Recalling days gone by this Christmas

Christmas Eve, along with the July Wednesday after the major- league baseball all- star game, is an unusually slow sports day.

No late scores to wait for, allowing newspaper workers to leave early and spend time with family. Back when the presses rolled at 300 Spring St., I would leave no later than 10 p.m. while Sue finished packing for our annual Mississippi holiday jaunt. As is true of any sportswriter’s wife, she asked why I couldn’t get home earlier.

One late night in Mississippi was spent in philosophy class at a Waffle House. Family members, some of them Ole Miss fans, asked about the Rebels’ next football coach, a chap from Arkansas. Of Houston Nutt, I said, “You’ll learn to dislike him like Arkansas people did.”

Ever a super salesman, Nutt used his first press conference to declare that his teams would do things the “Ole Miss way,” whatever that was. Borrowing Nick Carraway’s line in “The Great Gatsby,” I headlined my next- day column, “Nevertheless, he’s an Oxford man.” He lasted four years in John Grisham country and hasn’t sniffed a head job since 2011.

Christmas Eve once was spent polishing holiday wishes to run in the next day’s paper, becoming too painful after Sue’s passing. But it was fun thinking of a line for a particular sports figure. One local girls’ basketball coach reached the holiday one year after playing only a few games. To her, I wished “steady work.”

Fellow journalist Harry King once reversed his financial fortunes in the last race of one Oaklawn Park meeting. In his behalf, I asked for “another Jug of Water at the track if he ever needs one.”

Stepping back from office work but still keeping a hand in the daily product, I go on nostalgic binges about players or coaches I’ve known or games that I watched.

It was good to watch a varsity boys’ basketball game Tuesday night matching Caddo Hills and Fountain Lake. In 40 years of newspaper writing, I have enjoyed few thrills comparable with covering Caddo Hills’ 37-1 Class A championship team of 1989-90. Then living in Glenwood, I was virtually in residence at the Montgomery County holler-house where Lakeside High graduate Jerry Bridges groomed a dynamic team, taking on all comers. My mom, graduate of the former Caddo Gap High School, attended most every home game and it was to the home stands I looked, where she usually sat, when entering the gymnasium on game night. She’s gone now, but some rituals never change.

One of Caddo Hills’ top players now is senior Cameron Gaither, who played the last two years at rival Kirby. Cameron is related to Stacy Vines, MVP of the 1990 state Class A tournament. Stacy might not have been the best player on that team but no one played with more intensity; think of Corey Beck for the Razorbacks’ 2004 NCAA champions. I hugged his stepdad, the latter overcome by tears, when Stacy was announced MVP.

I wanted to have a moment like that with Garry Crowder at Jessieville. He took two teams to the state finals, although neither game was thrilling as some semifinal losses in the state tournament. His 1987-88 Lady Lions, the best team I’d seen at a small school since Glenwood’s Class B champions of 1965, relied offensively on three Jessieville all-timers: Nancy Castleberry, Tammy Oates and Lori Stephens. Two Flippin players shot lights- out in the state tournament, and Jessieville finished 30-1.

Some intimacy has been lost in Jessieville Sports Arena that made game night at Glazener Gymnasium something to treasure. What I would not give to

be in a gym sitting beside Gene Glazener (the superintendent often bragged that no incumbent on the school board had ever lost an election), with Crowder and Joe Taylor (Jessieville boys’ coach) holding court and chatting with Ruby Pipkins at the scorer’s table. Years later, I described it as a place where the portraits came off the wall.

Before long, I must pay Hot Springs High’s new basketball gymnasium a visit. One visitor gave it high marks, rating it over Lake Hamilton’s spacious (but grossly undernamed) Wolf Arena. Basketball should be played in an arena not in an athletic complex, like one of our local schools insists.

But how good can a Lakeside or Lake Hamilton game at Hot Springs be if not played at Trojan Fieldhouse?

Can any place hold the intimacy of that basketball arena built into a high school? Until they added padded seats on the home side, there was hardly a comfortable seat to be found. On special nights, you had to get there early or risk standing.

But what memories. Nights with Alvin Corder or Voris Johnson or Sherry White or Myrna Lorick coaching and Sha Hopson, Shameka Christon and Joy Oakley playing in the girls’ game and the Dobbins brothers or LaJuan Christon (followed by his sons) in Trojan uniforms.

One night, a Trojan player was eyed leaving the bench during a game. The coach said later he bumped into the player at a grocery one day and asked why he hadn’t been coming to practice.

Eddie Sutton, then in his Arkansas coaching heyday, came one night to watch Bryant recruit Willie Cutts. John Tate, a future star at Arkansas State, played an exceptional game one night for Watson Chapel. Anacoco, La., whose best player was in seventh grade, faced the Lady Trojans in a tournament final (Anacoco lost a close one and its fans protested mightily. It was New Year’s Eve and coach Jim Elser and I relived the game over dinner at the former Shoney’s on Central Avenue).

Cutter Morning Star has opened its new basketball arena and, I am happy to report, that Pam Jackson is still keeping the home team’s scorebook. I can go to a Fountain Lake game and feel sure where Gerald Hulsey is sitting. (Some grandparent is sure to ask why I don’t come to watch their child. On that count, call me an equal-opportunity non-employer.)

Gone are the days of calling a coach’s home (sometimes a police station) late at night for a final score. One night I called Lavaca and someone answered the phone, “Lavaca.” I didn’t ask if he climbed a post.

At Glenwood, one was always meeting new people. Changing coaches amounted to a Pavlovian reflex and it amounted to a meet-and-greet session. One quit at halftime of a football game.

Thankfully, no one filled me with buckshot, though a referee once asked for an explanation about something that I’d written. So did the area coach who was was not amused when I observed that “they either need better athletes or a softer schedule.” Just once, I wanted to comment on a band’s musical selection: “They played ‘ The Hustle’ when the ‘Tighten Up’ might have been more appropriate.”

Remember, it’s all for the kids. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!