Beating the big dude at his own game

The place we moved to belonged to some people named Baylor. They ran a restaurant on West Walnut Street in Rogers. They lived on Third Street, next door to a lady whose name was Vera Keys; she was wellknown.

There was an old saying that the farther you lived down Ganns Ridge, the tougher you were. We lived in the next to the last house on Ganns Ridge. The main problem was I had to walk six miles to high school. Most of the kids in the neighborhood went to Seligman (Mo.) because they could walk two miles up Ganns Ridge and catch the school bus to Seligman.

David went to Bayless School and Hugh, Sam and Helen went to Corinth School. We were in the Corinth District, but David could go to Bayless because they had school through the 10th grade.

When the weather was foul, Dad would let me ride the black mule. I would leave him in Midas Stacy’s barn lot during the day.

When we had a basketball game, I would stay with our friends, Enoch and Nettie Taylor. Our basketball team went to Cave Springs to play a conference game. Cave Springs was the smallest school in the conference and it was hard for them to form a team. They played their games in a warehouse and the floor was smaller than regulation but at least they had a gym to play in.

The Garfield court was an outside dirt court.

Cave Springs was usually at the bottom of the bracket because of the lack of players. This year they had imported a 6-foot 6-inch dude from somewhere and they were winning ball games! The big dude would stand by the basket and slap the ball out of the hoop. In that year, that was legal, then, because Freyberger of Arkansas and Kurland of the Oklahoma Aggies did the same thing in a college game, the rule was changed.

It became illegal to touch the ball on its downward flight above the goal. The Arkansas and Oklahoma Aggies game ended up with a score of 16-14 and that was considered dullsville.

The referee at Cave Springs was my second cousin, Hugh “Goose” Price. When I would commit a foul, I would say, “Now cous’,” and he would say, “That cous’ stuff doesn’t do it in basketball games.”

On one trip down the court, I accidentally elbowed the big dude and he did some di-dos that I had never seen before. Instead of laying the basketball in the basket, he slammed it off the backboard. That gave me an idea, so I called time

out. I told my cousin, Ross Pitts, to play in front of the big dude and I would accidentally elbow him and we could win this ball game.

My idea was working real well on both ends of the court until one time they threw him the ball high and with both hands he slammed it off of Ross’s head. Ross called a time out, in the huddle he told me to play in front, because big dude nearly killed him.

My referee cousin stuck his head in our huddle and said, “If you two Pitts boys goose the big dude one more time, I’ll throw both of you out of the game!”

Cousin Goose didn’t have to worry because we had the big dude horse whipped. All we had to do was point a finger at him and he would start his didos. Without a gym, we had to play all of our games on the road. When we went back to Cave Springs to play our return game, the big dude wasn’t with them. We asked the players where he was and they told us we had ruined his basketball career. He had quit school and gone to California to pick fruit. He should have been good at it if someone didn’t accidentally goose him.

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Editor’s note: Joe Pitts (19202008) was a native of Pea Ridge and regular columnist for the newspaper. He began writing a column for The Times in 2000 initially titled “Things Happen” by Joe “Pea Patch” Pitts. This column was first published Nov. 5, 2005, in the Pea Ridge TIMES.