom or two addressed in passing before the inevitable veto by Amazon, Wall Street and the gendarmes of capital accumulation.

It's a good thing we still have books.

---

Coincidentally, the late Mark Fisher’s amazing Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? closed out March atop my nightstand, from whence I devoured it in three sittings.

In his book The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James has convincingly posited a correlation between rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism practiced in countries like Britain, the USA and Australia. In line with James’s claims, I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill?”

It isn’t acceptable, is it?

Maybe it’s a fast food diet of pure sugar, the plastic fragments coursing through our veins, or the modern global economy’s reduction of work to frantic kaleidoscopic gigging.

Fischer’s view is that when alternatives to robber baron capitalism can no longer even be imagined, bat-shit craziness is the logical outcome for all except the 1%.

(In retrospect, listening to Joy Division while writing these words may not have been my best idea ever.)

I’ll never be entirely sure whether my inner turmoil during high school and shortly thereafter was the usual hormonal accompaniment to acne and masturbation, or something deeper. The odds overwhelmingly favor the former, but it strikes me as useful in the context of a public education that young people have access to mental health services.

Far more useful would be immediate and pervasive revolution against neoliberalism, and yet I understand how few Americans are in a position to undertake the corrective measures. I’m a patient man, and I trust that in time, they will, even if it’s after my time.

In the interim, allow me to state publicly that I’ve no issues with the school corporation’s referendum. I’ll campaign neither for nor against it, but if you have strong feelings either way, please submit them for publication. My blog is your blog.

In the main, my fellow baby boomers have been major bummers; my generation of unreconstructed narcissists has acquiesced in a greed-driven economic system built to benefit engorgement for the few, with the expense of a natural by-product of mental (and often physical) illness left to be borne by the many.

I’m for doing what we can to mitigate the effects, and while I'm on the topic, remember to vote for Bernie Sanders early and often. Maybe soon we can prevent this institutionalized insanity instead of slap bandages on the contusions produced.

---

Recent columns:

February 27: ON THE AVENUES: There is a complete absence of diversity among regular News and Tribune columnists.

February 20: ON THE AVENUES: For downtown New Albany, escaping reality might soon be a bridge too far.

February 13: ON THE AVENUES: War. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

February 6: ON THE AVENUES Alas, New Albany is less of a place without a bookstore.

To New Albany's Joe Dean, it was string music. For me, high school basketball was a mixed gym bag.

Sectional champs, 1978.

Last night, Floyd Central beat New Albany in boys basketball for the first time in 15 years, a span of time comprising 20 consecutive losses. There are hundreds of potentially interesting topics to be spun from this sporting news, but I like to pick my spots, which in this instance is the opportunity to recall my own underachieving career in high school basketball.

These lightly edited and updated thoughts have appeared at least twice here previously, most recently in March of 2014. They may not be particularly edifying, but at least they're honest.

---

ON THE AVENUES: String music?

It has been 39 years since my final basketball game as a member of Floyd Central’s varsity.

I'm occasionally reminded of this ancient factoid, like when a Facebook friend request came to me from my former coach, Joe Hinton. I duly accepted the request, and thought it very nice of him to ask. We didn’t always see eye to eye back in the day, but it’s been long, long ago.

One quite tumultuous time, we were on entirely different pages. It was late in the basketball season during my senior year, as my decidedly non-illustrious career was fast approaching a merciful conclusion. At a practice session just prior to the 1978 sectional, the coaching staff revealed the official tournament roster, and the list didn't include my name.

Granted, the omission was mostly deserved based on purely inconsistent performance, and yet I was annoyed at what I perceived as a slight, responding with a two-hour concentrated display of faux "go team" enthusiasm and contrived, vaudevillian, entirely mock "rah-rah."

This apparently was mistaken by the coaching staff for a death bed conversion to team spirit, if not genuine depth of feeling. The following day, I was reinstated to the roster. It never dawned on me to pursue a career in acting, or I might be portraying Josh Dallas’s father on television by now.

