Hoosier Hysteria, Sons, and Other Stories

By Larry Moran and Stephen Adams

Eight stories of terror, suspense, mystery, humor, and surprise: A United States senator and vice-presidential candidate is forced to choose who in his family will live and who will die; a newspaper reporter, journalisms answer to Inspector Clouseau, witnesses a murder, but police can find no evidence a crime has been committed; two elderly women share an afternoon of uncertainty and terror; a teenage boy dreams of becoming a star basketball player so he can win a girls affection; a writer learns about truth, honor, greed, betrayal, and himself; a young man follow a famous uncle in time travel to find the beautiful grass-skirted women of 16th century Hawaii; the world faces environmental calamity after ignoring one mans plea to stop polluting the skies; and an old man fears dying along but learns it is not his worst nightmare.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 27, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452079172

Larry Moran

Larry Moran was born in Indianapolis and grew up in Carmel, Indiana. He was a newspaper reporter in the state for nine years, covering everything from sports to presidential politics. In 1971, he moved to the Washington, DC, area, where, for thirty-three years, he was an economist, public information officer, and media spokesperson for a federal government agency. Mr. Moran previously published a collection of eight short stories of terror, suspense, mystery, humor, and surprise. He is currently working on two novels and a collection of his poetry. He is an avid but awful golfer and a tournament bridge player. His other interests include American political history, the history and culture of the American West, baseball, music, and magic.

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Contents

FOREWORD

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

HOOSIER HYSTERIA

THE DEATH OF SADIE WILSON

THE MYSTERIOUSLY MISSING MURDER

SONS

FOLLOWING UNCLE MCWITT IN TIME TRAVEL

DANGEROUS PASSION

NEXT TIME BY FIRE

LOVED ONES

FOREWORD

Short stories are the desserts of literature. Each is a delicious treat that can be consumed quickly, is complete and rewarding, and doesn’t fill us up. A collection of short fiction gives us more plots, introduces us to more characters, stirs more of our emotions, exposes us to more new ideas, and gives us more new experiences than literature’s main course, the novel. Of course, both the novel and the short story are wonderful in their own way.

I love to write fiction, because plots are intriguing and characters are fascinating. Writing short stories allows me to explore more characters and to develop plots more quickly. Generally, ideas for my short stories are plot driven. An idea may come from me wondering how some event, real or fictional, might have developed differently under variant circumstances or had the players in the event acted differently. Characters in my stories are largely based on people I have known, but for each, I draw on characteristics of several people. In some cases, traits are exaggerated to make a character more amusing. But amusing or not, characters must be real, at least to some extent.

Mostly I write to entertain—to make readers laugh, think, and feel and to add a spark to their lives. To share laughter with readers, I have included three humorous stories in this collection—The Mysteriously Missing Murder, Hoosier Hysteria, and Following Uncle McWitt in Time Travel. These stories are whimsical and light-hearted. The worlds portrayed in them don’t quite exist, and many of the characters in them are not quite real.

Even so, some of the characters and events in these stories are loosely based on real people and events. For example, Lip Baker in The Mysteriously Missing Murder is based on the city editor at The Indianapolis Times when I was a young reporter there. My city editor was as gruff and tough as Lip, but he was also encouraging and supportive. I learned much from him and owe much of my development as a reporter to him. From the same story, the John Wilkes Booth letters incident is loosely based on something that really happened to, I confess, me. Of course, the real incident did not go as far as the one in the story.

Although many of the journalists in The Mysteriously Missing Murder are caricatures, I have great respect and affection for real journalists, particularly newspaper reporters. The nine years I spent as a newspaper reporter were among the happiest and most rewarding of my professional career. I am proud of many of the stories I uncovered and wrote. One series of my stories led to the introduction in the state legislature of a bill that required county council districts within each of Indiana’s counties to have equal population. Other stories I wrote led to changes in local laws and policies. But mostly, my own and other reporters’ best stories provided people with the information they needed to make decisions in their personal and political lives. In addition to the serious work, I had fun writing a humor column for several years. Most journalists are wonderful people. Nearly all the reporters and editors I worked with during those years were good, interesting, and dedicated men and women. The same can be said for most of the reporters I dealt with while I worked as the media contact person at the United States Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis for nearly twenty-five years.

