FRONT-PORCH GOSPEL: This life story begins in 1973 (kind of) part 68
Sonny always leaned over that half-door and intently watched the games in progress. It was almost as if he were studying the game, watching every player’s tendency, determining their weaknesses, and then making a game plan of how he would plot to stop that player if he were playing him.
Sonny was studious that way, a true student of the game. He was to basketball what Preacher Harvey and Uncle River were to the Bible.
Sometimes during a game, a loose ball would get away and roll over to him, and he would lean over that half-door, grab the ball on the bounce, and instead of throwing it back to the players, he’d shoot it from that spot and hit nothing but net. I never knew how he could shoot the ball that far with so little leverage, but he had the strength to do it.
He also had the strength of a tough Georgia patrol like Vicki Lawrence sang about in “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia.” He was Johnny-on-the-spot if anything amiss transpired on the court, which was often. He would holler out and correct the disturbance without an ounce of quiver in his voice, and the players got the point.
Not a single day went by in all those years where the fellas did not get into it over a foul call. That applied equally to the later years when I would return religiously to my Georgia homeland twice a year and pop in on this same floor and take part in a noon league that the guys I grew up playing with had formed, along with a few new guys who had moved into town.
By then, they were businessmen, showing up in suits and ties, changing clothes, and duking it out for an hour on the hardwood in lieu of eating lunch. I think as older players they were more volatile than when they were young. Grown men can debate and haggle a point better than young men. You could hear the chatter of angry voices to Callaway Stadium three hundred yards to the west, just across Dallis Street.
I always smile when I think back to all this, and I think of Jim Croce who hit the nail on the head when his famous song filled the airways in the summer of ’73: “You don’t pull on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit in the wind, you don’t pull off the mask of the ol’ Long Ranger, and you don’t mess around with Jim.”
That was one of the lessons learned in the summer of ’73 and one everybody ought to learn if they want to see their full allotment of birthdays. The lesson was written in big, bold letters and flashed all the colors of the rainbow in your mind like a neon sign on a liquor store in the bad part of town.
When the basketball crew went from young to gray, I figured out that at that noon-time basketball league at the Y playing ball on their lunch hour was so they could yell at somebody – anybody! – because they couldn’t yell at their bosses or their customers, and they sure couldn’t yell at their wives when they walked in the door at night. It was hard for me to imagine, but I am sure that – as tough as big red-headed Kilgore, savvy southpaw Ken Carter, and rough 6' 2" Sauter, they were meek as lambs when they came in their front doors in the evenings. I may be half a bubble off, but I don’t think so.
The same might be said of Sonny, too, even though his job as the peacemaker-slash-bouncer of the Y put him at another level altogether. He ruled that part of the Y and was always in the equipment room adjoining the gym.
He was the first person you saw entering the hallway from the side door, one of two entrances for the Y. The front door was on the west side facing Callaway Stadium and led to the ping pong and TV room, along with some other big glass rooms where I suppose they had dance classes and such, although I never frequented those areas.
All the rooms were glassed in, so what you did at the Y was not done secretly. What you did at the Y didn’t stay at the Y, I can promise you that’s a fact.
“Cheyenne,” I said, turning back to him in the middle of the story, “I’ll tell you a story about that in a bit because I told it to Corrina when we left the gym later that evening, and it proves that the Y, unlike Vegas, kept no secrets. What happened at the Y was spread all over town before the sun went down. That’s a fact.”
Cheyenne smiled, partly because of how I said it, probably, and partially because he saw how we were laying one story on top of another like one of Grandma’s five-layer coconut cakes.
Unlike the sweaty gym in the back, the front part of the Y was air-conditioned. The Kilgore’s and Sauter’s of the world stayed back in the sweat box; but the softer sort would spend a good bit of time playing ping pong up front in the cool area. I spent a reasonable amount of time in the air-conditioned area myself – although I was the exception to the rule of tough guys not hanging out up there – and I might even have been ping pong champion had it not been for an older man named Frog who would come in to play almost every day. I never heard Frog say a word in all the years he came to the gym to play ping-pong. He would just grunt as he played, just like a frog. He was the first player I ever knew who held his paddle upside down, and he could slam better than anybody I ever saw. He could slam your slam, and you weren’t hitting it when it came back at you a hundred miles an hour. On top of that, he was left-handed. Hitting one of his balls was like hitting Sandy Koufax, something only players like Hank Aaron or Willie Mays could do in those days. Willie Mays once said that he knew every pitch Koufax was going to pitch and he still couldn’t hit him. That was the way it was with Frog.