Happily, or so it seemed, I'd neglected reporting this turn of events to my father. Unhappily, his old friend (Hinton) already had done so, which may have been the devious intent from the beginning. The whole off-and-on scenario did little to improve matters on the home front.

As the late Gomer Pyle once said: “Surprise, surprise, surprise."

---

Almost 40 years later, I can't attribute truly coherent motives to my teenage ambivalence about sports, these ultimately meaningless games being just about the only form of communication between a father and his son. The father was an ex-Marine who had traded athletic opportunities for three years as a gunner on a Navy ship in World War II, and he was keen – perhaps overly so – to see his son succeed at basketball and baseball.

However, the son just wasn't wired for this kind of pressure, at least during those hormonally-charged years, and surely it is indicative of my fundamental disconnect that while I always enjoyed the essence of the games themselves and still do, my favorite book about sports was (and remains) Jim Bouton's Ball Four, which celebrated the timelessness of baseball while exposing the vacuous and inane nature of jock culture.

Bouton spoke directly to me, fervently and personally. I fancied myself a thinker, not a sweat hog. I'd have gladly settled for "thinker and lover, not a fighter," except that I hadn't been able to convince any girls of my credentials, and in truth, doubted whether any such talent existed.

So, it came back to me and my brain, together against the world. It should suffice to say that locker rooms were mind-free zones, and brains in sports were the object of lingering suspicion unless one happened to be an otherwise semi-literate point guard who could remember the plays and run the offense.

There I was, kicked off the senior-dominated basketball team and then placed back on it, contemplating yet again how it came to be that we were such persistent underachievers as a squad, utterly failing to capitalize on the rosy potential predicated by all observers, including my still simmering dad … and understanding, as I always had, that it all owed to a lack of cohesion.

In other words, too few of us liked each other off the court, and this distaste had a way of being glaringly obvious on the court, to Joe Hinton's fuming dismay.

Our sectional draw was a breeze. We were lumped into a bracket with smaller rural schools as a result of one or the other cynical maneuverings common to the political byways of the purportedly pristine Indiana state sport of basketball, which naturally had much more to do with smoky hotel room maneuvers at the national political party conventions of the 1920's than the farmyard ideal preferred by so many fans.

The cheering section probably knew better, but worshipped all the same.

We won the sectional and advanced to play Scottsburg in the Saturday morning game at the Seymour Regional the following week. The Warriors, from a school far smaller than ours, had nonetheless soundly thrashed us at home a few weeks earlier.

In today's parlance, Floyd Central had "match-up" problems with Scottsburg, which is to say that they had one of their finest teams ever; though not demonstrably better at every position, the Warriors played as a team, something we couldn't match.

I knew there would be little playing time for me, and at that point, it no longer mattered. Amid much hoopla and a special pep rally, we boarded the bus on Friday afternoon for the 40-minute drive, an early evening shoot-around, a buffet meal and an overnight stay at the Days Inn.

At this juncture, two worlds were set to collide.

While some of my best high school friends were athletes, only a few of them were on the basketball team. I mostly ran in different circles, and at various times, yes, there was beer involved, though seldom if ever during the basketball season. Ambivalence aside, I tried to play it straight as often as possible.

But for the Saturday regional festivities, a few of my heartier-partying friends had reserved a room at the very same hotel where the team was staying – only my buddies called it the Daze Inn, and planned to treat it accordingly.

---

Floyd Central unceremoniously exited the tournament in the morning session, and Scottsburg advanced to meet Clarksville in the evening finale. I'd like to remember that in defeat, we came together as a team and grasped an eternal cliched truth or three, but from my perspective, all I felt was pervasive relief that finally, at long last, the ordeal was over.

There was a post-game chat and showers, and we returned to the hotel to eat and waste a dilatory afternoon playing euchre before riding back to the gym on the bus and watching the championship game, which was to be our last solemn obligation as a dysfunctional unit.

You've probably already guessed what happened next.

