Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
I’ve been around the gym for a while. Since 1971 I’ve played, officiated, coached and written about basketball. I was there before Title IX allowed the girls to play. I watched the change the 3-point shot made in the game, both good and bad, and now I’m about to see the difference the shot clock brings next fall to high school basketball.
I won’t be around the gym this season until at least early February, maybe not at all.
In July our idyllic summer vacation with our daughter Staci, son Brian, daughter-in-law Katelin, son-in-law Adam and granddaughters Jayne, Norah and Morgan was interrupted by a medical report.
My wife Sue had her annual mammogram. For decades it was always a clean report. This time it wasn’t. There was a small tumor.
It changed the course of our lives.
The good news is Sue is progressing well under her treatment. Additional testing has shown the tumor substantially reduced, and the doctors tell us there is only one. These are both great news and they expect a total eradication of this nasty little bastard.
The bad news is that a dozen weekly initial sessions of chemotherapy, and the second round of new drugs administered every three weeks in four sessions has hammered her immune system.
A few weeks ago, Sue struggled to come out of the aftermath of one of her infusions. Every time she has tough Wednesdays and Thursdays after each treatment, but this time she wasn’t recovering.
I had a slight cold, or so I thought.
We tested for COVID and sure enough we both had it. I sneezed a few times, had a stuffy nose for a day or two and was over it. Sue suffered, literally wiped out and nearly bedridden for a week.
It’s a wicked disease if your immune system is compromised. The chemotherapy drugs do wonders on cancer cells, but they do the same on white blood cells, platelets and neutrophils. Despite booster shots before each session to spark her bone marrow into overproduction of these disease fighting cells, her numbers drop, sometimes dangerously low.
The only effective remedy is isolation.
That’s why you won’t see me at the end of the basketball court or beside the wrestling mat with my camera this season. It’s just too risky.
I told Sue that maybe I’d just drop in, shoot a few pictures, get the flow of the game and leave without talking to anyone. I’d even wear a mask.
She saw right through that façade. I can’t go to a gym and not talk to anyone, I’ve been around winter sports for over half a century, and my entire adult life.
As Senator Al Simpson once said, “Wyoming is just one small town with really long streets.”
My problem is I know the address of too many people on those long streets and I enjoy speaking with them too much.
So, I’ll stay away.
That doesn’t mean I’m not going to cover basketball and wrestling. I’m still on the beat.
I’m going to play a couple of aces to stay in the game.
The first is technology. I can watch every game live, or via the “On Demand” option on various streaming sites. It’s not the gym, but on a 65-inch big screen, it’s a pretty close facsimile. The other ace is a group of talented photographers who I’ve used sparingly in the past, but that I’m now asking to provide images for the duration of the season.
Jessica, Christina, Margaret and Maci are great photographers. With the help of online rosters, and my knowledge of all 16 Fremont County teams from last season, I can easily identify the players.
Mix in modern digital technology and it’s almost like being there for this aged sportswriter.
When I taught Sports Journalism for Casper College a few years ago one of my assignments was requiring students to write a sports story from just a football stat book, a wrestling book or a basketball scorebook.
If you know the game, you can tell by foul count, the number of free throws shot in the final period, or the sudden filling of a quarter column with 2s and 3s by a single player what happened in the game.
In wrestling, you can read the first two periods and see a boy or girl building a big lead but getting pinned in the final period.
You can tell that they fell into a pinning combination with a loss of concentration and you can verify that with just a few minutes talking with the coach.
Here is my final ace. I know I wrote two, but I have three.
The coaches in Fremont County are superb. They are above the standard and are fine men and women, attributes to their respective schools. Best of all, almost all of them are my friends.
For years, decades in some cases, they’ve told me things I could never write, but that gives me a glimpse of what is going on inside their programs.
As a former coach, I understand their challenges and frustrations.
This year, I’ll be waiting each Friday and Saturday for messages on my cell phone from each coach as they take post-game pictures of their scorebooks. After perusing the scorebook, I can get an idea of what happened and text a few questions to them. Their responses become quotes in my story the next morning.
If you’ve been around the sun a few times, or perhaps a few dozen, you might remember long distance phone calls, and even the Bell System advertisement for them. “It’s almost like being there,” was the center point of their ad campaign.
I’ll be covering games as if I were there and taking care of the most precious person in my life at the same time.
I won’t be seeing you at the gym for a while, but I’ll be there.