TERRE HAUTE —
Lights down, tree out, another year gone at the Classic.
It seems as though 2011 came to an end in more than one way for me on the last day of the year. Despite the gray chill of a damp afternoon, I managed to get the last of my Christmas lights unclipped from the gutters, reeled in my extension cords and dragged our needle-dropping tree out of the living room to reside near our wood line as a nesting spot for the birds.
But despite all the housecleaning chores — I also policed our yard for wind-blown bows and silk poinsettias — I’ve taken the time to reflect on the passing of another Pizza Hut Wabash Valley Classic, which in the past 12 years has become as traditional for me as eggnog and Yule logs.
I enjoyed this Classic perhaps as much as any I’ve ever seen. Of course, I say that every year. The PHWVC allows me, just for its four days, to pretend that I am a sportswriter again, gives me an opportunity to revive the column I started so many years ago and, in just a short period of time, allows me to watch about as much high school basketball as my backside can take.
Here’s a bit of what I took in…
• We interrupt this program — Gary Fears, the godfather of the Classic, is usually the first guy I look up when I get to the gymnasium for the opening game each year. His Day One jitters are as predictable as my appetite for Christmas fudge, so when he seemed a bit preoccupied in the half-hour before Bloomfield and Marshall kicked off the tournament Tuesday, I knew things were going according to plan.
“Things are out of sync today,” Gary said. He was worried about malfunctioning scoretable lights and a balky Internet connection, and whatever else someone who organizes a four-day event for 12,000 people has to worry about. A full gymnasium, a hard-working crew of Terre Haute North staffers and a good game later, Gary seemed to be past his technical difficulties and enjoying the basketball. That’s how the plan was supposed to go too.
• The sailor with the camera — I was happy to spend a little time during the Classic with Tribune-Star photographer Joe Garza. You would think that as a writer for the newspaper, I’d see Joe frequently, but that’s not the case, particularly not this year because he just got back from doing an overseas stint with the Navy.
“I was in a staging area on the Gulf of Aden,” Joe told me when he was explaining where he’d been. “You look one direction and there’s Somalia, and you look another and there’s Yemen, and in another there’s Ethiopia,” he said. “I knew I was getting acclimated to the heat over there,” he added, “when I told a friend one day that it ‘wasn’t bad’ outside. It was 95 degrees…” Joe said it regularly topped 120 degrees.
Despite it being a “dry heat,” I imagine that Joe was grateful to see it drizzling and 40 degrees here at home. We, on the other hand, should just be grateful for Joe.
• Oprah’s Book Club — One of the great things about covering games at the Classic is the great seat I’m given and the company I get to keep while sitting in it. Indiana State University men’s basketball coach Greg Lansing joined me in cushioned-chair comfort on the first and last days of the tournament, a trip to Iowa to face the Drake Bulldogs sandwiched in the days between.
Much to my surprise, Lansing said less about basketball in his time at my table than he did about books. “So, what are you reading these days?” he asked as he sat down just before he was to watch his prize recruit, Sullivan’s Rhett Smith, face Rockville in a great small-school matchup that went to the wire.
I discovered that Lansing likes thrillers and espionage, a genre with exciting finishes and non-stop action. “I mostly read when I am traveling,” he said. Let’s hope he can settle down with a great Vince Flynn novel on his way to an NCAA regional game with his Sycamores in March.
• Where the Buffalo Roams — I was joined for a while by Sheldon Oberholtzer, a former teaching and coaching friend of mine, who is reveling in the glories of retirement these days. As we chatted about this and that, Ernie Baysinger — a friend I’ve made through the Classic — walked by as he headed toward the aroma of a refreshment stand’s popcorn bags. Oberholzter interrupted himself in mid-sentence to ask, “Is that Baysinger?”
When I assured him that it was, he told me that Ernie was a real crackerjack player for the Freedom Aces at the time Sheldon played for neighborhood rival Patricksburg. Later, as the two reminisced a bit over the glories of Owen County hoops, Sheldon brought up Freedom’s Bob Buffalo, a “real good player.”
“I think it was the Brazil newspaper that used a headline one time about him that read that Freedom was ‘where the Buffalo roams,’” Oberholtzer said.
