My last story was about my one on one match versus Mick Glajoe at the"The Cage". I'll try to fill in some of the space in the story between those days and the first semester at UD. Like I mentioned previously, half way through that first semester Big B moved into the dorms and Big Swan and I moved into a pad above a bar called Murph's South End Tap. It was a rundown neighborhood pub located down on "the low end" right along the banks of the old Mississippi. One quick side story about renting the apartments we lived in from the rental agency. With Swan not having a job and us being evicted from the duplex on the hill, I had to pull a slick maneuver on the lady at the rental office. I gave her a friends phone number and a fake name and said it was the number to the RA at the dorms. I waited for the phone call and gave myself a great reference. I passed that trick on to some others and they used it on the same lady. From Murph's tap it was one hell of a long walk to class every day, the only good part about it was the uniqueness of the city being built on limestone cliffs that over looked the river valley. Dubuque has a really old feeling about it, with lots of brick houses and old limestone cliff side landscaping. Big Swan eventually landed a job at Wendy's where he made a few friends. One of those new friends was a kid named Mick Glajoe, who I actually shot baskets with once while still living above Murph's on the high hoop located at the grade school just up the street. For many years Big B and Shot and I would drive through Dubuque on our way to Wisconsin on fishing and hunting trips and I would see that grade school and wonder what it would be like to live in this old town and in that particular neighborhood. Careful what you wish for. The night life in Dubuque was unique, very, very different from that of the ICE. College kids were resented by much of the working class folks in Dubuque, and there was also a high degree of racism in the city. There were a few college bars located on a one block stretch on the main road between our pad and UD. There was also a chicken joint there where I always stopped to buy a plate of French fries on my way home from school (when I had any money). The most popular bar was called Gomer's. That first semester with Big B and Big Swan we hit up Gomer's a few times on the busy Friday nights. The place was packed with a line out the door sometimes. If there were any hotties to be found in Dubuque, Gomer's on a Friday night was the spot. On one of our first Gomer's experiences Big B and Swan and I were in the bar on a Friday night checking out the scene when a tough looking black kid with thick glasses and a backwards ball cap came up to us and asked each of us to take his lighter and put the flame to his hand. None of us bit on this crazy proposal. Later that night I saw the crazy masochist take his coke bottle glasses off and head out onto the dance floor, where chaos then ensued. Bodies started flying everywhere and that pretty much ended the evening for everyone. The bar was cleared, cops showed up etc... It's weird how bar fights are so unnerving and unsettling yet so fascinating all at the same time. I later heard some stories about who that bar brawling lighter toting kid was and its a good thing we avoided any confrontation with him. There is another famous Gomer's story, the most famous and infamous to me, and I wasn't even there to witness it, so what I write is only based on what I remember from hearing from other people. It seemed like crazy stuff always happened when ever I wasn't around. This was one of those instances. I was off visiting a girlfriend. Big Swan and I were still living at the Murph's South End Tap pad. Big B, Ike Lambert, and another new friend of Big B's (a UD baseball player) hit the night life and went to Gomer's on yet another Friday night, where they proceeded to drink some serious quantities of liquor. But before hitting the bar they did some pre-drinking in the dorms. There was a UD football player from Florida who always wore shorts, even in the winter. He also sported a mohawk hair style. He mixed up a huge deadly secret batch of a combination of hard liquor and dared Swan to drink it. Big mistake by a big man. At Gomer's there was a popular concoction served in a shot glass which Big Swan also hit up. The story goes that the 350 pound brother (Big Swan) was stumbling around in Gomer's knocking tables and people over as he stammered about. Eventually he was kicked out. According to Big B and Ike he was just gone all of a sudden. He wasn't spotted again until closing when he was seen outside in the crowd being held up by a group of hot young women. The story follows that he was apparently found lying along the road at the park near bye by these hot babes who took pity on him and helped him back to Gomer's to find his "friends." Ike and Big B had a serious grimace on their faces every time they told the story of how they later that night had to carry Big Swan up the wooden stairs behind Murph's up to our apartment. Swan was sick for a week after that, and that part of the story I did witness. If I would have been there I would never have abandoned Big Swan in such a condition after being kicked out of Gomer's. At the end of the summer Big Swan eventually found a new pad and a new room mate he met at Wendy's, and I moved into the dorms at the start of the next semester.