I promptly stole away from the ennui, and by the time the bus exited the Daze Inn parking lot several hours later, I was completely and blissfully smashed.

The bathtub in the party room was filled with canned beer and ice, and a story already was making the rounds as to how the designated underage beer buyer with his older brother's ID had run into a few of our teachers at the exact same package store and exchanged earnest pleasantries with them at the checkout counter.

Me? I was just happy to shed the weight of expectations and get myself dazed, even if remaining as clueless as always with respect to how the future would play out, although perhaps my vocational path forward in the beer and brewing business already was being plotted amid the plodding.

Eventually one of the assistant coaches dressed me down outside in the hotel courtyard when he saw that I held a smoldering Swisher Sweet in my hand. Did I really want to be kicked off the bus and suspended for smoking?

No, not at all, and I snubbed it out, because I'd already decided that my final act of courageous defiance against The Man (which one, exactly?) would be to drink a beer on the team bus in route to the evening championship game, and this I proceeded to do -- already crazily intoxicated, strategically seated all the way in the rear, a Schlitz Malt Liquor Bull artfully hidden in my gym bag, top popped discretely, and chugged quickly before hiding the empty again for the post-game ride home with my parents.

I'm neither proud nor ashamed of these recollections.

I did what I could with what I had at the time, and if awarded a time-travel "do over," probably I'd have worked harder at sports -- not for anyone else’s satisfaction, but for my own.

In retrospect, my work ethic was there all along, if latent and inchoate; it took a while for it to emerge fully formed, later in life. So be it. In truth, the thing I miss most about high school is singing in choir, not playing ball. I didn't know it then, but I know it now.

I'm forever hopeful that in the cosmic scheme of things, the ability to learn from one's youthful angst and missteps is what matters most. If not, I may be in serious trouble.

To this year's high school basketball players, my best wishes. If you're lucky, you'll forget all about it very, very soon.

ON THE AVENUES: String music?

ON THE AVENUES: String music?

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

It has been 36 years since my final basketball game as a member of Floyd Central’s varsity.

I was reminded of this ancient factoid in the rear view mirror because a Facebook friend request recently came to me from my former coach, Joe Hinton. I duly accepted the request, and thought it nice of him to ask. We didn’t always see eye to eye back in the day, but it’s been long, long ago.

One quite tumultuous time, when we were on entirely different pages was late in the basketball season during my senior year, as a decidedly non-illustrious career was fast approaching a merciful conclusion. At a practice session just prior to the 1978 sectional, the coaching staff revealed the official tournament roster, and the list didn't include my name.

Granted, the omission was mostly deserved based on pure performance, and yet I was annoyed at the slight, responding with a two-hour concentrated display of faux "go team" enthusiasm and contrived, entirely mock rah-rah, which apparently was mistaken for a death bed conversion, if not genuine depth of feeling, resulting in my reinstatement to the roster the following day.

It never dawned on me to pursue a career in acting, or I might be portraying Josh Dallas’s father on television by now.

Happily, or so it seemed, I'd neglected reporting this turn of events to my father. Unhappily, his friend (Hinton) had already done so, which may have been the devious intent from the beginning, and the whole off-and-on scenario did little to improve matters on the home front. As Gomer Pyle once said: “Surprise, surprise, surprise."

---

Three and a half decades later, I can't attribute truly coherent motives to my teenaged ambivalence about sports, these largely meaningless games being about the only form of communication between a father and his son. The father was an ex-Marine who had traded athletic opportunities for three years as a gunner on a Navy ship in World War II and was keen – perhaps overly so – to see his son succeed at basketball and baseball.

However, the son just wasn't wired for that kind of pressure, at least during those hormonally-charged years, and surely it is indicative of my fundamental disconnect that while I always enjoyed the games themselves and still do, my favorite book about sports was (and is) Jim Bouton's "Ball Four," which celebrated baseball while exposing the vacuous and inane nature of jock culture.

