Ebbets Field
On the ball
The long shadow of Granny Sundays
By DAVID BULLA
Ebbets Field Editor
The living room in a seven-room family farmhouse overflows with siblings, children and grandchildren on a Sunday afternoon. Grandmother has cooked a prodigious meal herself, but the bounty grows as her daughters, granddaughters and nieces have brought their own covered dishes, all laid out on the dining room table on top of a gauze white tablecloth. There is no room among the fried chicken, roast beef, Virginia ham, green beans, mashed potatoes, creamed corn, yams, okra, biscuits, corn bread, chocolate icebox pie and peach cobbler to sit down and have a proper Sunday meal. I serve myself and try to find a place to sit or stand elsewhere in the cramped farmhouse. My aunts make sure their husbands and children all have something to drink, sweet tea, coffee, buttermilk or mineral water from Granny�s well. It is too cold to go out on the porch and sit on Grandma�s swing. The best place to sit and eat is on a throw rug, under the mantle and the Farm Bureau calendar, in front of the TV, which Granny will not allow to be turned on until one o�clock in honor of the preacher.
Uncle Sidney says grace, a simple prayer that thanks God for this bountiful supply of food, good health and, if possible, an early planting season. He has a way with words. His rhythm, inflection, pacing and Biblical idioms make me wonder why he�s not a minister or a teacher, instead of a machinist.
The Williams family is modest, honest and blunt. Life is ritualistic. Seasons come and go. Preferably spring comes early, summer turns out not to be too rainy so that the tobacco can stay free of blight, fall is rainy and winter is reasonably short. Coming to Grandma�s house Sunday for supper is as much a part of our lives as going to church, school or work. So is hunting and fishing. A Williams looks at life as a tenuous gift. Missing on this day are my grandfather and one of his sons, both cancer victims. The Old and New Testaments reign here. The family worships the main subject of the latter, but our names come from both testaments. Rebecca, Joseph, John, Paul, Theresa, Mary.
After supper, several of the men and boys head to the pond on the northwest side of the farm to fish for bass, brim and crappie. They walk past the barn and then onto a trail that leads past fallow fields, a brook and a granary. It is cold and they will not last long. Still, my cousin Chris wants to try a new lure. He is a fisherman who could have given Norman Maclean�s brother a good day of fishing. Using his Garcia combo, Chris will find the fish if they are hungry at all on this winter afternoon. He knows that the fish hide under the shadows of the trees. I am not a fisherman; I follow Chris, who chooses not to use the johnboat on this day. Instead, we will fish from the bank. We catch a few brim before we go back to the granary. Chris has a .22 rifle there. We take target practice on mistletoe high up in the oaks behind Granny�s house.
When he becomes an adult, Chris will be a teacher and a coach -- so will his cousin. Chris will fall in love with track and briefly coach at a small college in Alabama; meanwhile, I coached high basketball for nine seasons, cross country for three. Like many coaches, we both eventually got fired. Having been a sportswriter in another incarnation, I found myself restless, fishing for something satisfying to do with my life. Thus, I decided to give up high school teaching to go back to college and get a less morally-redeeming advanced degree.
Now I found myself writing an Internet column about my lifelong love, the hoop game. I also keep a Web site for one of the local high school basketball teams. (It is also my intention to start a Web site devoted to major issues in sports.) I think of my column as an essay, an attempt to fish around for something meaningful in the world of that sport, sometimes even in the world in general. Perhaps once in awhile I might produce a piece somebody will enjoy.
Of course, writing, like coaching, is not a licensed profession. It has fewer rules or standards than, say, doctoring, teaching, plumbing or lawyering. Like a coach, a writer better figure out a way to get his point across. Both are communicators, though with different audiences.
Both writer and coach are essentially loners. They have to do things that aren�t popular: a coach decides who gets to play and who does not; a writer decides which topics to cover and which to ignore. A coach makes spur-of-the-moment decisions based on experience and wisdom that often prove wrong; a writer makes choices about diction and rhetorical devices that later seem contrived and irritate his audience. A coach chooses an offense and a defense that he thinks will win. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it does not. A writer chooses constructions that he thinks will maintain the reader�s interest, with equally satisfying and unsatisfying results.
Truth be told this writer realizes that he is a just a fan with a keyboard. Yes, he is an ex-coach, but he is a fan nonetheless. He can�t hide from that. Nor should he. Fans and writers are observers, witnesses. They aren�t doers. Thus, he understands why so many coaches have an unfavorable view of his discipline. Coaches, like players, make choices and do deeds, and they have to live with their choices and actions. Fans and writers watch both coaches and players act, then second guess. It is far easier to do the latter. No risks are involved.
Both the doers and watchers alike take a major risk in granting meaning to something that is as capricious as sport. How the basketball gods must chuckle at their current angst.
I too have a primitive psychology at work. I was cut from my high school basketball team and never totally got over it, like a first romantic rejection. So I write as a writer who is a fan, a former coach, a former sportswriter and, in spirit, a teenager who fell in love with a game the same way he fell in love with Kathy Hannah or Mary Barbe.
It�s been one of those seasons like a Sunday at Grandma�s house. The season has been vicissitudinous at best. My college team soared early and soured late. The high school team I follow has nearly reached outer space with 25 consecutive wins, but a loss in Saturday�s state championship game in Indianapolis will bring it crashing down to earth. Yes, the season reminds me of the rise and fall of action at Granny�s house. After a peaceful dinner, the aunts would serve dessert -- my favorite being Granny�s pecan pie. My father, uncle Bobby and aunt Lois would be arguing who was better for the country, the Democrats (Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey, McGovern, Carter) or the Republicans (Goldwater, Rockefeller, Nixon, Ford) while the quieter men and the boys would have returned from fishing and would be watching professional football or basketball. Unitas, Butkus, Starr, Gifford, Hayes, Smith, Halas, Landry and Lombardi in the fall. Russell, Havlicek, West, Baylor, Chamberlain, Reed, Greer, Auerbach and Holtzman in the winter. Or at least shadows of them on Granny�s black-and-white Zenith screen.
Thirty years later -- granny, father, several uncles and now the cantankerous, stubborn and independent aunt Lois (a recent heart attack victim) all gone -- I am still chasing such shadows. That local high school team�s best player, Jared Jeffries, a fisherman himself, consumes my sports thoughts these days. He offers hope for the future of my college team. Jeffries is one of the five best prep players in the country and he will play for my Hoosiers next season. He is from a small town and has the geniality and kindness of a small town politician. This local hero brings joy to anyone who watches him play. He is 6-foot-10 and weighs 215 pounds, but he plays the game like a guard. His pass to teammate Sean May for the game-winning basket in the last five seconds of the semifinals last Saturday night speaks volumes about his unselfishness and his ability to pass. So too does his spotting an opponent up in the stands long after the game and going to console him after his loss. Jeffries, who in part chose the state university in his hometown so his grandmother could see his college career, is the new shadow in my life. I will chase him the next four years. I doubt I will ever catch him.
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