Today I'll talk about the great sport of basketball. Let me take you back...to 1989...Wichita Falls... junior high. There I am, a strapping young lad, joining the basketball team. I had high hopes, which proved to be crushed by what I refer to as a coach's nightmare. I was in an awkward phase. As we all are around that time period, and I guess I was deemed not athletic (probably because it took me 20 minutes to run a mile). Now coaches are not nice people to the awkward students. Most of them never got out of being 12 in their mind and some of them decided military coaching is the best tactic. Drills, drills, drills and if you mess up, bear crawls for punishment. My first experience with humiliation came when at the start of the season the coaches bet on me. I think coach Hawkins said I would score a basket during the season while the other coaches said I wouldn't. They said if I scored a basket I would get a game ball to motivate me. Ok, it is just one basket, one lousy basket, and I was looked on like a pathetic looser who couldn't score. And yet I did score, and I got the ball and everyone celebrated when I scored. At least when I scored a touchdown in football it wasn't looked on as a false achievement, even though it was a 2-yard touchdown. One factor had to be that I only got to play about 2 minutes a game. It is hard to score when you are a bench warmer. The other awkward coaching moment happened when I wanted to get out of practice. I had my mom write a note to excuse me from practice so that I could go Christmas shopping, even though we weren't actually going. Anyway, in the middle of basketball practice I tell the coach, Coach Carmichael - 7^th graders love him, 8^th graders hate him. After I tell him he flips out of his gourd. He throws the basketball to the ground so hard it ricochets up into the rafters of the gym while screaming "Christmas Shopping!" Then he calms down and says "go, just go". That's not where it ends though. Months later I was talking about it at practice and didn't realize he was standing behind me. He heard me say it was all a rouse to get out of practice. Needless to say, I had to do bear crawls after practice. The coach asked me if I learned anything about it. I said, "Yeah, when I tell the truth, make sure you're not around." I think I ended up doing more bear crawls.

Thought of the Day

"You no-brainer rotten stinking @$##$ #$%#$%"

"Ralphie, Your mother, your mother, your mother, ewww"

-- Christmas Story