My freshman year at UD I played mostly on the JV squad. The head coach modeled his program somewhat after the Iowa Hawkeye Basketball program (the big U. in Iowa located in Iowa City which is my home town) by having a practice squad to play and practice against the varsity. Nearly all the schools in the Iowa Conference had JV teams. Most of the players on our JV squad got to see action that year at the varsity level and most of us dressed for all the varsity games. That first year the coach was using a style of play called the Loyola Maramount system. It was a high paced run and gun three point shooting offense that used a lot of players. The previous year the UD squad had all the talent in the world, but Big Mo, D Rog, Rue, Rye Hubb, Square, Trellis, and others all graduated. There was a talented returning sophomore class with players like Zeke, Ike Lambert, Darby and Brute Mahone. The freshman class too was talented. Big Mo and D Rog were coaching our JV team and we started the season with seven straight wins. We kicked the crap out of the varsity in practice on a daily basis. The first semester I shacked up in a coed dorm with two dorm mates: Ike Lambert from Hazel Green Wisconsin, and Spike from south side Chicago. These were two of the most honest and sincere guys I ever met, and it was my only semester of dorm life in all my 13 years of college. One particular incident in our dorm room sticks out as a great memory that allowed Ike and Spike and myself to bond and become closer friends. We were all settling in for the night with the lights off and in bed, or so I thought. I had to turn a light on momentarily, on and off real quick, and in that brief moment that the room was illuminated I glanced over and saw Spike on his knees at his bed saying prayers. There was a brief moment of awkward silence and then I said, "And what's he doing?" Then we all started dying laughing, not because praying was funny but because of the awkwardness of the situation. I respected Spike a lot before and after that. After the giggles left us that night we all had the "Do you believe in God" conversation.
I had a girl friend I met working at Bonanza steak house in a suburb of the ICE that then lived in the small Wisconsin town of Boscobel, located 60 minutes from Dubuque. She was the reason I had moved to the area. Before UD I had attended a junior college in Richland Center Wisconsin, just 30 minutes from Boscobel. The girlfriend was three years older than me and she had got a job as a grade school teacher in the wild turkey capitol of the world known as Boscobel. I had decided to move with her when she got the job. It was a chance for me to continue my dream of playing college ball. South West Wisconsin was so beautiful and I loved to explore and drive around in my 4 wheel drive Toyota pick up (with the awesome custom stereo system.) There are many basketball and life changing stories from the semester I spent at Richland Center, including the fact that I flipped and rolled my truck traveling between the ICE and Richland Center after a weekend of deer hunting. That particular story is called "The Curse of the Big Buck" and it tells how I barely escaped the crash alive, opening the driver side door of the truck while it lay on its side as flames burned under me and down the ice covered road from gasoline that was spilling out after the crash. I met two ballers who became friends while at UW Richland, one from inner city Milwalkee and the other from Battle Creek Michigan. I visited UD on a recruiting visit with the kid from Milwalkee when we were both thinking about transfering, and that was how I ended up at UD. Anyway, while I was living in the dorms that first full year at UD I was still dating the girl in Boscobel. Our relationship was being strained by the long distance status of the relationship. And I was still young and experiencing college life while she was starting her career. Other females in Dubuque were becoming tempting temptresses. The two ballers from UW Richland were both black kids living hip hop and basketball lives. Players they were. Having more than one girlfriend (or a wife with "mistresses") was a way of life for them, and admittingly I was somewhat influenced by the culture. So part of this culture was having many girlfriends, and at the time I thought it was super cool. I bring up Boscobel and the girlfriend because our JV team went to play at Richland Center, our eighth game of the season, JV only, no varsity on the trip because UW Richland was a junior college. The game became our first loss of the season. But before that trip occurred Ike Lambert wanted to move off campus into an apartment during winter break that year. So we got a place down the main road from UD, very near to the old duplex that Big B and Big Swan and I first lived in the year before. This new pad was called the Wilson Street Crib. I was taking care of a Doberman Pincher that I was part owner of when I first moved to Wilson street. The dogs name was Duke and he was a great dog. Eventually I had to take him back to the ICE because it became to hard to take care of him while playing on the basketball team. The game against my