School bus decorum

I don't know who Blake Griffin is other than an NBA player who can jump and obviously jump cars.  I am impressed by anyone who can jump over a car regardless of motive.  When an LAPD fellow is in hot pursuit of a thief and jumps over a car - or even does the Clint Eastwood hood-slide - well that is impressive.

I grew up in Michigan in a town populated by whites of Polish and German descent. I'm being serious.  If your name didn't end with "ski" or "mann" you were pretty much confined to the wasp area and we really couldn't jump cars let me tell you.   I entered high school to be greeted by a basketball "system" that had produced one winning season since WWII and that was 9-6.  Most of the time they won 2-3 games a year at best.  Our class suddenly became the "great white hope" as our town was segregated at the town limits.  We had less than half a dozen black students out of 3600.  Do the math.

Our freshman year we had an A and B squad and we were 39-1 overall - the only loss to Saginaw High's freshman who had 4 players who went on to division 1 NCAA basketball and that was by something like 4-5 points. I can't remember other than my normal uniform number was #41 and I couldn't find it that game so wore #5 and we lost.  They had a center named LeRoy Blasingame who I ran up against during our entire high school career. He could really jump. I remember noticing his knees eye level on a few occasions.

So this freshman team went to junior varsity as you had to be a junior or senior to play a varsity sport at that time.  We had a new head coach and a new staff so we were "coached" by a math teacher who could do neither. Nice fellow. No idea. We played the same  teams we played the year before as freshman and went 8-8, losing in the league playoffs (we could only play 15 games total before playoffs).  Morale was in the dumps.  The varsity was in the midst of setting a Michigan record for class A ball of 40 losses in a row. Coaching wasn't a strong point.

I bring up this trip down memory lane only because in our junior season, under the head coach who brought this promising freshman team to the golden shores of continual losses, we were on a bus to Alpena, Michigan a town that time and mother nature forgot, for one of our rare long distance road trips. We get out on the court doing our pre-game drills. Not like real teams do them but just line up and do layups.  We watched in amazement how the other team did their pre-game;  stretching, perimeter shooting, guys underneath feeding guys outside to shoot, etc. and were in lines.  Finally they did a few layups and we went to mid-court to watch as they had white guys who could dunk the ball. No kidding. White men who could jump.

We lost by a zillion points - the game being over sometime during the warm ups. So we got back on the bus to go home and Kanicki, the equipment manager and varsity sports keeper of the gauze and tape came down the middle of the bus and shouted "You guys are an embarrassment. You don't deserve to wear the school colors. Its because you are slackers in practice and you talked on the way up here. I heard you talking. NO talking and no talking on the way back. Think about how you played. Now shut up."

I pulled out a book and started reading. The following Monday at practice I was tossed off the team.  And I could jump a car...and Mr. Kanicki couldn't read.