The reader’s ability to clearly and completely traverse and experience the thoughts and emotions of characters is an important trait that distinguishes the written story from other art forms. For example, in Sons, the reader experiences with many characters the fear of an ambiguous unknown and then rides with the two main characters the tidal wave of emotions caused by the head-on collision of hatred and terror. In particular, David Rodgers grapples with the dread that cool logic and compromise, tools that had worked so well for him through all his life, may not prevent the most horrific of all outcomes. For the record, Sons was written before any of my children were born and more than three years before any of my sons were born. (The story here was updated to set it in the twenty-first century.) The personalities and experiences of the sons in the story are in no way based on any of my sons. The traits and experiences of one of the sons are loosely based on one of my brothers; the other son’s personality is completely fictional.

Many of the stories included here are not set in the opening years of the twenty-first century. Hoosier Hysteria is set in the early 1960s, when I was a junior at Carmel High School, and Following Uncle McWitt in Time Travel is set in the early 1970s, when it was written. Some of the latter story’s references to the women’s movement are dated, and a few statements are not by today’s standards politically correct, but the story is still entertaining and is intended to be funny, not offensive. In fact, in the story the narrator gets his comeuppance. The Death of Sadie Wilson is set in the late 1970s, but the time period is less important to the story. Next Time by Fire is set a bit in the future, and Loved Ones is set still further in the future.

In Loved Ones and The Death of Sadie Wilson, characters also struggle through their thoughts and fears as they move toward a certain or uncertain conclusion. In Dangerous Passion, through introspection the narrator discovers truths about his world and about himself. In Next Time by Fire, the reader experiences the consequences to the world and to an individual of environmental neglect.

I hope all readers find some spark here, something that makes them laugh, or something that makes them think, or something that stirs their emotions.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Before sharing the short stories in this collection, I would like to thank my mother and father for the family I grew up in and for the support they always gave me. Without them, I would not have my positive outlook on life and would not know of the importance of creativity.

I would also like to thank my wife, Helga, for supporting and encouraging my writing and especially for allowing me to disappear into my den for hours on end as I worked on my fiction.

Finally, I would like to thank my sister Carole for creating the wonderful drawings that precede each story in this book.

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HOOSIER HYSTERIA

When you grow up in Indiana as I did, you dream of being a star on your high school’s basketball team. So my boyhood thoughts were filled with such glory, and during my early teens, I spent many hours on the concrete slab in front of our garage shooting baskets at the hoop my father had attached to the garage roof. Every practice session by myself and every pickup game with my brothers or friends I transformed in my mind into the final game of the state high school basketball tournament. A thousand times I fantasized at that basket that I was taking a shot to beat the ending buzzer of a championship game, and if I made it, Carmel High School would take home the trophy.

By the time I was in high school, I had no recourse but to try out for the school team. In those days, Carmel High School was small, so making the school basketball team required little more of me than showing up for tryouts and successfully running the length of the court without tripping over my own feet. For a growing teenage boy, that wasn’t as easy as it sounds, but I succeeded.

However, making the team was one thing; becoming a star on the team was something quite different. Far from being a star, although I made the freshman basketball team and the reserve team my sophomore year, I spent most of the games sitting on the bench. This didn’t disappoint me too much, because I knew my limitations. I was only five foot seven inches tall and weighed one hundred and twenty pounds.

I wasn’t too disappointed, that is, not until my junior year, when I fell madly in love with Donna Sandiwald, a Carmel High School cheerleader. Donna was a very cute girl with blond hair, a turned-up nose, and a figure with all the features that attract teenage boys. My only competitors for Donna’s affections were every boy at Carmel High School between the ages of thirteen and eighteen who had a verifiable heartbeat.

Sadly, Donna seemed barely aware of my existence. We did share one intimate moment in algebra class early in my junior year. As I puzzled over how to solve a quadratic equation, I heard someone whisper my name. When I looked up, Donna was standing by my desk, smiling at me. In her seraphic voice, she asked, May I borrow a pencil?

Light-headed from the erotic emotions of the moment, I nearly swooned out of my chair. But I recovered and somehow kept from falling to the floor. Then I straightened up, threw my chest out and my shoulders back in an attempt to be as manly as a one-hundred-twenty-pounds boy could be, and gave her the pencil I had been using, saying, Take this one, it’s my best pencil.

