In small towns and in rural areas in days now past young people often spent their spare moments playing basketball. Many homes had a basketball hoop installed on the side of the driveway where the neighborhood kids would get together and shoot some hoop. It started when they were very young and could barely carry a basketball let alone shoot it into the hoop mounted ten feet off the ground, but that did little to dissuade these wannabe basketball stars. Our home was no different. We had a basket and backboard mounted on a pole on the driveway at our home too. Actually I remember several of them, each filling the need until it no longer was serviceable. Then a new one was installed.
The kids and their friends from round about spent many, many hours developing their shooting and rebounding skills as well as their sportsmanship or lack of sportsmanship as the day would have it. They also proved their competitive instincts and we always said it was good exercise for them. There were the occasional bloody knees and split lips and sometimes brothers didn't treat brothers like brothers, or maybe that's just what brothers do to each other, Early on, their driveway-developed skills were put to use in the community sponsored pee-wee basketball leagues and then on into Junior High and High School basketball, not to mention "Church Ball." This was not just a boy thing either. Our Alison, as slight as she was, proved pretty tough on the basketball court and the boys didn't cut her any slack either. From day to day we never knew what was going to happen, who was going to get a scraped knee or a black eye, or even if it was to be just a playground accident or a blow intentionally landed to make a point. It didn't matter much what the weather was like, come rain or snow,or gloom of night the boys could often be seen and heard playing basketball at our house. In the winter time the games were often transferred indoors into our family room. There a Nerf basketball would take the place of a real one, but other than that not much changed. Actually, I think some of them learned their " basketball moves" a little better from the family room indoor sessions than they did out side on the cement.
By the time they had all graduated from high school we had seven pictures of our Bear Lake Bear basketball players hanging proudly on the family room wall. Each of our children, including Alison, played varsity basketball. Some started and starred, some got a lot of minutes off the bench, some got just a few here and there, but basketball was a big part of life growing up in small town Bear Lake Valley. Some of my favorite memories include singing Christmas carols as we traveled over the snowy and drifted roads to Afton, Wyoming about Christmas time every year. There Justin once got an elbow to the cheek so hard it cut clear through and he could stick his tongue out the side of the bloody hole in his cheek. But the game went on. Another time I arrived at the Reed Gym in Pocatello just in time to hear the game announcer saying over the loud speaker, "Eborn for Three" I remember the announcer on the radio describing Philip's play during one of these Star Valley games as : "That Philip Eborn is putting on a clinic for us here tonight." That was a parent feel-good moment. I remember the night Justin scored thirty points against the Preston Indians to give them some much needed humility. I remember Alison, getting flattened, and I do mean flattened, by that big Indian girl from American Falls, and having to be checked out at the hospital emergency room. She, like the others, didn't seem to let a little bit of adversity affect them. I remember going with Stephen to the High School Gym when he was on the team in high school. We would shoot three hundred three pointers every night. He would shoot and I would shag the balls. Needless to say, he got to be pretty good. Coach Parks knew when to put him in the game - when they were down about ten and needed someone who could score that many points in about two minutes. Unfortunately, he then would take him back out again until they got behind by ten again. Stephen even won two three point shooting contests at the holiday community basketball tournament when he was a junior and then again as a senior in high school. There's a whole other story about that, but you'll have to ask him about that. Ryan played on the team that won the state championship game in 1995. The Bears played against Moscow in the Mindome in Pocatello for that victory. I still remember the crowd chanting, "Here we go Bear Lake, here we go." For one of the few times in Bear Lake Valley history everyone in the valley was on the same page and pulling together. It was such fun. I remember my sweet little southern wife standing in the crowd and witnessing what to her was an obvious bad call from the referee. "You stupid idiot!" she shouted at the top of her voice just as the entire gymnasium suddenly fell deathly silent as if to make sure the referee heard her vocal judgment of his work. I remember the night Jason was put into the game with just twelve seconds to play after sitting the bench for the rest of the game. Iris waited for Coach Belnap to come out of the dressing room doors after the game. She was going to give him a piece of her mind. Coach Belnap escaped out a rear door and eventually Iris calmed down, but not until she had tried to call Coach Belnap a few time from home. Wisely, he didn't answer the phone. Otherwise we may have had a fatality that night. Instead the Belnaps have remained our friends.
Jared could dunk the ball pretty well as a senior. His senior team went to state, or at least they were supposed to have done, but after reviewing the score of their last game, one might wonder if they really showed up to play. Another memory of Jared's play was in Church Ball, where he shattered the glass backboard. Not the only time he did that.
All these trips to watch our kids play basketball along with many of our friends and neighbors helped to make the long winters seem shorter in Bear Lake and gave us a sense of community that maybe little else could have done. Alison tells of the ride on the team bus the night of the invasion of Iraq in Operation Desert Storm with all of the team singing :"I'm Proud to Be an American." Eventually we ended up with a display of our "Magnificent Seven", each decked out in the uniform of the Bear Lake Bears hanging on our family room wall.. It wasn't the only thing in the world nor the most important, but for those years, especially from December through February it almost seemed like it was and that not much else mattered.. Looking back, these were really good times, never to be forgotten.
There is much more to tell, but then I'm not writing a book, just blogging a bit.
