B is for “Basketball”
By Phyllis Knox
This blog is part of a very special series created and written by Phyllis Knox, “Alphabetic Musings”, whereby she chooses a word starting with a particular letter from the alphabet and injects it with her storytelling magic.
The letter “B” is for basketball + sounds like…ba sket b(all); sport invented by James Naismith. Game played both indoors and outdoors with a minimum amount of equipment…(a basket and a ball, EH!)
James Naismith was a Canadian of Scottish ancestry who was born and raised on a farm in Almonte, Ontario, a small town near Ottawa. In the 1890’s, at age 30, he moved to Springfield, Massachusetts in the US of A where he came up with the idea of producing a round ball which could be bounced on a level surface and thrown into a straw peach basket which was mounted 10 feet high on a wall. Eventually, the bottom was cut from the bottom to make life easier, EH! Well, this sport has come a long way from a small high school gymnasium to the greatness and glamour of the Summer Olympics……it is now played on every continent and is beloved around the World.
So it is, that as a child, I TRIED to watch the National Basketball Association (NBA) games once a week on ABC (American Broadcast Corporation). The games were broadcast on Saturday afternoons but, as I mentioned above, I TRIED to watch…The act of watching was problematic because the ‘rabbit ears’ sitting on top of the black & white television had to be able to pick up the signals on a good day from far away cities south of the border (cable tv was a thing of the future). Not always easy!
Our high school, St. Pat’s (now Three Rivers Academy), had a basketball tradition as far back as the 1950’s. I remember seeing my much-older brother, Wayne, playing basketball with his esteemed team. (To this day, I am sorry to say, he still brags about their winning streaks and what a fantastic team they were! Erk!).
My next older brother, Bill, wanted to be the best, and he worked hard to be the best he could be but his team had to play against ‘The Seminary’’ (Le Séminaire St. Joseph) situated on Laviolette Street here in Three Rivers, ‘The Tech School’ (l’École Technique on Laviolette) Street and ‘The High School’ (Three Rivers High School) on the corner of Nicolas-Perrot and St. Maurice Streets). These teams were their historic rivals…forever!
Our small school had an auditorium but not a gymnasium, so all games were played elsewhere. This was a sad situation since we never got to experience at-home games at our own school…we were usually the “Visiteur” wherever we played. We did play at a rented space at the Pavillion Monseigneur St. Arnaud, which became our home court. In spite of having to face foes who could choose their best players from among their relatively huge student numbers, we did quite well – even though any young man who turned up for practice from among the small student body of less than 100 was accepted as a team member. The Green, Gold, and White team won as many – if not more – games than it lost. I think those kids must have worked harder to make up for their lack of facilities. The boys on that team WERE the most popular students EVER! All the girls went to the games hoping to be noticed by them……it didn’t quite work out that way. The boys chose the ‘French’ girls to go “out with” or to “go steady with” and not us! The two English-language schools were the only co-ed schools in town. This fact determined how girls were perceived. Because we were their classmates, it was apparently a logical extension that we girls were seen more as pals, as buddies, or as confidants; whereas the ‘French’ girls, only seen occasionally, were perceived as more exotic….so much for home-court advantage, EH?
Around 1960, girls’ basketball became popular all across Quebec. A couple of years later, I can remember being one happy, tiny, 5’2”, 100-lb, 12-year-old, 1st-year-high-school blond-with-a-multitude-of-freckles girl who was accepted as a member of what I thought was the “prestigious” basketball team! I dreamed I would become so popular and that all the boys would think I was fabulous, an outstanding athlete…that I was on my way to becoming The Head Girl, The Prom Queen, & Miss Popularity. May I add for the purposes of truthfulness, that while I loved playing basketball, I never was awarded any of the above-mentioned titles. (I did eventually – as an adult – become Miss Congeniality.)
Girls’ and boys’ basketball teams from my 1966 yearbook at St. Pat’s
Those were great years…playing basketball was my main focus (the three R’s - reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmatic, well, not so much!) Wonderful years during which I learned to share, to work hard, to follow the rules, to respect my team members as well as the opposing teams, and to win or to lose with the same spirit of good sportsmanship. I have tried to use everything I was taught by our coaches and shown through example by the other team members. I so enjoyed playing basketball for those four pivotal years. Hopefully, all those lessons-learned have served me well and have made me a better human being than I would otherwise have been. Although 55 years have passed since my last basketball game, I have never ever forgotten the feelings of belonging, and the challenges and team spirit which I experienced then!
I still watch NBA games, but now I have a huge wide-screen colour television set and a cable plan which offers four or five NBA games per evening over a 10-month span! I watch as many games as is humanly possible and maybe one or two more for good measure, EH: how good is that, EH? Canada once had two teams in the NBA, Vancouver and Toronto, but now has only the Toronto Raptors. However, as a country we have been able to produce many of the best players in the NBA league as well as excellent team members on the very best European teams.
Life has a way of “coming full circle”. All these many years later, two of my grandchildren – a 16-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl – are members of basketball teams in the same building that I once practiced in. School names have been changed – “to protect the innocent and not the guilty”…but the players are still practicing in the same auditorium as I did back in the day…and it is still not regulation size to this day, half a century later, EH!
Go Canada! Go the great White North, EH!
Signed by me, Phyllis, life-long basketball lover and aficionado of the best sport on Earth!
