Hoop Dreams At St. Joe's

Gopher forward Rodney Williams, a junior jumping jack, takes off with a leap from the free throw line, palms the basketball high over his head as he's suspended in mid-air, squirts between two taller defenders, apexes when his elbow is rim high, and slams the ball through the hoop. Two points! I turn to my wife, Mary (Momma Cuandito), and proclaim, "Rodney must have been watching film of me shooting layups at St. Joe's." She rolls her eyes and subtlety shakes her head from side to side. She's heard that joke before, maybe a hundred times. Getting no verbal response from her, I laugh at my own joke, as I am wont to do.

Actually, I did in fact play basketball for St. Joe's, my grade school in Libertyville, Illinois. In honor of Final Four Weekend which starts tomorrow, I thought I'd regale you with some memories of my one-year playing career.

St. Joseph School was housed in a large old two-story brick building, with no cafeteria or gymnasium. The Sisters of Mercy ran the school with the proverbial iron fist. The students were there to learn. Period. Extra curricular athletic activities for the youngsters (and by "youngsters" I mean boys) were left to the town's Little League and the Boys Club. Neither organization offered basketball, only softball, baseball and football. Things changed a little when a large addition was built for our school, just in time for the beginning of my eighth grade in the fall of 1960. We still didn't have a cafeteria, but at least now we had a gym. If you build it, they will come - - a basketball team, that is. The incarnation of the mighty St. Joe basketball squad occurred that winter.

There were twelve guys, all eighth graders, on our team, and our schedule included home and road games against many of the Catholic grade schools in northern Lake County. Our coach was a rotund middle aged fellow named Tom Pierce, who stood about five foot nine. He started the same five guys every game, and his rotation most of the time was ten deep, meaning that one other poor soul and I were riding the pines. This would not have been quite so ignominious were it not for the fact that St. Joe's did not win a single game all year. True, we were playing schools that had gymnasiums (probably) long before we did, and therefore fielded teams reaching back to fifth or sixth grade. But, you'd think that the law of averages would have enabled St. Joe's to come out on top at least once. Nope, it never happened.

I don't remember having too many practices in our shiny new gym, but I do recall, with clarity as if it were yesterday, two incidents that occurred at practice under the tutelage of the great Coach Pierce. During one of our first gatherings, I was dribbling the ball near center court in a four-on-four drill, when he loudly blew the whistle and yelled, "Double dribble!" He grabbed the ball from my hands, awarded it to the other side, and play resumed. A minute or two later, it was deja vu all over again. As I was dribbling he blew the whistle, this time even louder, and cried out with disdain, "Double dribble! Double dribble!!" The other side took possession and we carried on. I never knew what double dribble meant until after practice when I sheepishly asked one of my teammates. I guess Coach Pierce was too busy strategizing for the next opponent to take ten seconds to explain the rule to a kid who'd never played on a basketball team before.

The second practice incident left me feeling even lower. Around mid-season, the entire team was running around the perimeter of the court to warm up. The great molder of men, Coach Pierce, blew his whistle and called everyone over to the side to huddle up, except he instructed my teammate Tom S (I don't want to use his last name, although I can assure you I know what it was - - in fact, I saw him back in Libertyville about six years ago) to keep running. In the huddle he said to the eleven players (paraphrasing), "Even though Tom is not very good, I want you guys to remember that he is a member of our team. He is trying as hard as he can." This struck me as both odd and ironic. Keep in mind that Coach Pierce was not talking to the Dream Team. He was addressing a bunch of guys who had not come within fifteen points of winning a game. Tom S was no worse than at least eight or nine other guys on the team, but how would Pierce know? He had his unswerving rotation for the games. As you might have guessed by now, Tom S was the "other poor soul" to whom I referred two paragraphs above. I always wondered if the coach said the same thing to the team about me when I wasn't nearby.

As for my "blink of an eye" participation in actual games, I remember three things from that season fifty-one years ago. When we played Santa Maria on the road in Mundelein, we were getting stomped by over twenty-five points, and as the clock was winding down I had not yet been called to offer my valuable services. Up to that point I had usually played maybe two to three minutes a game. I figured Pierce was afraid if I went in, the margin would climb to thirty-five points in quick order. Then, with exactly four seconds left in the game (that is not a typo), he had me go in. Despite my absolutely heroic efforts during those four seconds, I could not snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

The second game action memory was also on the road, this time against St. Gilbert's up in Grayslake. Toward the end (when else?) of another lopsided game, I found myself with the ball, wide open at the top of the key. This was a shot I had been practicing forever on the playground, usually in a game of horse. I stroked the shot, it looked right on target with good rotation, but it hit the heel of the rim, bounced a foot in the air, and fell off to the side. Why, you might ask, do I remember that shot, especially when it didn't go in? The answer is very simple: in my basketball career, that was the only shot I ever took! Yep, I scored exactly zero points in the only year I played on a basketball team.

At the end of January, 1961, my family moved from Libertyville to Bettendorf, Iowa. That leads me to my third and final game memory. In my last game for St. Joe's before I left for Iowa, we had a home game, and Coach Pierce had me start. I did not ask for the honor; maybe my dad slipped him a sawbuck, I don't know. Anyway, before every game the five cheerleaders would go on the court to do a cheer which included the girls taking turns to name the five starters. "Mike, Mike, he's our man, if he can't do it, Billy can! Billy, Billy, he's our man, if he can't do it..." I can't recall who our opponent was that day, but I do remember the cheerleader who called out my name. It was Linda Donino. When you are a thirteen year old eighth grader, you notice things like that.

By the time we arrived in Bettendorf it was too late in the season for me to join my new school's team. Nine months later, I tried out for the freshman team at Assumption High School in Davenport, hoping that somehow I could go from an eighth grade benchwarmer to a regular player. Instead, I was cut from the first round of tryouts. My illustrious basketball career was over.

Linda Donino? I haven't seen her since I headed west in 1961. To borrow some words from "Signs" by the Five Man Electrical Band, I hope she's alive and doin' fine. I wonder if she realizes that when the history of basketball is written for the ages and the sport's greatest moments are relived, her name will be right there, along with Wilt, Magic, Bird, Michael and Kobe.