Actually, I gladly would have given Donna my ballpoint pen, but that would have done her no good, because she took my pencil, and as she stood by my desk, she used its eraser on something in her notebook. Then she handed the pencil back to me and walked away. With that, our close relationship ended.

For weeks, I made sure all my pencils had good erasers. No matter how long a pencil was, if its eraser was ground to a lead-covered stub, I discarded it. Be prepared was my new mantra. But Donna never asked to borrow another pencil.

At age sixteen, I had all the sexual appeal of a punctured beach ball. I was short, skinny, and awkward and could not carry on a conversation lasting more than two minutes that was not about sports. But being sixteen, I had one advantage—I didn’t realize how little sex appeal I had.

A month passed after Donna borrowed my pencil in algebra class without her saying a single word to me, so I decided to take matters into my own hands. Each October, Carmel High School holds its homecoming dance. The dance, I reasoned, presented the perfect opportunity for me to renew my intimate relationship with Donna, not because I was a good dancer—I wasn’t—but because everyone in school could go to the dance, with or without a date. Thus, I could go to the dance without having to ask Donna for a date, and I knew she would be there. Surely, I thought, I would get at least one dance with Donna, and when I did, she would fall madly in love with me.

On the evening of the dance, I put on the only suit I owned, a black suit my parents had bought for me to wear to church. They had bought it when I was thirteen years old, so it was a little small, but it would have to do. I wore a white shirt, my clip-on black bow tie, white socks (they showed a bit too much because my pants were short), and my one pair of non–gym shoes, which were black with durable tractor-tread soles. I slicked my hair down with Wild Root Cream Oil and combed and parted it. Then I was ready to woo Donna.

Like many Indiana October evenings, this one was autumnally romantic, with gentle breezes, a sky full of stars, and a gorgeously shining full moon. As I walked the three blocks from my home to the school cafeteria, my heart raced with anticipation. And when I entered the cafeteria, I knew the night would be full of romantic enchantment, because the dance committee had decorated the room with stacks of hay, stuffed scarecrows, dried stalks of corn, carved jack-o-lanterns, and miles of orange and black streamers. The place was beautiful.

When I arrived, the dance floor was already packed with kids rockin’ and rollin’ to the latest top forty-five tunes. It didn’t take me long to find Donna Sandiwald. She was a heavenly vision in her pale blue dress, with its V-neck top and its knee-length full skirt. What was not a heavenly vision was the boy Donna was dancing with. Ed Frook was a year older, five inches taller, and fifty pounds heavier than me, and worst of all, Ed was the star halfback on the Carmel High football team. But I wasn’t worried. While Ed was a good-looking boy who was bigger and stronger than me, he wasn’t wearing a suit and tie as I was. He had come to the dance in slacks, a plaid shirt, and a Carmel High letterman’s sweater. Donna would surely see I was more suave than Ed.

Or would she? On that night, Donna and Ed seemed never to be apart. Some of my buddies and I spent much of the early evening at the punch and cookie table and standing against a wall that had been decorated with papier-mâché pumpkins, cardboard cutout ghosts and goblins, and colorful corncobs strung on strings. I enviously watched Ed and Donna dancing and tried to work up the courage to cut in on Ed. I really wanted to show Donna what a cool guy I was, but to do that I would have to deal with Ed, the football halfback. Whenever I thought I had built the courage to cut in, I decided that first I needed more punch.

Halfway through the evening, I was devastated to learn Donna and Ed were on a date and were going steady, which meant it would be impossible for me to dance with Donna. And of course that meant it also would be impossible for me to reestablish my close relationship with her—at least on that night.

I spent the rest of the evening dapperly standing against the wall drinking punch with my buddies, who ogled a lot of the girls on the dance floor and sitting on chairs around the room. Certainly, there were plenty of girls who had come to the dance without dates. My buddies talked about dancing with some of those girls, but they were disappointed because none of the girls asked them to dance. The girls seemed happier talking among themselves and occasionally dancing with each other. Go figure!

Anyway, my heart and eyes belonged only to Donna. And because I didn’t get to dance with her, the evening was a complete disappointment.

It turned out Donna and Ed only dated once or twice more after the homecoming dance and then broke up. But Ed’s bad luck wasn’t doing me any good. Although over the next few weeks I saw Donna at school, there were no more magic moments like the one we had shared in algebra class. One day, I concluded that if I was ever going to have a romantic relationship with Donna, I would have to speak to her. It was a shocking revelation for a teenage boy.