former school, UW Richland, came during winter break. Ike and I were already moved into the new pad. There was a road game for Varsity on the Friday night before the showdown at Richland Center. The JV team traveled and dressed for the Friday night game, and some of us even played in it and got substantial playing time. We won the varsity game Friday night, came back to Dubuque and partied hard and long into the morning. I had a new girl friend that I had met through Ike. We spent that night together and needless to say I got hardly any sleep and I was very dehydrated the next morning. The JV players only had to make it to the van early that Saturday morning for the road trip into Wisconsin. D Rog and Big Mo drove us with me giving directions. It was a nastalgic journey for me returning to old stomping grounds with a new team. The only problem was that all the guys on the team were looking like a bunch of zombies. That road trip, without the head coach present, started the trash talking and ribbing sessions that highlighted the long van rides to games that took place in and out of our conference. I think this was the trip where one of the players on the team, a red headed kid from small town Iowa was dubbed "Period Baby" by D-Rog. I really got a kick out of that and I had been waiting for my chance for some ribbing sessions with the likes of D-Rog and Mo. Most of the guys on the team weren't hip to it all, but I cherish those memories, and I loved the comradeship that existed on the teams that I traveled with and played with and the experiences with teammates that I lived with. I had a chance to ask D Rog and Big Mo about how best to recover from a long night of sexual healing. D Rog said he was once told that the best thing to do was drink lots of water. Our team was put to the test at the game that day. In short, we laid an egg. It seemed like nobody was even trying. Bye bye undefeated JV season. My old girl friend from Boscobel was in the stands watching that day. My old coach was on the other sidelines. I didn't stay at UW Richland after my first semester there because there was not enough basketball for me. I needed and liked to play everyday or whenever the spirit moved me. The IC was an oasis of basketball and games could be found at any time on almost every day of the year. Dubuque was a much larger city then Richland Center and with four colleges it offered more opportunities to find a basketball game then the small Wisconsin town. The guys on the UW Richland team complained about having to play once a week. I was also an out of state student at UW Richland and I couldn't afford tuition so when I was there I was only taking one class while trying to gain Wisconsin residency. I did get to practice with the team. My flatmate Ike Lambert had been recruited by the UW Richland coach and told me a story of how the previous year when he was on the UD JV team that the UW Richland coach said after the game during the traditional team handshakes, "You could have been playing 30 games a year Lamb!" This year that old coach had only one decent player who actually dunked on us in the game. At half time of our game after receiving a thrashing I came into the locker room and said loudly, "I quit!" I was actually just making a point and making fun of the rest of the team. In reality it seemed like they quit! But D Rog and Mo never let me live that remark down. "I quit, I quit!" D Rog used to say. He didn't get it. Even Period baby came up to me in the locker room and said, "Are you really quitting?" No one got it. I was the only one who didn't quit. I led the team in scoring, rebounding, steals, and probably in blocks and assists that day. I played my dehydrated hung over ass off. My efforts didn't matter. Period Baby was the first one to get serious playing time on the varsity and got his big break in the previous nights game, so this JV business was probably small time now for him. Havatake played like the Invisible man. He was invisible on the court and in the stat book. Usually he put up about fitty a game, no bull. Reecy "Dragon breath" Vankinscoff, usually a rebounding machine, was coming off a serious ankle sprain, so he didn't contribute much. In the game he looked like his bad foot was bolted to the court. The mad Russian Cray Murphy, starting point guard, chipped in a couple baskets but thats about it. It was a humiliating loss. The UW coach didn't have much to say to me during the post game hand shake. The old girl friend from Boscobel left as soon as the game ended and I didn't even get a chance to speak to her. She later on the phone said she thought I played well. I actually had an open fast break opportunity for a dunk near the end of the game but I had no legs that day (long night with the new girl friend). I did finger roll the rock and made the open shot, and Havatake afterwards was like, "Why didn't you dunk it?" After this game the starting JV players from the start of the season were starting to be plucked off the JV roster one by one for sole action at the varsity level. Injuries and bad play by the upperclassmen caused the JV break up. I eventually even got my chance on varsity that year.