I lost two days of writing trying to publish stories from laptop to the internet. The laptop's mouse pad is to blame. There are a few more good stories about Ike Lambert and Big Stace from the semester I lived in the dorms. The first has to do with an ally-oop dunk Ike threw to me during our team organized pick up game sessions that took place before and after the start of the season. We were playing on the short courts in the upstairs gym at the UD sports complex. Our game was on the court nearest to coaches office. A lot of times the teams were segregated because the black guys would always pick each other. When ever I called the next game I would pick up anybody who asked me to play, but sometimes I picked up all white guys so as to demonstrate that we could whip some ass on the court. Ike was almost always on my team (Big B. was in the IC during this period). I rarely dunked in games after I suffered the ankle injury during the intramural game the first semester I attended UD. Ike threw me a pass in the pick up game from about the free throw line on a transition play and I jumped off the stride and barely caught the pass on the end of my fingertips and proceeded to hammer down the dunk on the fools under me which shook the whole backboard and posts attaching it to the wall. Ike had thrown the pass what looked like a foot or so too high, which he mentioned to me during the ride home. It was a dunk to remember. There is nothing quite like the feeling of making a play like that, which was something I had dreamed about for many years as a kid and it was an ability which I worked very hard to achieve. Nothing else in life has compared to the feeling of dunking a basketball in a game. Now a days about the closest I can come to reliving those feelings is to drink back a few brews, take a couple tokes, and write about it. The plays on the court were like artistic expressions of self in physical movement and in sport, but they only last for the brief moments when they take place and then alls thats left is the memory, the act itself for ever gone like dust in the wind. At least my stories are something that can be read and experienced over and over and by many more people.

Ike and I played the same position at one point during my first full season. He had started at the three spot but coach moved him to the four position, which is where I was playing. Coach told me that I should explain the role of the four spot in the offense to Ike. I did, incorporating many coaching lessons about flashing in the paint and posting up from not only my recent experience but from all I had learned from other coaches at the various colleges I had attended. Ike took my advice and went out on the court that night and had his best game of the season, scoring over 20 points in the game. I was a good coach and I enjoyed teaching others the craft of playing basketball.

If I'm going to talk about my dunks I better talk about the times I got dunked on. One such time I was playing in a game against a high school kid from New Orleans. The kid had connections with someone involved in the UD men's basketball program so he was allowed to participate in our team organized pick up games. On the play the kid stole an inbounds pass using an old school slick trick (which I had used before on others) and then lean in dunked on the inbounder, nuts in face and all that jazz. The problem was that I was the inbounder. Later that same afternoon I was matched up against the kid and I hit a crucial jump hook over him from the free throw elbow (I was a good three feet further away from the hoop than I thought when I had already committed to making the move). Darby was on my team that game and said "Thats how you talk shit back to him!" I didn't understand what he meant at first and replied, "I don't need to talk trash." Darby was like, "That's what I'm saying." Then I got what he meant.

The kid from New Orleans had moved to Dubuque to get away from the hood and the temptation of the street life. When playing against Ike on another occasion he knocked Ike to the ground and from the sidelines I yelled, "Help him up!" The N.O. Kid responded with a slew of swear words and something to the effect of, "I ain't pick'n that mutha up!" Our coach had told us that if we knock a teammate down in practice or in a pick up game to help him up after wards. Soon after the incident coach said that no non-UD students could participate in our pick up sessions. That was not what I had intended. I went to a game of the N.O. kids at Dubuque Senior High School, one of three large high schools in Dubuque. Senior was made of limestone bricks, looked like a prison from the outside, and lay in the heart of the city. I was hoping to see the N.O. baller dunk on some short white Iowa boys, but the kid hardly played, and when he did get in the game he looked nervous and out of place. Even though we had our run ins I was rooting for the kid to do well and I wanted to see him dunk in a real game. I asked some of his partners about what the problem was. I could relate to his situation because I was a streetballer myself learning to adapt to organized ball. I never even played for my high school yet I was playing in college. I passed on some advice that he should keep playing and working to get better if thats what he really wanted to do. Never give up on your dreams, especially with all the natural talent that the young man has. A couple years later I saw him. He was waving a wad of dollar bills around and was sporting gold chains, gold rings, gold capped teeth and diamond earrings. The story was he had gone back to New Orleans and turned to the street life and to making easy money. One last tidbit of information about the kid that I'll never forget. Word got around that someone had cracked on the kid and said he looked just like the dude from "Tales from the Cript." That was an all time great smack running blast from someone who spent time in that old river town. The kid did look a little bony in the face and he did resemble the Tales from the Cript host. Of course the smack talk is all good fun and ingrained in the culture.