Talk with Donna … well it was easier thought and said than done. One day as I walked down a hallway at school, Donna came out of a classroom and passed quite near me. I tried to speak to her, but the sound I made was very much like the high-pitched voice of a dolphin, perhaps a teenage dolphin whose voice was changing. Clearly startled, Donna stepped back and looked in my direction. I pretended the sound had not come from me, and I looked around, as if I too was trying to find the source of the strangest noise ever heard in the corridors of Carmel High School.

On most occasions when I saw Donna, there were lots of other kids around—she was a very popular girl—and I just didn’t have the courage to talk with her in front of them.

But I finally got to talk with Donna, sort of. One afternoon I went into the school library to get a book for Mrs. Bamburger’s English class and found there was a line at Mrs. Moffitt’s desk. In those days, students were not allowed to get a book off the shelf, they had to ask Mrs. Moffitt, the school librarian, for the book. Well, I couldn’t believe my luck, because in line directly in front of me was Donna Sandiwald. There were two students in front of Donna, and the one at the librarian’s desk was taking some time, so for five amazing minutes, I stared lovingly at the back of Donna’s head. Remarkably, the back of her head seemed to transform me. Courage built within my breast, and I decided to speak. Not wanting to repeat my previous imitation of a teenage dolphin, I cleared my throat, and in as deep a voice as I could conjure, I said, Hi.

Donna didn’t turn around, so it was clear she hadn’t heard me. I repeated my entire speech in a louder and, hopefully, deeper voice.

Finally, Donna turned to me and said, Huh?

Hi, I said for the third time, but this time my voice returned to its near talking fish tone.

Hi, she said.

Here the conversation lost some of its zip. Neither of us spoke for a few seconds.

Desperate for something to say, I tried, I came in here to get a book.

Oh, said Donna.

After another pause, I added, You get books from the library.

Yes, I know, Donna assured me.

So that’s why I’m here.

Me too.

Good, I said.

Because of my glib talk, you probably think I was calm and cool. Well, maybe on the outside, but not on the inside. My heart was racing, my brain was burning, and my sweat glands were operating at full tilt. In fact, I was regretting that in the morning I hadn’t put on a tee shirt under the striped one I was wearing, because it was now sticking to my back, stomach, and underarms. My hands were pretty clammy, and pools of perspiration began growing on my forehead.

They have some pretty good books here, I said, trying to keep the conversation lively.

Yes, probably, Donna contributed.

Some thick ones and some thin ones.

Donna was silent.

And some that have pretty good pictures.

Yes, Donna finally added.

By now, sweat was rolling down my forehead and into my eyes, burning them and blurring my vision.

Through the mist, I saw Donna look at her wristwatch. Then she said, This is taking longer than I had expected. I guess I’ll come back at another time.

Me too, agreed.

Donna hurried out of the library, and I tried to follow her. But with my blurred vision I misjudged the location of the doorway and walked into the wall next to it. I was embarrassed, of course, but it wasn’t as bad as all that, because I don’t think Donna saw what I had done. When I finally stumbled into the hallway, she was nowhere in sight.

The rest of the day and for several days afterward, I cherished the memory of being that close to Donna and the intimate chat we had shared. Obviously, I realized I needed to polish my conversational skills. But ever the optimist, I believed there would be other chances for me to interact with Donna.

And as it happened, in early November, I had another opportunity to build my romantic bond with Donna. One Saturday afternoon, my buddy Rick Duce and I went to the Noblesville Roller Skating Rink. (Carmel did not have a roller rink, or even a bowling alley for that matter.) A few minutes after Rick and I had arrived, heaven smiled upon Noblesville’s skating palace. Sweeping in from one of the side entrances and rolling out onto the dusty hardwood floor came a celestial vision. Swishing and swaying in perfect time to the music, Donna Sandiwald glided gracefully around the rink. Wearing a short white skating skirt and a royal blue blouse, she was a dream come true. My entire body tingled with passion as my eyes followed her elegant movements.

Roller rinks provide opportunities, and on that afternoon I was sure the Noblesville Roller Rink would provide me with another opportunity to win Donna’s love. Patience was required, of course, because Donna had come to the rink with several of her girlfriends. But I knew there would be a moment when Donna would be skating alone, a moment when I could skate around the rink behind her and then casually coast alongside her. And so positioned, I would smoothly start a conversation, the conversation that would win her heart.