• Something in the water — I had a former student of mine stop by to point out that her son, the diminutive Luther Mathas, was warming up for Riverton Parke’s Panthers before they played Casey in the Classic’s third game. “He has to be the shortest player in the history of the tournament,” his mom, Joni, proudly told me. Being vertically challenged never stopped her from facing tough times, so I imagine that her 5-foot-4 sophomore son is more than willing to stick his nose into trouble too.
This Classic may have had more than its share of big players — no fewer than eight were 6-7 or better — but two of the best moments were supplied by its shortest participants, all on Parke County rosters.
As time wound down as the Panthers faced Rockville on Day Two, Mathas stepped onto the court at nearly the same time that Rox coach Dave Mahurin called Kiontre Wilkey’s number on the Rockville bench. Kiontre, a freshman, is listed as 5-8, but clearly Mahurin bought a defective measuring tape because Mathas has Wilkey by an inch. The two were squared off as the game’s final buzzer sounded.
Mathas and Wilkey may have had their moments in the Classic, but Turkey Run’s Justin Paddock stole the show with an appearance that fellow writer Andy Amey has written about as well.
Paddock, another freshman who’s around the 5-4 mark, wasn’t listed in the tournament program, but with about two minutes left in the Warriors’ loss to Terre Haute South, North’s cheer block (I’ll mention these fans later too) began chanting: “Put in Paddock… Put in Paddock…” With 1:30 left on the clock, Turkey Run Coach Grant McVay did just that.
With South defender Peter Tanoos giving Paddock a little space to shoot (one of the Classic’s classier moments) the TR guard hit nothing but net from the top of the key, and a celebrity was born. After the game, Paddock was deluged with high fives and autograph seekers — again, mostly from North’s young fans.
• As Julie Andrews would say … — Here are a “few of my favorite things,” from the Classic:
Best team warmup routine: Marshall Lions;
Best games: Rockville-Sullivan and North-South on Day One and West Vigo-Marshall on Day Four;
Best hair: That of a decidedly senior citizen who sat in the North stands sporting a spiked pink do on championship night;
Best dunk: Smith’s two-hand slam against the Rox;
Best T-shirt: One worn by a young man sitting in North’s seating section that read: “Lazy but talented”;
Best cheer block: It’s tough to beat Terre Haute North’s for size and originality (“If you’re losing and you know it, clap your hands,” was one of their favorites), but those from Marshall and Sullivan came very close;
Best Hospitality Room food that wasn’t pizza: Whoever made the chili can adopt me now;
Best moment on the floor not involving a basketball: The cheerleading at this Classic was outstanding, but when Sullivan and North’s cheerleaders hooked up in a back-flip showdown during a third-quarter break on championship night, they took it to another level;
Best singing of the National Anthem: If anyone can do a better job than 11-year-old Carsyn Wayland’s rendition just before the championship game Friday night, I’d like to hear it.
Another all-tournament team: Each year, an all-tournament team is selected, and everyone involved in the voting knows it’s a tough thing to whittle it down to just 10 players. I keep a running list in my notebook of guys who, although not always the biggest scorers, are always leaving skin on the floor, or setting screens, or making that last great pass. This list is far from complete too, but here’s my All-Dirty Work team: Bloomfield’s Curtis Hasler and Ben Hays; Monrovia’s Grant Benefiel; Riverton’s Cody Vauters; West Vigo’s Cade Lindsey and Nathan Gregg; Casey’s Zach Murphy; North’s Austin Lewis and Ross Sponsler; Marshall’s Logan Cannady and Taylor Maurer; Rockville’s Jordon McFall; Shakamak’s Brodie Crowe; South’s Danny Etling; South Vermillion’s Philip Harpenau; and Sullivan’s Caleb Turner. My Dirty Work Team Captain: Sullivan senior Bryce Bement.
