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Published in August 2008 issue of The Sports Scoop

It's in the genes to remember

By Shawn Fury

For four decades my dad Pat has amazed and sometimes frightened my mom with his ability to relate any past event to a sporting moment that happened the same day. Doesn’t matter if it was historical or personal. Ask him about a friend’s birthday party in 1959, and he’ll end the tale with, “That was the day Eddie Matthews hit his 40^th homer.” Pry for details about what our family was doing the year I was born and you’ll soon hear stories about the legendary 1975 Fulda boys basketball team and its trip to the state tournament. I’m convinced the only reason he doesn’t remember his own birth is that no significant game was played that day in any of the major sports.

I inherited this trait. But it’s only been in the past few years that I’ve realized this occasionally annoying quirk now extends to nearly all aspects of my life, including geography. If I hear a town’s name or pass through it, I soon think about a coach, an opponent, a win or a loss.

I grew up in Janesville. After that came college at St. John’s and jobs in Worthington and Fargo. In 2004 I left the Midwest behind for New York City. About every six months I make it back home. It usually takes about a day to adjust to the silence of Janesville from the organized chaos of Manhattan. Over the last four years, I’ve often used my trips home to reflect on my life in Minnesota, from childhood through the high school years and beyond. On the 75-minute drive from the airport to my parents’ home, the towns roll by, along with the memories. Inevitably, the majority of these memories come back to the games I’ve played, watched, and remembered.

As we head down 35W and pass through Burnsville, I think back to a winter night in 1993, when a group of us had tickets to a Timberwolves game against Houston. The highlight of the night was to be my friend Matt’s date with a gorgeous girl from Burnsville. We’d pick her up, gawk, compliment Matt with raised eyebrows, wonder how he possibly earned her desire, sneak looks in the rearview mirror and then force her to watch Hakeem Olajuwon manhandle a cowering Christian Laettner.

That detailed plan ended at the same time my car left an icy road near Mountain Lake and slid into a ditch, ensuring I’d be late to Janesville to pick up my buddies and guaranteeing we’d never get to Burnsville on time. We arrived at the Timberwolves game in the second quarter. The Wolves lost. Laettner whimpered. Matt seethed and the girl pouted. Shortly after that night, she told Matt how great of a guy he was and how they’d always be friends. Not sure if he’s yet forgiven me.

Now the car’s coming up near Northfield. My thoughts drift to my days at Janesville-Waldorf-Pemberton. My old basketball coach Dave Tonolli lives here. Retired from teaching and coaching, Dave spends his days working nearly as much as ever, this time at the golf course instead of on the bench. The practices, games and speeches are as clear as the wins and losses. I remember him benching me for talking back during a timeout as vividly as I recall his handshake after I fouled out of my last high school game. A coach to me then, he’s now a friend, someone I talk with regularly. On most trips home my family will meet up with him and his wife for dinner and companionship. We make new memories during this time, often while talking about the old ones.

Faribault’s next. Ah, Faribault, home to Bethlehem Academy. Exiting off of 35, names like J.J. Korman, Tim Schlaak and Jim Lovrien bounce around my head. I picture the games at the B.A. gym, a glorified closet with a court sandwiched between a stage and auditorium seating. Here’s where coach Franz Boelter ruled over one of the best basketball programs in the state.

Memories from those games come back easily. The refs at those games weren’t always Franz’s first cousins, but I think they were somewhere on the Boelter family tree. The B.A. players were tough, efficient and strong—mentally and physically—yet somehow managed to flop backward at the slightest hint of contact from an offensive player, performances that earned the admiration of the officials, if not the Oscars. Back then a drive into Faribault was met with a certain amount of trepidation. We left the city bruised, on the scoreboard and our bodies. But when I think of Faribault today there’s none of that. Like Tonolli, coach Boelter is now someone I correspond with throughout the high school sports seasons. I greatly enjoy our communications. Admiration for his program and personality replaced any resentment I felt as a teenage player toward his powerhouse teams.

Fifteen years and fifteen-hundred miles add much-needed perspective.

It’s that perspective that keeps from saying a few miles later that I hate everything about Waterville-Elysian-Morristown, from the green and white colors of its Buccaneers, to its old sub-par baseball infield made from rocks, and the bizarrely positioned football field with inadequate seating for the visiting teams. It’s impossible for me to pass through Waterville without thinking of an old Janesville friend named Kenny Hinze. Whenever I’d see him from 1988 until about 1996, Hinze reminded me—enthusiastically reminded me—that my three-on-three team lost to a team of Waterville girls when we were seventh-graders. The fact they were girls was bad enough for Kenny. But Waterville girls?

Again, though, time erases uneasy feelings, if not memories. Today the only animosity I have toward W-E-M is directed at the school’s fashion sense. Green and white? But that has nothing to do with the school and everything to do with the Boston Celtics, a franchise and city I loathed long before settling in New York.

Sometimes on the way home we’ll turn toward Waseca, a star city in the eyes of the state of Minnesota, but a four-letter word back in high school. Being that I now live on a city block that’s home to more people than live in Waseca, it’s a tad ridiculous to think how resentful us small-school kids could be toward the “big school” to our east. Well, maybe not so ridiculous considering the cockiness we endured at various summer league basketball games.

Waseca was the big dog in the county, confident in its knowledge that the Bluejays always had the best basketball or football team in the area. Not because they always had superior talent, but because they played a tougher schedule. So they said. That theory lost some credibility when JWP beat Waseca by 28 points in the 1992 playoffs, a victory that was satisfying to the players and to many parents, who trash-talked their Waseca co-workers the next day. The final game of my high school sports career came on the Waseca diamond, a shutout loss where we were convinced that wily Tink Larson stole our pitching signals. If he did, it probably had nothing to do with the final outcome, but it did convince us even more that Tink was one of the best coaches anywhere, in any sport.

Ten more miles and we’re home. Back in Janesville. Today there are more houses on the streets but fewer students in the school. Back at my childhood home, the sports memories can’t help but flood in. The house sits a block from the city park. There I spent hundreds of hours on the basketball court, shooting at a hoop that for some unexplained reason stood slightly higher than 10 feet. A piece of concrete jutted out of the bottom, delivering many dangerous shots to sensitive areas of unsuspecting rebounders. Our next-door neighbor also had a hoop. I competed against my dad in games of H-O-R-S-E and free throw competitions, feeling outraged when I'd lose, triumphant when I prevailed. Across our yard is a now-abandoned church. When I look at it I don’t think of it as a former place of worship. Instead I think about what the parishioners must have thought when they’d hear a constant thumping against the side of the structure. The place wasn’t falling apart: I was firing tennis balls off of it to practice fielding grounders.

The memories are everywhere on that drive home, in Janesville, and in this home. Memories that are as countless as the games that inspired them. My guess is the majority of athletes and coaches from here and everywhere else experience similar feelings, whether they still live in their hometowns or only visit occasionally. Of course, memories usually fade. But I don’t think these will.

It’s in my genes to remember.