Saturday, May 17, 2008

The 6th Ward Junior Basketball Team, 1977


This washed-out photo shows the Albuquerque 6th Ward junior (young men's) basketball team in 1977, my senior year in high school. It was taken right after the stake tournament championship game, which we lost to the Los Alamos Ward due to two factors. One, we decided to play by the "rules" (at least as we understood them at the time) and play only one non-member at a time. (At that precise moment, we had three non-members -- Brian Bennett, Tracy Carroll, and Chris Carroll -- although Tracy and Chris were only days from joining the church.) And two, the refereeing was so one-sided, in Los Alamos' favor, as to be completely laughable. (I won't name the culprit, as he still lives in our stake, but suffice it to say that he always had it in for our ward and, especially, the Kartchner family. He made so many bad, obviously biased calls against us that day that he finally started making up rules by the end of the game.) If we had played Brian, Tracy, and Chris at the same time that day, we'd have wiped up the floor with Los Alamos regardless of the pathetic refereeing, but c'est la vie. We looked forward to doing well in the regional tournament after Tracy and Chris were baptized, but then Tracy, our best outside shooter, came down with the flu and couldn't play; consequently, we ended up losing to 1st Ward, a team we had beaten easily earlier in the year in a holiday tournament. My junior basketball "career" then ended with a win in the regional consolation bracket against a team from the San Luis Valley in Colorado, in which I remember sustaining a bloody nose from an elbow that a kid on the other team threw during a jump ball. (It seems weird to write of jump balls now after a generation of the "alternating possession" rule.)

That year, we probably had the best starting five (me, Brian, Tracy, Chris, and Carl Prestwich) of any junior team I played on, and I think we would have won regionals if we'd had all our guns. I was at the apex of my basketball abilities; Brian, though he didn't play on his high school team, was good enough to go on to play college ball at McMurry College; and Tracy and Carl both eventually became better basketball players than I ever was. I always loved basketball when I was a teenager and was very grateful for the church sports program, which was, at least in those days, a good missionary tool -- during the three years I was in high school, at least five kids who played on our basketball teams converted, and I believe three of them are active church members to this day. However, I have to say that I don't miss the strife and contention that naturally resulted from competitions among various church members with overinflated opinions of their own athletic prowess (among whom I count myself).

My interest in playing basketball tailed off dramatically as the result of serving a church mission (during which two years I played hoops maybe 5-6 times). I played on church, city, and/or base league teams for a number of years after that, but I lost a lot of ground during my mission and never really got it back, and my RK surgery in 1994 pretty much ruined whatever hand-eye coordination I had left at that point. Nowadays, a basketball might just as well be a large rock for how foreign it feels in my hands!

The people in the picture are: (Top Row, L-R): Kevin Kartchner, Tracy Carroll, Brian Bennett; (Middle Row, L-R): Ken Foley [head coach and my best friend in high school and beyond], Chris Carroll, Carl Prestwich, Rick Baca [assistant coach and my first cousin]; (Bottom Row, L-R): David Williamson, Bryan Porter, Rick Foley.