Bouton directly spoke to me, fervently and personally. I fancied myself a thinker, not a sweathog. I'd have gladly settled for "lover, not a fighter," except that I hadn't been able to convince girls of my credentials in the former, and in truth, doubted whether any such talent existed, and so it came back to me and my brain against the world.

It should suffice to say that locker rooms were mind-free zones, and brains in sports were the object of lingering suspicion unless one happened to be an otherwise illiterate point guard who could remember the plays and run the offense.

There I was, off the senior-dominated basketball team and then back on it, contemplating yet again how it came to be that we were such persistent underachievers, utterly failing to capitalize on the potential predicated by all observers, including my still simmering dad … and understanding, as I always had, that it all owed to a lack of cohesion. In other words, too few of us liked each other, and this distaste had a way of being glaringly obvious on the court, to Joe Hinton's fuming dismay.

Our sectional draw was a breeze. We were lumped into a bracket with smaller rural schools as a result of one or the other cynical maneuverings common to the political byways of the purportedly pristine Indiana state sport of basketball, which naturally had much more to do with smoky hotel rooms at the national party conventions of the 1920's than the farmyard ideal preferred by so many fans.

They probably knew better, but worshipped just the same.

We won the sectional and advanced to play Scottsburg in the Saturday morning game at the Seymour Regional the following week. The Warriors, from a school far smaller than ours, had nonetheless soundly thrashed us at home a few weeks earlier. In today's parlance, Floyd Central had "match-up" problems with Scottsburg, which is to say that they had one of their finest teams ever, one better than ours at almost every position.

I knew there would be little playing time for me, and at that point, it no longer mattered. Amid much hoopla and a special pep rally, we boarded the bus on Friday afternoon for the 40-minute drive, an early evening shoot-around, a buffet meal and an overnight stay at the Days Inn.

At this juncture, two worlds were about to collide. While some of my best high school friends were athletes, only a couple of them were on the basketball team. I ran in different circles, and at various times, yes, there was beer involved, though seldom if ever during the basketball season. Ambivalence aside, I tried to play it straight as often as possible. But for the Saturday regional festivities, a few of my heartier partying friends had reserved a room at the very same hotel where the team was staying – only my buddies called it the Daze Inn, and planned to treat it accordingly.

---

Unsurprisingly, Floyd Central exited the tournament in the morning session, and Scottsburg advanced to meet Clarksville in the evening finale. I'd like to remember that in defeat, the team came together and grasped an eternal truth or three, but from my perspective, all I felt was pervasive relief that finally, at long last, it was over. There was a post-game chat and showers, and we returned to the hotel to eat and waste a dilatory afternoon playing euchre before riding back to the gym on the bus and watching the championship game, which was to be our last solemn obligation as a dysfunctional unit.

I promptly stole away, and by the time the bus exited the Daze Inn parking lot several hours later, I was blissfully smashed. The bathtub in the party room was filled with canned beer and ice, and a story already was making the rounds as to how the designated underage beer buyer had run into a few of our teachers at the exact same package store and exchanged pleasantries with them at the counter.

I was just happy to shed the weight of expectations and get myself altered, even if clueless as always with respect to how the future would play out.

Eventually one of the assistant coaches dressed me down outside in the courtyard when he saw that I had a smoldering Swisher Sweet in my hand. Did I really want to be kicked off the bus and suspended for smoking?

No, not at all, and I snubbed it out, because I'd already decided that my final act of courageous defiance against The Man (which one?) would be to drink a beer on the team bus in route to the evening game, and this I proceeded to do, already crazily intoxicated, strategically seated all the way in the rear, a Schlitz Malt Liquor Bull artfully hidden in my gym bag, top popped discretely, and chugged quickly before being hidden again for the ride home with my parents afterward.

I'm neither ashamed nor proud of these recollections. I did what I could with what I had at the time, and if I had to do it over, I'd have worked harder at sports than I did -- not for anyone else’s satisfaction, but for my own. Seems that the work ethic actually was there all along, though latent; it just came later in life, and so be it.

