Isherwood column: In another league
By Justin Isherwood
McDill Graded, LeRoy Heiser principal, had a basketball team; we played Roosevelt, Saint Pete’s, Saint Stan’s. Basketball was a native sport because every car garage of the era had a basketball hoop attached, as did every god-fearing haymow and its basketball hoop. Here the similarities of the game ended; the game we played and the game of basketball known to townees. Excuse the epithet.
For farm kids there was an emotional trauma playing this game of basketball indoors, not at all the same game as outdoors or a haymow. Dribbling that basketball in a haymow caused a seismic frequency to gain grip on the barn, where the very frame of this great timbered beast began a kind of sympathetic oscillence. A like experience not known to occur until really big rock concerts came to be, whose wall of loud speakers and sub-woofers attached to the Continental Plate gained a pounding rhythm you could feel in the landscape.
In haymow basketball we had the similar ambiance of a half million audience swaying and stomping their feet. A barn could do a verse of “We Will Rock You” on its own as the dribble was picked up and reverberated through 40,000 tons of hay bales, barn beams surrounding lactating females.
To the negative, we played haymow basketball wearing barn rubbers, stocking caps, often two sweatshirts, bib-overalls and eight inch barn shoes at seven pounds each, this entire assembly dependent on the ambient air temperature. On our hands were Fleet Farm yellow fuzzies or chopper mitts. The game of basketball wearing chopper mitts is a great leveler of competition. This is particularly important to a game where any over 6-foot tall tend to hog the air space.
McDill Graded regularly lost to Saint Pete’s and Saint Stan’s, who were accustomed to indoor basketball. Personally, I had a hard time appearing in public wearing basketball trunks, as were little more than colored underwear.
To the consequence three quarters of the game had elapsed before I could refrain from dropping my hand to attend to other things. By this juncture Saint Pete’s had an insurmountable lead. At the time I did not understand why half the game wasn’t played in bib overalls to balance the competition. As noted, we regularly lost to Saint Pete’s and Saint Stan’s, neither played haymow basketball with mittens on much less the barn rubbers.
Yet to detail the difference in recoil of a basketball at 70 degree temperature and the same ball at minus 10 degrees. A warm basketball is like warm bread, warm coffee, warm women, a whole different animal. Cold basketballs don’t exactly dribble, to say this ball bounces is more literary than a fact. Getting it to bounce required three times the foot pounds of energy put into the dribble. The basketball at 20 degrees of air temp is more like a shotput event.
If only the ball had been chilled in a chest freezer a couple days before the game, McDill Graded might have stood a chance. Or if the court had been cooled to somewhere of 20 degrees, better yet minus 10 that would have been a fair game.
The NBA has yet to create that separate league of basketball played at 20 degrees and a suitably chilled ball. To include mittens, Feet Farm “yellow fuzzies,” and barn rubbers. A game where the ball collides like a cannon-fire off the hull of the Constitution with none of the awkward recoil of a 70 degree basketball; instead drops off the rim with the inertia of an oak stump and as much bounce.
That was haymow basketball.