And, so it went for another year…
Mike Lunsford
SIDELINES: Good for even a traditional Classic buff
- Mike Lunsford
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Time to become one of the boys of summer again …
Besides writing for a living, I teach school, and I’m not ashamed to tell people that I still love my classroom. I’ve been a teacher for 33 years, all of them in the same school district, and virtually all of them in the same building. But I also have to tell you that if the next few weeks don’t slide by pretty quickly, I may just let loose of the last thread of sanity from which I have been dangling for a while now. There are a lot of teachers out there who feel the same way.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: It’s time for us to get the real lowdown on dirt…
I have had my hands in the soil as of late. Two Fridays ago, I planted a viburnum bush, three chrysanthemums and a yellow poplar, not because it happened to be Earth Day, but because it was sunny and warm, and I had the whole afternoon to myself. The dirt I scraped out of and back into the shallow holes I dug near a backyard picket fence smelled good, and when dampened with a few sprinkles of water, it soon found its way into the deep wrinkles of my knuckles and under my fingernails. For the most part, I have nothing but good things to say about dirt.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Make big money: Raise worms at home for fun and profit…
When I think about all of the crazy things my brother and sister and I did just to make a few dollars when we were kids, I can’t help but feel a little sorry for teens this summer as they try to find jobs in what is supposed to be a very tight market. Money, to say the least, was a rare commodity when we were growing up, but you have to at least give us credit for trying.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: ‘When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d…’
Had white lace curtains been hanging in the west window of my cabin, I would have had a perfect Wyeth painting to watch last Thursday. A gentle breeze was wafting through my screens, and the sunlight of a warm late March day was fractured by the window sill as it poured onto my legs and feet. I could catch the scent of lilacs as it was carried in by that wind, and it and the subtle melody of the chimes that hang just outside made me as lazy as an old cat.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: A report from the country as a new season brings sense of renewal
Regardless of what the calendar may yet say, spring has happened. It couldn’t have come too soon, and it wasn’t just last week and its windy 70s that have convinced me. I have been keeping a journal of sorts in my head for a fortnight now, stashing away reports of birds and buds and sounds in the crammed cabinets of my mind, all in a file marked, “The New Season.”
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Feeding time at the homestead draws a host of new guests
I stepped outside into the warmth of an unusually mild early March morning last week to do what I always do just before I grab my briefcase and book bag and lunch bag and head off to work. It’s nearly always dark when I leave, even as the sun gets up earlier and earlier in the late winter, so I often go about the business of feeding our cats with porch lights on and a flashlight in hand.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Taking a road less traveled in this illogical life
If you can still recall reading the poetry of Robert Frost in your high school English class years ago, I imagine that you can conjure up a line or two from his “The Road Not Taken.”
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Books open our eyes to that which we will never see
I got a letter last week from a friend, Sister Margaret Quinlan, who lives amidst the beauty of the St. Mary-of-the-Woods campus. Besides the email space and the time she invests in describing the flowers and trees and birds that she shares with her roomies out there, as well as her accounts of teaching and traveling, Margaret most often writes about books. She loves them, and she knows I do, too.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Hoping to master the art of taking a nap
I got away from work as early as I could one day last week. It was a cloudy day, filled with grayness and rain, and my head felt as if I had inhaled my pillow the night before. My throat suggested I’d swallowed a wood rasp, too, and my eyes felt as though I was looking through someone else’s glasses. Yet, I had work do, this column being on the list of chores.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Windy companion finally gives him the cold shoulder
The wind came to visit us this week. We live on the knob of a hill that overlooks a Raccoon Creek valley, and it is a breezy spot year-round, but this wind was the kind that ushers in a full-blown front from Canada, perhaps just to remind us that cold weather is going to be the boss around here for a while. No matter how surprising our mild winter has been so far, this kind of wind tells us not to expect many more warm days over the next few months.
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SIDELINES: Good for even a traditional Classic buff
Lights down, tree out, another year gone at the Classic.
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THE OFF SEASON: The more things change, the more they keep changing
I must have had at least a dozen people ask at my son’s wedding a few weeks ago whether I cried, or “how I was handling losing him.” I think they all knew just how tight I am with my two kids, and thought I must have come completely unglued when it finally hit me that he was on his own for good, that the rules had changed nearly as much in my life when he said ,“I do,” as they did for him.