But these things take time, take building up to. At least, building up my courage took time. Besides, during the first hour after Donna had arrived, she was always skating with her girlfriends, so I decided to lay some groundwork by impressing her with my skating skills.

To be specific, I decided to impress Donna by showing her how fast I could skate. That’s the way teenage boys think, impress the girls with brute force or speed. So Rick and I raced around the rink. In those days, I was a pretty good skater. I was pretty good, that is, when going straight. I was not very good at making turns, and the essence of skating in a rink is making turns. As Rick and I raced around the rink, we took wider and wider turns to keep our speed up. At one point, I felt confident and passed Rick on a straightaway, then rushed into a turn. I failed to navigate it. I slammed into the railing, did a somersault over it, and landed on a table where a girl and boy were having something to eat. I smashed their hamburgers and spilled soda all over them.

After helping the couple clean up the mess and buying them replacement meals, I eased back onto the rink. Rick told me it was possible Donna had not seen my mishap, because she had been at the opposite end of the rink when it happened. As difficult as it was to believe that Donna had neither seen the accident nor heard about it, to protect my self-esteem and my chances with her, I chose to believe just that.

Still, the afternoon was slipping away, and I had made no contact with Donna. I had to find some way to speak to her. I had to! Then suddenly, there she was, skating, gracefully floating around the rink by herself, looking like the angel she was. If I was to have a chance that afternoon, I had to act then. I began circling the rink just behind Donna, working up my courage. It took four full trips around the floor before I thought I was ready. Mustering as much bravado as I could, I pulled up beside Donna, and with all the charm a sixteen-year-old boy who had grown up in rural Indiana could summon, I smiled and said, Hello.

And then I fell down. In front of Donna. She tripped over me and fell to the floor. Then another skater tripped and fell over both of us. And then three more skaters did the same. It took four full minutes for all of us to untangle ourselves. When we had done so, Donna and I sat facing each other. I gazed into her heavenly blue eyes and discovered the weather forecast in heaven included severe storms.

She was embarrassed and was hurting, with bruises on her hands, elbows, and knees. You, you …, she stammered, but all those vocabulary building exercises we had done in Mrs. Ford’s English class seemed to fail her, because Donna could not find the words she wanted to complete the sentence.

Wanting to make amends, I apologized. I’m sorry, I said, that you fell.

Suddenly Donna found a few words. I fell! she shrieked. I didn’t fall, you tripped me, you klutz, you, you … But her vocabulary failed her again, so in frustration and anger, she quickly got up and skated away. Totally humiliated and fearing I had lost Donna’s love forever, I got to my feet and slowly moved to some chairs against one wall of the rink, where Rick sat waiting for me. Lucky for him, he was not laughing at me. Not long after that, Donna and her girlfriends left the rink. There was no mistake, the afternoon had not been a success.

I spent that evening angry with myself and depressed, but by the next morning, my optimism returned. At least, I told myself, Donna had not said she never wanted to see me again. Maybe she really wasn’t mad at me. Maybe I still had a chance with her.

My only remaining chance to win Donna’s heart, I told myself, was to become a star on the Carmel High School basketball team. The basketball season started in mid-November, and remarkably I made the varsity team that year. However, as in my freshman and sophomore years, although I was on the team, I rarely played in any games, which made it difficult to become a star. Still, being an optimist and a dreamer, I dreamed that one day that year I would be thrust into an important game and would become the star player, making miraculous passes, fighting for rebounds, and sinking thirty-foot jump shots. Late in the game, just as it appeared Carmel would lose, I would steal the ball, weave my way through our opponents the entire length of the court, and make a spectacular twisting, falling hook shot at the buzzer to win the game. I would be mobbed by my teammates, who would cheer me one and all. Then they would hoist me onto their shoulders, and as they carried me triumphantly off the court, Donna would rush up to me and shout she loved me and would forever. Isn’t high school love wonderful?

I suppose it would be wonderful if it ever came true, but game after game passed, and my dreams of stardom and of winning Donna’s love failed to materialize. During each game, I sat on one end of the bench, next to the team manager, whose job it was to hand towels and drinks to players coming out of the game for a rest. The coach sat at the other end of the bench, seemingly as far from me as he possibly could. I got into only a few games, and then only with less than a minute left in the game and with Carmel either ahead or behind by at least twenty-five points. My infrequent game appearances under such circumstances never gave me a chance to prove my star power to the coach, to my teammates, to the school, or to Donna Sandiwald.