I only saw Frog get beat once in those years. My classmate David Hart, would come to play wielding a thick, cushioned paddle, not the hard sandpaper-feeling kind we always used. He could put a spin on that ball that would prove to neutralize Frog’s lefthanded slams. You’d get ready to swing at it the way you would do ordinarily when it sizzled over the net, and the ball would just curve a foot away from where it should’ve been going – as we said, like a Sandy Koufax curve, or it would curve into your chest where you had no chance to get a paddle on it. Somebody set up the match for Frog to play Hart, and there must’ve been thirty people standing outside those glass windows watching and another twenty inside. Frog talked all through that match, at least his kind of talk. Normally, he would grunt every ten seconds or so, but he shortened the wait time significantly that day.
David delivered the knock-out blow by turning one of Frog’s slams back on him with a ball spinning like a ballet dancer, giving him a hard-fought twenty-one to nineteen win over our ping-pong Goliath. Frog let out a grunt that must’ve lasted half a minute. Nobody knew he was a sore loser because we had never seen him before, and I never saw him lose again. But that day, he had one of the longest conversations I ever heard with himself. It was a “Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr,” a shallow breath, followed by another “Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.” He conversed with himself that way from when the game was over until he hit the door on a run and headed home. You could’ve heard a pin drop while he picked up the bag he brought. Everybody stood silently, partially from having seen Frog get beat and partially just out of respect for the man they’d never seen get beat.
The scene reminded me of when I watched the classic “To Kill a Mockingbird” at the fire station one summer afternoon when I was about nine and watched with tear-filled eyes as Atticus packed his briefcase and all the Blacks in Maycomb County stood up on the balcony in silent respect. I never thought about it until years later, but maybe they were the ones who gave the name “balcony people” to those who are always there with you and for you, no matter what.
I felt bad for Frog after that. David was a smart fella who would go on to go to Auburn, make a great deal of money in business, and become the consummate Southern gentleman whose personality probably allowed him to spend as much time on the golf course as in the office. He could do a lot of things in life. Frog – well, playing ping pong was the only thing I knew him to do.
Somebody came back and set up a rematch for the two, and word spread quickly, so twice as many people came that night. I think it may have been the only time in the history of the Y that the sweaty gym was as quiet as a graveyard. Even Kilgore and Sauter left the court to watch that debacle. I left the gym with those tough guys, too. I left a tad early even to make sure I got a good vantage point for the epic rematch. The match went way into overtime, with the winning score about thirty to twenty-eight. I didn’t just watch that match that night, I did what Sonny did. I studied it. I watched both players’ faces – intense, focused, neither blinking, like a poker player in the heat of a high-stakes game.
But, in the end, Frog came out on top in that rematch, and I’ve studied how that came about over the years. I think I’ve finally figured out why he beat David that time. It wasn’t because he was better but because it meant more to him. Once, after Frog sent a slam that even David couldn’t handle, David glanced over at me where I was standing in the corner facing him, and he gave me a wry smile, so I knew he wasn’t quite as focused as Frog was.
I often wondered about something else. I wondered if David didn’t let Frog win the rematch. David was a nice guy like that – a true Southern gentleman, as I said – and I could see him doing that very thing. I think David knew what I knew. David could do many things better than most, but ping pong was the one thing Frog could do better than anybody else.
He didn’t want to take that away from him.
Coach Steven Ray Bowen served as a teacher and basketball coach at Red Oak High from 1998-2012 and recently spent two years teaching and coaching at Ferris. He and his wife Marilyn (the “amazin’ blonde”) served many years with the Church of Christ of Red Oak at Uhl/Ovilla Roads, but now spend time evangelizing in several states in addition to Coach’s work as a writer and author, including the writing of the ongoing novel/memoir here in the Press. Call or text (972) 824-5197, or email coachbowen1984@gmail.com, or see frontporchgospel.com.