20 years ago Hoopfest was another ‘thingy’ for this ex-jock

There is just too much dead time in a softball game. And no good can come from it.

Sitting on a bench in a Franklin Park dugout some 20 years ago, a decision was made that led to more than a decade of pain – one weekend at a time.

My buddy Steve Larson, then the junior varsity basketball coach at Cheney High, and I were doing what softball players do while waiting their turn to hit: shooting the bull.

Steve and I had played basketball together at Spokane Falls for years, doing our best to build self esteem in the other 3-on-3 league participants. So it made sense when one of us started talking about this new Hoopfest thingy, we would play together.

One overweight 5-foot-10 catcher teaming with an overweight 6-2 first baseman, both with a lot more basketball brains than ability – and Steve had all of both.

What a team. But, even with my newspaper math skills, I knew we needed at least one more guy.

“I’ll play,” someone on the bench said.

It was Tom Bock, one of our pitchers who made the drive in from Grand Coulee twice a week. What the heck. We needed some height and I once called Tom “really big tall guy,” while chattering away from my spot behind the plate, so he seemed to fit the bill.

Bingo. We had a 6-5 “post.” So what if he was built like a telephone pole and admitted, later, he hadn’t played much basketball?

A fourth would be nice, though, considering it would be late June and playing who knows how many games on sun-baked asphalt wasn’t for the timid – or out-of-shape.

Steve took care of finding our Ringo, asking a friend from Cheney, Dave Ward, to play. Though we didn’t meet until Saturday morning just before our first game, it was obvious Steve had chosen well.

Dave was an athlete. He was also competitive – he’s now the football coach at Archbishop Murphy High on the West Side after leading Oak Harbor to the 4A title in 2006 – which, seeing how we were deficient in talent, was a needed trait.

So how did that first Hoopfest go?

Let’s see. The first team we played had a guy that was built like LeBron James who preceded to hit a shot from somewhere near the port-a-potties to start the game. And it got worse.

Dave got hurt (broke his wrist if memory serves), Tom really hadn’t played much basketball before and we were – what’s the word? Oh ya – bad. Somehow we won one game – thanks Steve – before getting Sunday off.

And thus a pattern was set.

Though Steve and I played together for years – with a varying cast of teammates who mostly consisted of Steve’s relatives by marriage – we rarely got to play on Sunday.

We would either lose, win, lose – just good enough to not get in the consolation bracket – or we would win our first game then lose two before it got dark Saturday.

We finally changed our team name to “Never On Sunday.” Of course, that year we lost twice in-a-row and had to play early Sunday morning.

Of course we won, ruining the rest of our watch-other-people-play day.