I did some online newspaper research about this game. I now know our hapless Wildcat squad played the Vikings on December 1, 1970. Yesterday, I said we lost the game by just over fifty points. I was wrong. We lost by forty-nine points. The final tally was 106-57.
Finding this score brought back a memory of what a deluded kid I was in high school, how willing I was to express false confidence, how very little self-knowledge I had. In the locker room after the game, we Wildcats were dejected. We'd just been humiliated by a far superior opponent and we might have all known, though we wouldn't say it, that we didn't have much of a basketball team.
Our coach, Larry Curry, walked into the locker room and declared: "They won't score 100 points on us next time."
I responded: "Hell, they won't even beat us."
I'm still embarrassed that I said such a clueless thing. We could have played the 1970-71 Vikings team a hundred times and never beaten them. They were tall, fast, and experienced and we were short, slow, and green.
The game with CdA was contested on a Tuesday night. We licked our wounds during the week, practiced hard, and traveled to Ferris High School on Friday night. I looked up the score of that game. Ferris defeated us 102-52.
Ah! That was our fifty point loss.
Under the headline, "'Century' Victim to Take on Zags", these paragraphs appeared in the December 5, 1970 Spokane Daily Chronicle's encapsulation of the Ferris game:
,
Kellogg helps Gonzaga Prep open its 1970-71 high school basketball campaign tonight in Spokane and the visiting Wildcats have to be hoping they will not help another team join the "Century Club".
Kellogg was whipped 102-52 by Ferris here last night. It was the same Panhandle team that was the victim when Shadle Park set a City record in notching a 106-55 victory early last year.
The Chronicle didn't bother to mention that we surrendered over 100 points to CdA just four days earlier, helping them enter the "Century Club".
By the way, I checked the December 7, 1970 Spokane Daily Chronicle. We held Gonzaga Prep to 70 points the night after surrendering 102 points to Ferris.
Although we denied the Zags admission into the "Century Club", we could only muster 55 points ourselves and started our dismal 1970-71 season at 0-3, having given up 278 points in three games.
Oh! Later in the season, my prediction that "Hell, they won't even beat us" didn't pan out.
CdA came to Andrews Gymnasium at Kellogg High School and drubbed us. I don't know the final score, but Coach Curry's prediction was right: they didn't score 100 points against us again.
2. I had time to do all that research into the opening of the 1970-71 basketball season because I rested quite a bit today, fighting off the bug I mentioned yesterday. The rest helped a lot. I did get out, though. I thoroughly enjoyed driving over to MOM's Organic to pick up a few groceries for dinner, I stopped in at the Sunoco station where Jens replaced a headlight bulb that had gone out, and I picked up a few things at the Co-op.
3. If you read this blog of mine very often, you might have noticed a word missing over the last two and half months or so: eggplant. Today, however, I made a green curry for the Deke and me and poured it over rice noodles, eggplant, onion, green beans, and tofu. It was a mild curry. I wish I'd made it a little spicier because spicy things are medicinal for me. It was really fun, though, to make some curry again and to work with my old friend eggplant in the kitchen after our too long of an absence from each other.
No comments:
Post a Comment