In truth, the thing I miss most about high school is singing in choir, not playing ball. I didn't know it then, but I know it now. I'm hoping that in the cosmic scheme of things, that's all that matters. If it isn't, I may be in trouble.

To this year's basketball players, in a tournament or out, and whether in high school or college: If you're lucky, you'll forget all about it very, very soon.

(The preceding was posted at NAC in 2008 and later appeared as a newspaper column in truncated form. This is the revised, full-length version)

How I came to attend the Louisville Orchestra's performance of Dvořák's New World Symphony.

I graduated from high school in 1978 and landed a job picking up and delivering parts for a contractor's supply company called Reid-Holcomb, which had just opened a branch office in Clarksville. The branch manager lived in Georgetown and was somewhat of a family friend, and he got me on part time. The other half of my time was to have been devoted to attending courses at IU Southeast, although apart from Introduction to Philosophy, which I loved, I didn't attend the others very often.

However, my checkered academic career is not the subject of today's digression.

The job at Reid-Holcomb lasted through the end of 1978. I learned of my redundancy in January upon returning to what had become non-work, having just gotten home from a week spent in the Bay Area. Before departing, I'd mentioned my brief holiday to the branch manager, who neglected to tell my immediate superior, whom I'd unfortunately bypassed in the chain of requisite approvals.

To be truthful, it was a tough economy, and they didn't really need me, anyway. My faux pas just speeded matters along.

The trip to San Francisco and environs was much fun. I joined my friend and former high school English teacher Bob, who was staying during the holiday season at his brother's condo in Palo Alto. We hiked at Point Reyes National Seashore, ate at a French restaurant in Carmel, and took the obligatory tour of Alcatraz. During the latter, I observed males in identical sweaters holding hands, and thought: Hmm, I've heard of this sort of thing, and never seen it in New Albany. Is it here, too?

The point being that I was a decidedly non-worldly 18-year-old, and fascinated (often confused) by everything I saw. Unlike summer vacations with the folks, this was about me as an adult free to see the planet, although of course I'd have been far too timid and incompetent to navigate or understand any of it without a genuine adult around to do the heavy lifting and explain that yes, they're everywhere, and no, it doesn't matter one bit.

With that settled, it was revealed that Bob's brother had a treasure trove of long-playing record albums, including pop, rock, jazz and classical. Of these genres, classical was the least explored, so one evening I placed Dvořák's 9th Symphony on the turntable, solely because the "New World" descriptor seemed vaguely to promise something more familiar and less foreign. For whatever reason, I was utterly enchanted, and continued playing it over and over until Bob grew weary and forbade further listenings. He made a game effort to steer me toward Mahler, but I wasn't ready yet.

In an easily grasped metaphorical sense, I imagine that Dvořák's "New World" symphony and the brave new world of a state approximating adulthood were woven together in my unawakened mind. It would be another six years before enough of it coalesced into a plan, and I finally set off to backpack in Europe. It was the boot camp I so desperately needed. But am I really an adult, even now?

It's been slightly more than 35 years since Dvořák's Symphony No. 9 in E minor, "From the New World", Op. 95, first settled onto the turntable in Palo Alto, and last evening Mrs. Confidential accompanied me to the Brown Theatre in Louisville to see it performed live by the Louisville Orchestra. Providentially, she saw it mentioned just a few days ago, and largely unaware of the back story, suggested we take in the performance. I'm grateful.

It was a fine evening, and while I'm not sufficiently knowledgeable to critique the orchestra's work, I was happy to be there.  The workaday world has been hard as nails lately, and so an escape into these lovely melodies, and the memories they engender, was an experience I really appreciated.

Sometimes plans just come together. I'm glad they do.

String music?

The great March blizzard of 2008 forced the postponement of today's IHSAA boys' high school basketball regional tournament at Seymour. New Albany's undefeated Bulldogs must now wait until Monday to resume their pursuit of a championship, albeit one largely rendered moot by the continued existence of class basketball, which put an end to whatever merits the sport of high school basketball still had prior to the institution of egalitarian mediocrity a decade or more ago.

