Basketball


I started playing basketball in about 1966 when my friend Chip Lisec and his father put up a hoop in their driveway across the street from my childhood home in Crown Point, Indiana.

I was one of only five players to answer Mrs. Schubert's call and play for Schubert's Shooters in the sixth grade at Lake Street School. Since we did not have a bench, our first game of that season was one of the longest hours of my life. I had no idea what "tired" meant until that game.

The seventh and eighth grade basketball coaches at Taft Junior High School cut me during tryouts both years, somehow missing me among the hundreds of boys who wanted to be on the teams. I persevered however and continued to hone my skills on the playgrounds of Crown Point. In the ninth grade, thanks to a dominant display of skill during gym class with the ninth grade coach watching, I was put on the ninth grade B team. The B team did not fare well but we were proud to be called the B team bombers, and I got the chance to play with Jim McCord, Kevin Kayes and Greg Stiener, who all became life-long friends.

In high school I was on the end of the bench of the jayvee team my sophomore year, I started for the jayvees my junior year and I started for the varsity team my senior year. Things that I can still remember: getting 18 rebounds in one half in a jayvee game, scoring 19 points against Lake Central in a televised varsity game (televised high school games were very rare in the earlier 1970s), and fouling out in the third quarter of my final game and having to watch my teammates eventually lose in overtime, which eliminated us from Indiana's legendary, but now defunct, single class state tournament. (If you haven't seen the movie "Hoosiers", I would recommend it. It does a good job of capturing life in small-town Indiana.)

In college I played intramural basketball for my dorm, Harrison Hall. In my junior year our Harrison Hall team won the Purdue campus championship, behind the outstanding play of our center, Spiro Bereveskos, who went on to play a year of pro-ball in Greece.

In graduate school at Purdue I played on the computer science department's team in the staff league, aptly named the Infinite Hoops.

More recently I lumbered up and down the court in the Dover men's leagues. In 2002 my team won the Over 35 League championship game in a four-overtime thriller. That night I learned once again the meaning of "tired".

In 2014, after tearing up my right knee, I retired from playing basketball. I miss it. I still have regular dreams about playing!

1973: We loved those tight shorts.

1974: Larry Bird and I were both all-state players in Indiana that year. Of course, I was only academic all-state.

1977: Dining hall handout plugging upcoming Purdue intramural championship games.

2002: After a four-overtime championship game.