State it clear: basketball time to treasure

Like the 1972 Miami Dolphins after every National Football League team has tasted defeat, the 2000 Lakeside Rams should spring for champagne each basketball season.

That’s to honor the last state championship in the sport by a Garland County boys’ high-school team.

Has it been 21 years since Tommy White, using every last time-out at his disposal on some nights, got those Rams past Harrison in what today would be the

4A final at Pine Bluff. “Back then,” said our James Leigh, who wrote a

20-year retrospective last spring, “they insisted in having all the A’s listed (i.e., AAAA).”

That was the Landon Trusty-Andy Brakebill-Darin Wallace crowd — Wallace there for distribution, Brakebill to launch the deep shot if they ganged up on the 6-7 Trusty. (I remember Landon hanging on the rim in one close game at Lakeside, risking a technical foul, though he would insist we not go there.)

Beating Lake Hamilton in the semifinals made it doubly satisfying for the Rams. That provided symmetry with Hot Springs’

1996 boys championship team, who beat the Wolves in the finals. Lake Hamilton had some brutal losses during those years, losing to the Trojans and to Magnolia in consecutive finals and then to Greenwood, triple overtime, in the ‘98 semifinals on the Bulldogs’ home court. Former Wolf LaJuan Christon (his sister played basketball, you might remember) made the game-winning shot in the ‘98 finals against Greenwood, coached by former Cutter Morning Star head man Lance Taylor.

See how far we’ve come. Taylor is now executive director of the Arkansas Athletics Association, trying to wrap up a basketball season disrupted by the coronavirus. He’s sure to be in town often with the 5A tournaments at Trojan Arena and the overall finals next week at Bank OZK Arena.

The Christon crusher came five years after another gruesome finals defeat for a Taylor-coached team. Playing at Little Rock’s Barton Coliseum, the 1993 CMS Eagles dropped one in overtime against defending champion Buffalo Island Central. Gaylon Taylor, now the BIC superintendent, coached the Monette-based Mustangs (his brother, Bill Taylor, later won titles at BIC after one at Delta and replacing Jerry Bridges at Caddo Hills). Chip Layne, Gaylon’s best player, now is superintendent at Mammoth Spring. (Take it from someone who married a Jonesboro graduate, basketball rotates on a northeast Arkansas axis.)

Though he and sister Shameka won state titles as Hot Springs players after transferring from Lake Hamilton, LaJuan experienced the flip side as a father. In their last game for Hot Springs, as tense a game as has ever been played at Bank OZK Arena, brothers Exavian and KaJuan lost 70-66 in overtime to Forrest City in the

2016 semifinals. Trey Lenox also played for the Rodney Echolscoached Trojans, perhaps the best Garland County boys’ team without a state title since 2000 Lakeside.

The big three, as we in the newsroom called them, are the only Garland County teams playing this week. Hot Springs, in its new arena, hosts Lake Hamilton, Lakeside and others in the weeklong 5A tournament, which started Monday. It worked that way on both sides with Lake Hamilton the South conference’s top seed in girls and ranked second among South boys.

Lake Hamilton, with some additions from a whiz-bang junior-high team, is coming on in boys and the Lady Wolves rolled through the South undefeated. Both teams are to be commended for taking on top-flight opposition early, and it won’t be surprising if two or three teams in December tournaments at Wolf Arena cut down nets soon.

No one with whom I’ve

worked loved covering basketball more than Sean Saunders. A Jonesboro High graduate who knows the school’s “open the roof” chant by memory, Sean often entertained house guests (fellow writers mostly) during state-tournament week. It’s his favorite week of the year and though now in Kansas City, out of the newspaper business, he keeps a close eye on Arkansas sports.

(For what it’s worth, his 5A picks are Sylvan Hills boys and Greenwood girls. I’m clipping and saving the rest: Boys-LR Central, Magnolia, Dumas, Marianna and Nevada. Girls-FS Northside, Star City, Bergman, Melbourne and Mt. Vernon-Enola. If there is one player to watch the next two weeks, it’s Arkansas signee and McDonald’s All-American Jersey Wolfenbarger of Northside. A

6-5 guard — you read that right — Jersey and some other incomers should clear up the only problem, height, that surrounds Mike Neighbors’ artists formerly known as Lady Razorbacks.)

It’s been three years since a Garland County girls’ basketball team won a state title. Guards Ariana Guinn and Imani Honey led the 2018 Hot Springs Lady Trojans, making Joshua Smith the fourth coach in program history to take the prize. Sherry White won in 1990, Jim Elser in 1997 and

‘98 and Mark Upshaw in 2015.

Lady Trojan memories are among my fondest in covering local sports. One who likes basketball is not to have lived if denied access to Sha Hopson, a star on a team of stars in 1990. One night at Bryant, where Carla Crowder was hammering together three overall state titles in four years, Hopson came as close to making the trees sway as any Arkansas player I’ve seen. Give her a slight nod over Shameka Christon, who went on to greater glory at Arkansas than Hopson but, playing alongside Joy Oakley and Katrina Swanigan, had a stronger supporting cast for, as we headlined the team, Lady Troy.

Christon moved up as a freshman for the 1997 Lady Trojans, a five-star addition to the first of two championship teams. The 1998 team was, in its own way, deeply heroic, needing to win its last eight games just to get in the state tournament. Greene County Tech, which beat Hot Springs at the buzzer in the ‘96 finals, never had a chance in the first round at Greenwood.

Greene County Tech’s coach, Ted Cunningham, took the loss especially hard, starting when I asked in the post-game presser, “When did you know who Southwest 4 (Hot Springs’ spot on the bracket) would be?” Years later, GCT beating Hot Springs in another state tournament, Cunningham

told our Jeff Halpern that one still stung, doing his team “irreparable harm.”

Our coaches have become so gun-shy of trash talk that they virtually recite sweet nothings after games. One hopes that, against all odds, they lift the conversational wraps. Then again, perhaps a writer should look in the mirror, take stock himself, if his quotes aren’t crisp. (“Words, after all,” District Attorney Adam Schiff told an assistant on TV’s “Law & Order” in one episode, “are what we do around here.”)

Bill Taylor, then at Caddo Hills, gave me two quotes for the archive one night at Centerpoint High in a state tournament. Stephens High, then in all its glory, so moved Taylor that he said, “They’ve got an idea.” About his own team, Bill was a bit more vague, saying, “I’m not sure we have a best player.”

On the same night, Charleston beat Jessieville on a last-second shot from the corner, a heart-breaking defeat for losing coach Eddie Lamb (who now has Lakeside playing well). As I recall, it was the Charleston player’s only field-goal attempt that night.

Make no difference, said Randy Terry, Charleston’s coach. “He’s a senior,” said Terry, “and he’s supposed to take that shot.”