Today marks the 30th anniversary of my final regional basketball appearance as a member of the Floyd Central varsity in 1978. Another reminder of this long-forgotten (and forgettable) occurrence came earlier this week, when the New Albany Tribune profiled former FCHS head coach Joe Hinton, who won a sectional title with Paoli last weekend. Joe's pushing 70, but still in the thick of it, and doing what he knows and loves. More power to him, even if we didn't always see eye to eye back in the day.

One such tumultuous time when we were on entirely different pages was late in the basketball season my senior year, as a decidedly non-illustrious career was fast approaching a merciful conclusion. At a practice session just prior to the 1978 sectional, the coaching staff revealed the official tournament roster, and the list didn't include my name.

Granted, the omission was fully deserved based on pure performance, and yet I was annoyed at the slight, responding with a two-hour concentrated display of faux "go team" enthusiasm and contrived, entirely mock rah-rah, which somehow was mistaken for genuine depth of feeling, resulting in my reinstatement to the roster the following day.

Happily, or so it seemed, I'd neglected reporting this turn of events to my father. Unhappily, his friend and my coach had already done so, which may have been the intent from the beginning, and the whole off-and-on scenario did little to improve matters on the home front. As Gomer Pyle said often at the time, "surprise, surprise, surprise."

Thinking back on it from the vantage point of three decades, I can't attribute truly coherent motives to my teenaged ambivalence about sports, these games being about the only form of communication between a father and his son. The father was an ex-Marine who had traded athletic opportunities for three years as a gunner on a Navy ship in World War II and was keen – perhaps overly so – to see his son succeed at basketball and baseball.

However, the son just wasn't wired for that kind of pressure, at least during those hormonally-charged years, and surely it is indicative of the fundamental disconnect that while I always enjoyed the games themselves and still do, as a precocious reader, my favorite book about sports was Jim Bouton's "Ball Four," which celebrated baseball while exposing the vacuous and inane nature of jock culture.

Bouton spoke to me, fervently and personally. I fancied myself a thinker, not a sweathog. I'd have gladly settled for "lover, not a fighter," except that I hadn't been able to convince the girls of my credentials in the former, and in truth, doubted whether any such talent existed, and so it came back to my brain and I against the world. Suffice to say that according to the flavor of the time, locker rooms were mind-free zones, and brains in sports were the object of suspicion unless one happened to be an otherwise illiterate point guard who could remember the plays and run the offense.

There I was, off the senior-dominated basketball team and then back on it, contemplating yet again how it came to be that we were such underachievers, utterly failing to capitalize on the potential predicated by all observers, including my still simmering dad … and understanding, as I always had, that it all owed to a lack of cohesion. In other words, too few of us liked each other, and this distaste had a way of being glaringly obvious on the court, to Joe Hinton's fuming dismay.

Our sectional draw was a breeze. We were lumped into a bracket with smaller rural schools as a result of one or the other cynical maneuverings common to the political byways of the purportedly pristine Indiana state sport of basketball, which naturally had much more to do with smoky hotel rooms at the national party conventions of the 1920's than the farmyard ideal preferred by so many fans. They probably knew better, but worshipped just the same.

We won the sectional and advanced to play Scottsburg in the Saturday morning game at the Seymour Regional the following week. The Warriors, from a school far smaller than ours, had nonetheless soundly thrashed us at home a few weeks earlier. In today's parlance, Floyd Central had "match-up" problems with Scottsburg, which is to say that they had one of their finest teams ever, and was better than we were at almost every position. I knew there would be little playing time for me, and at that point, it really no longer mattered. Amid much hoopla and a special pep rally, we boarded the bus on Friday afternoon for the 40-minute drive, an early evening shoot-around, a buffet meal and an overnight stay at the Days Inn.