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Lunsford signing new book at Brazil Coffee Grounds
Parke County writer Mike Lunsford will be signing his latest book, “A Place Near Home” (Shade Tree Press; $15) from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday at Coffee Grounds, Bakery and Coffee Shop in Brazil.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: In the neighborhood with the ‘fantastic’ Mr. Fox
As we drove home late one night last week, my wife and I, both a bit drowsy and anxious for a warm bed and a long nap, were surprised to see a red fox as it darted across the road. He made his appearance in a flash — just a bit of nose and fur and bushy tail — as he jumped out of a ditch in front of our car and was caught in the glare of our headlights on his way to the relative safety of an apple orchard.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The lizard wore long johns, and other Halloween tales
We stocked our house with a supply of Halloween candy last week; Joanie and I stopped into the new dollar store in town and filled a grocery cart with Butterfingers and Baby Ruths and Three Musketeers bars. Every aromatic bit of it has been calling to me from the orange-and-black baskets we keep on a living room trunk ever since.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Here’s to the simple beauty of an untended garden…
I can hear a combine eating its way across a nearby cornfield as I write this on a Saturday evening. It is a sound that signals the end of one season and the beginning of anot
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The Off Season: Listening to Mozart is a ‘purr-fect’ way to relax
Regardless of what some people may believe, classical music fans are not snobs. They come from all walks of life, fall into all income brackets, and they’re not required to understand or analyze anything to which they’re listening; they just need to enjoy themselves.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Fall’s arrival heralded in ever-present fencerows
As much as I hate summer to leave us, I am happy that fall is just around the corner. It has been a bone-dry season, one in which I’ve watched my yard bake and crack like an old pie crust. My wife and I are still spending our evenings going about the business of watering flowers, standing with a dribbling hose in our hands, optimistically hoping that our drought will be broken because we’ve tempted the weather fates to do us one better and give us a good rain.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The value of hard work goes well beyond a paycheck
Years ago, I used to drive into Rosedale to get my workday started with a big cup of black coffee. Every morning, Monday through Friday, until the town grocery store’s business dried up and blew away, you could have found me slipping through a back door — left unlocked for the early birds — of the old Red and White, 15 minutes before it opened for official business.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Life’s little conveniences actually can be quite annoying
I am aware that much of the language I use is outdated, stodgy, old-fashioned; I apologize.
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The Off Season: Another sad passing: One-time trendsetter can’t keep up
I wandered into the local mall bookstore the other day. My wife and I had come to town with a list of chores to do and things to buy, but whenever we venture anywhere near a place with book shelves and sales tables and racks of paperbacks, we’re attracted to the scent of ink and the sight of book covers like bees to clover .
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Overheated in Hobart and other vacation tales…
My family climbed into our van and headed to Michigan a few weeks ago, just as we do every other year or so, to stay on the great lake there, for we have come to love its cool breezes and blue water and lighthouses.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Silence is wonderful, as long as you don’t take it too far
I have visited this topic — how it is often only through inconvenience that we come to appreciate the comforts we have in life — before.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: His tolerance for insects ends with sawyer beetles
As I sloshed a can of water over a pot of red petunias a Sunday morning ago, I saw a pine sawyer beetle make its way slowly up the vinyl siding near my front door. I swatted it to the concrete, and smashed it with my shoe … with impunity, I might add.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Storm damage makes you appreciate home
My wife and I hadn’t been into town for a good while when we drove in from our place to visit her doctor and my favorite hardware store last week.
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Paying respect in more way than one way…
It has become a habit of mine on Mother’s Day to go to Rosedale Cemetery and lay a few irises on my mom’s grave.
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The Off Season: On the trail with Max the Mushroom Cat
The wet weather and a busy calendar have kept my wife and me from doing what we’ve really wanted to do for a while. Ever since the thermometer began to stay consistently above 40 and the grass started to green, we’ve wanted to get outside, get some sun on our arms, and get down to the wetlands to watch the geese make their landings with a flourish and a honk.
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THE OFF SEASON: So much to do; so little time…
My wife’s aunt, Martha Jean McCarthy, passed away earlier this month; she was 85 years old. Martha Jean was kind and generous and busy her entire life.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: A lesson plan for public schools
I am an advocate of public education; I pull no punches about that. I have taught in public schools for 32 years, and I think it is an inherently American institution.
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THE OFF SEASON: Craning to see elegance in flight
Just before midnight last night, spring officially slipped quietly into our back yards, but I doubt that any of us noticed it much this morning as we slurped our coffee or downed our eggs over this newspaper.
- More Mike Lunsford Headlines
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