Rekindling a lost love for roundball
Amelia Earhart is still missing and Jimmy Hoffa is not picking up his messages, but something personal that was lost has, with joy, been found.
Quite to my surprise, I rediscovered high school basketball in the year ending Monday.
A sport I watched with interest in the 1960s left me, in my
60s, checking schedules for local games not to be missed. See how I’m doing when Oaklawn Park resumes live racing later this month, though this passion may last through three days in March when Hot Springs plays host to 14 state finals.
A few viewing tips: (1) You can’t watch it all — comparison shopping is necessary — and (2) some is unwatchable. I saw a local team lose a particularly one-sided game last month, then told the losing coach that a return visit was imminent. “Get here about an hour late,” he said.
One other thing: Don’t believe the hype about any team. See for yourself. Fans of one local team carried on so strongly the other night that I wondered if I had missed something on an earlier inspection. A double-digit loss to another local team one night later should curb that hysteria.
Curtailing a Christmas vacation, I watched a game Thursday in the Spa City Shootout at Bank OZK Arena, then kept a pledge to cover Friday and Saturday’s action in the inaugural Larry Ray Memorial at Jessieville Sports Arena. With regrets I missed the Kameron Hale Invitational at Lake Hamilton Wolf Arena, which begs me to ask why one of the local tournaments couldn’t be played on the weekend before Christmas.
Knowing that the newspaper was ably represented elsewhere, I hunkered down for two days in Jessieville, which for years has been the closest thing to basketball heaven in Garland County.
Curiously, since opening in
1937, the school has won state championships in almost every other sport but not in this one. Both Jessieville teams reached the state finals in 2007, when they were first played in Hot Springs, and went down against Junction City’s boys and Carlisle’s girls. The 2013 Lady Lions, playing Greenland in Little Rock’s musty Barton Coliseum, may be the only unbeaten Arkansas high-school team to lose a state final under a mercy rule.
Later, Jessieville’s girls could not close the deal in the four years that the incomparable Kellie Lampo, now in her second year as a starter at Harding University, played on the varsity level. Lampo’s mother, the former Lori Stephens, played for great Lady Lion teams that came up short in March alongside two more Jessieville all-timers, Nancy Castleberry and Tammy Oates.
What I wouldn’t give to see another game in old Glazener Gymnasium. The memory fixes on an early 1980s affair that the Lady Lions, with the incandescent Holli Tucker, shot down a Caddo Hills team helmed by former Jessieville coach Jimmy Reppo. Darrell Oates, Tammy’s dad and himself a former Jessieville player, coached the Lady Lions that night. The legendary Joe Taylor coached the Jessieville boys, one of his best players, Robbie Davis, with a son on the school’s current team.
The three-point line changed Arkansas high school basketball — not necessarily to best advantage, I might add — and drove some veteran coaches to the point of distraction. One night in the early 1990s, Taylor grimaced when a senior, leaving his basketball smarts on the bus, needlessly launched one from long range late in a close game against Caddo Hills. Jessieville still won, I think, and cornered after the game, Taylor smiled and said, “I used to could really coach that 1-3-1 zone defense.”
On more than one occasion, Taylor fielded post-game questions on the phone from a Hot Springs nightspot. I’ve had former co-workers, who covered Jessieville teams while here, ask, “How’s coach Taylor?” His teams could massage (that is, hold) a basketball like a masseur working an ailing back.
During philosophy class one day, Taylor said, “We used to do nothing up here but have school and play basketball. Now it seems like we do everything but that.”
Taylor’s successor at Jessieville found himself in over his head, and the two of us, it can be said, did not exchange Christmas cards. I got along better with Jerry Chumley and Eddie Lamb, two former Bryant teammates who coached Jessieville teams in the magical 2006-07 season.
With Chumley off to Benton the following year, in came Cutter Morning Star graduate Matt Carter from Berryville to coach the Lady Lions. Carter’s first team included two players who defined Jessieville basketball, senior Mandy Masino and freshman Grier Bennett — at times referred to in these pages as Masino Royale and Mona Lion. In almost 40 years of covering high school athletics for this newspaper, Bennett (she of the mystic smile) is the one player I would most like to call a teammate.
Last season was the first since coming to Hot Springs that I did not know either Jessieville coach personally. Correcting that oversight, I can affirm that Jared White and Magen Scrivner, both in their second years at the school, understand what the people sitting in those blue seats want to see.
White’s boys team delivered the goods in the Larry Ray Memorial championship game Saturday night. Chase Pedersen’s three-pointer at the buzzer produced a 51-50 victory over Prescott that they’ll be talking about locally in 2019 or the year 2525.
To me it was just another basketball night at a school where pictures of valedictorians and board members hang in the gymnasium alongside those of athletes. And on some nights, especially when the home team needs help, the portraits seem to come off the wall and wear a uniform.