At this juncture, two worlds were about to collide. While some of my best high school friends were athletes, only a couple of them were on the basketball team. I ran in different circles, and at various times, there was beer involved, though seldom if ever during the basketball season; ambivalence aside, I tried to play it straight as often as possible. But for the Saturday regional festivities, a few of my heartier partying friends had reserved a room at the very same hotel where the team was staying – only my buddies called it the Daze Inn, and planned to treat it accordingly.

Unsurprisingly, Floyd Central exited the tournament in the morning session, and Scottsburg advanced to meet Clarksville in the evening finale. I'd like to remember that in defeat, the team came together and grasped an eternal truth or three, but from my perspective, all I felt was relief that it was over. There was a post-game chat and showers, and we returned to the hotel to eat and waste an afternoon before riding back to the gym on the bus and watching the championship game, which was to be our last obligation as a dysfunctional unit.

By the time the bus exited the Daze Inn parking lot several hours later, I was blissfully smashed. The bathtub in the party room was filled with canned beer and ice, and the story already was making the rounds as to how the designated underage beer buyer had run into a few of our teachers at the exact same package store and exchanged pleasantries with them. I was just happy to shed the weight of expectations, though clueless as to how the future would play out.

Eventually one of the assistant coaches dressed me down outside in the courtyard when he saw that I had a smoldering Swisher Sweet in my hand.

Did I really want to be kicked off the bus and suspended for smoking?

No, not at all, because I'd already decided that my final act of courageous defiance against The Man would be to drink a beer on the team bus in route to the evening game, and this I proceeded to do, crazily intoxicated, strategically seated all the way in back, a Schlitz Malt Liquor Bull artfully hidden in my gym bag, top popped discretely, and chugged quickly before being hidden again for the ride home with my parents afterward.

I'm neither ashamed nor proud of these recollections. I did what I could with what I had at the time, and if I had to do it over, I'd have worked harder at sports than I did -- not for anyone else, but for me. Seems that the work ethic came later in life, and so be it. In truth, the thing I miss most about high school is singing in choir, not playing ball. I didn't know it then, but I know it now.

I'm hoping that in the cosmic scheme of things, that's all that matters. If it isn't, I may be in trouble. Good luck to all the players in this year's tournament.

If you're lucky, you'll forget all about it very, very soon.

What do you remember about the snow storms in 1977 and 1978?

It's finally white outside.

I certainly remember the consecutive yearly blizzards while nearing the end of my high school career, and our being out of class for around three weeks in both 1977 and 1978.

It’s hard to believe, but I was a Floyd Central varsity basketball player at the time (it’s even harder to believe that I could dunk, though these days such antics are restricted to doughnuts), and the school cancellations had almost no effect on the sports routine. Few if any practices were missed as a junior in 1977, and it seems that at least some of the games were played, although others were postponed.

My recollection of 1978 is that ultimately, the issue was less about snowfall than a coal shortage and high energy prices in the midst of Jimmy Carter’s famous “malaise.” Consequently, we continued to practice in daylight right after school at Georgetown Elementary, where there were still windows, so that the electricity could be spared at FCHS. The games we played on our home court were also right after school, so the gym wouldn’t have to be heated at night.

But … am I on the right track here? Something about these memories doesn’t jibe.

What puzzles me in retrospect is why we didn’t get back to school sooner. Apart from the not unexpected phenomenon of the basketball program’s tail wagging the dog (how times have changed at FCHS!), there are memories of getting out, driving around, socializing, grocery shopping.

More recently, there was the massive snow dump of 1994, when we were somehow able to keep the pub open after about ten inches and had a great business day, in the process unfortunately missing the single best Rich O’s photo opportunity ever when my pal Kevin and his brothers-in-law drove their snowmobiles over and parked right outside the door atop the mound created by the industrious “Mr. Plow.” But the '94 snow was gone within days.

Given the panic-stricken standards of today, the current snowfall constitutes the apocalypse. I believe there was a time not so long ago when the White Terror earned its sobriquet. On the other hand, quite a few beers have passed in the interim.

If I start telling stories about walking miles through snowdrifts, you can give “last call.”