Big Stace lived down the hall from Ike, Spike and myself the one semester I lived in the dorms. He was a muscular black kid from Dunbar High School in Chicago. The first time I saw Stace was in the weight room. I thought for sure he was a football player, but his first couple years at UD he just wrestled. His wrestling coach was an old school, and I mean an old school style coach. He used to be the head football coach before the university made him step down for what some say was overworking the team. I really liked that old coach and I was lucky enough to have a chance to take a class that was taught be him ('History of Sport' was the name of the class). Stace and I had talked about starting a push up program where we would agree to do 100 push ups everyday regardless of what other weight lifting we did. I guess Stace thought I had agreed to start because he went ahead and did it for a long while and then was very disappointed when he found out that I hadn't been doing it. I had been lifting free weights every day, and that year I bench pressed the most weight on the basketball team (265 lbs 3X) at our end of season strength testing. I was still dating the teacher who lived in Boscobel when I first moved into the dorms. She came to visit one time and attended the UD Commencement ceremony with me and with Big Stace. I have never seen someone act so polite, charming, and so smooth as I did when I saw Stace around my girl friend. I guess he was impressed with my selection of such a cute tenderoni. Stace and Ike had a general education requirement class together with me that semester and we had to drag our asses out of bed and be to that class at 7:30 AM ! three times a week. The class was called Music Appreciation. Stace was like a walking zombie in the morning. He used to sit next to me in class and copy my notes down word for word. I was curious as to whether he was even contemplating what he was writing so I wrote some "mom jokes" down and he copied them word for word not discovering them until later on when studying for the upcoming test. I made sure he had all the correct notes and apologized and talked to him about his sleepiness problem. I let him look off my test paper during the test even though the teacher stood behind us and out loud said to me during the test, "You don't have to let him look at your paper. " I responded by twisting and hiding my paper and saying "Hey!" like 'Hey, what are you doing looking at my paper.' That provoked a chuckle from Stace and some others nearby. I justified my actions of making my paper available for him to see because I felt guilty about the "mom jokes" and because I knew that he had a morning sleepiness disorder. He and Ike had to study much harder and longer than I did just to get a passing grade. It seemed unfair to me. D Rog and Moe's take on Big Stace was they thought he was a fake. It had to do with them trying to hook up with some she-males one night and toking on a jizzoint and Big Stace fake hitting it when it was passed to him just to try and impress the ladies. My take is, oh well, in some ways Mo and D had their less than on the level qualities and skeletons. Stace had some very good qualities in my opinion, and we all had some bad. One night a few of us were hanging out in Stace and Zeke's room watching a movie. One of the co-eds from across the way came by and said she wanted to talk to me. Her name was Sarai. Next thing you know we were in her room getting down and dirty. At the last moment she asked me to put on a jimmy hat. I didn't have any so I called Stace and Zeke's room and talked to Zeke who said that I could come over and grab one off Stace's dresser. I went and grabbed a couple, but a she-baller named Fanny Bronze was in the room and sniffed that something was amiss, so the cock blocking beee-ithch called Sarai and told her that I had come into Zeke's room bragging about knocking boots etc... It was a flat out lie and Sarai wouldn't even open the door for me afterwards. The full truth came out a couple years later. In fact Fanny had a crush on me and I kind of liked her. She had her 15 seconds of fame when at the beginning of the women's basketball season she was leading women's Division III NCAA basketball in scoring and it was even posted on ESPN. Sarai was known as an "STW bitch". Sarai and her friend Alley Cat were both Environmental Science majors as was I. STW stood for "Save The World". I used to defend the fact that they were Env. Sci. majors but I thought the STW tag was hilarious. We used to say 'STW' like Chuck D in Public Enemies and Professor Griff's song about the 'S1W's'.
Stace moved into the Wilson street crib at the start of the summer. He said I could borrow any of his gear to wear. I guess I got carried away because I wore his gear out. He had a lot of Starter jerseys and some hip gene overalls which G Money (aka Havatake) and I would wear around that summer with only one strap fastened. What a couple of tokens we were. I'm sure Stace was clowning me behind my back about wearing out his clothes. At least I made sure everything was always returned and returned clean and washed. That summer at Wilson Street was crazy, and a lot of it is a blur, but things were only going to get crazier after that.

First NBA game of the season on the CBC this Sunday morning as I finish rewriting my lost work. Toronto Raptors basketball! vs. Bobcats from Char. North Carolina. I hitched south yesterday to Corner Store for beer, came home and watched Hockey Night in Canada, Vancouver Canucks shut out Minnesota Wild, Canuck's goalie Bingo Bango Bongo Roberto Luongo on a record setting tear of keeping the puck out of the net. Its hard to believe that I like watching hockey about as much as basketball now. Hopefully today's NBA game is a good one.

I am trying to write all the Ike Lambert stories down before moving on, and as I am thinking back I am confused at the timetable of things, particularly regarding playing in games against defending Division III National Champions UW Platteville, a team coached at the time by the great Bo Ryan. Our team must have gone on the road to Platteville my first year, because I remember getting in the game and running an inbound play under Platteville's basket. I came around the screen set by Ike and was fed the pass. I pulled up like I was going to shoot but was intending to drop it into Lambert just like old times from the three on three Lancaster tournament. Ike thought I was going to surely shoot it and turned his back on me trying to get rebound position. I had no choice but to launch a shot which hit the side of the back board missing any rim what so ever. I glanced over at coach at the bench as I ran backwards while getting back on defense. Coach glared at me and yelled, 'Matt?" with his hands and shoulders in the question pose. I just nodded and played defense. That story is blurred in my mind and combined with my memory of the game against Platteville the next year. A couple things don't make sense about it. Did we play at Platteville two years in a row? Usually teams alternate playing on each others home court from year to year. During my second Platteville game Big B. had transferred back to UD and he was on the team. That story to be told later.