But I didn’t lose hope. There was still The Tournament. Each year in late February and early March, at the end of the regular season, the Indiana state high school basketball tournament is held. Known throughout the Midwest as Hoosier Hysteria, it is the event of the year in Indiana. Coaches, players, and fans look forward to that tournament from the first day of basketball practice through the entire season. When tournament time arrives, excitement and emotions are at a fevered pitch throughout Indiana’s high schools, cities, towns, and rural areas.

I had no reason to expect to play in any tournament games that year, but I had my dreams. And in my dreams, I would lead Carmel High School to the state basketball championship and in doing so, I would win Donna Sandiwald’s love.

The state tournament actually consists of four levels of tournaments—the sectionals (or local tournaments), the regionals, the semi-states, and the state finals. Although Carmel was not the largest town in Hamilton County, its gymnasium could hold more people than any other in the county, and so the sectional tournament was held there. For the fifteen years prior to my junior year, Carmel High School had not advanced beyond the sectionals round of the tournament. But somehow in my junior year, we won our first two games of the Hamilton County sectional tournament and needed only to win one more game to advance to the Anderson regional tournament.

On the day of the final games of the sectional tournaments, snow poured out of the sky as if it had been violently shaken loose from a massive secret winterland somewhere in the heavens. By late afternoon, more than twenty inches of snow blanketed most of Indiana. And still, hundreds of thousands of Hoosiers battled and clawed their way to the sixty-four gymnasiums where the sectional tournaments’ final games would be played. In Carmel, a town with a population of just over one thousand people and a high school with a senior class of fewer than ninety students, some seventy-five hundred fanatical fans squeezed into the Carmel High School gym.

When I arrived in the team locker room before the game, I learned two of my teammates had such bad cases of the flu they were home in bed. So I and nine other Carmel High School players suited up in our gold and blue basketball uniforms and ran out onto the shiny hardwood basketball court to face the team from Noblesville High School in front of all those screaming basketball fans and Donna Sandiwald. Noblesville had long been Carmel’s archrival in football, baseball, and basketball. It was the county seat in Hamilton County, had five times the population of Carmel, and had three stoplights compared with Carmel’s one.

During the early minutes of the game, players raced up and down the court, their arms and legs churning and their bodies in constant motion. The referees, men who seemed old to me at the time but who were probably in their late twenties or early thirties, chased after the players. They wore their black and white striped shirts, and the whistles in their mouths were poised to shriek at some rule violation by a player. Sitting at a table just behind the Carmel players’ bench were the game’s official timer, each team’s official scorer, and newspaper reporters from Carmel, Noblesville, and Indianapolis. Those were the reporters who would tell the world how I had won the game for Carmel High School—that is, if I ever got into the game.

As the players and referees sped up and down the court, their shoes squeaked on the hardwood floor. There was the nearly constant sound of the ball being dribbled on the floor, bounced off a backboard, and swished through the basket. A drumming high-pitched noise from the fans rose and fell, oscillating between the sound of them chattering among themselves and exhorting the players to do better to a raging, screaming, maddening sound that came in reaction to some frenzied action on the court. The Noblesville cheerleaders and Donna Sandiwald and the other Carmel cheerleaders led their respective booster sections in oft-rehearsed cheers and chants urging their teams on to victory, and each school’s booster section tried to outscream the other. The place was a madhouse. Wafting down from the concession stand on the upper rim of seats that surrounded the basketball court came the smell of buttered popcorn and boiled hot dogs, and from the court came the bitter smell of teenage boys sweating profusely.

Carmel took an early lead but soon lost it. Noblesville pulled ahead by five points, but Carmel came back and tied the score. And so it went back and forth for the first two quarters of the game. Most of the time, Carmel trailed but never by more than six points. Just before halftime, Carmel suffered a blow. One of our starting guards twisted an ankle so badly he would not be able to play again the rest of the night.

In the locker room, our coach bullied and begged us to play harder, to be more patient when looking for high-percentage shots, to be more careful when passing the ball, to use more teamwork, to play tougher defense, and to fight harder for rebounds. I was more than willing to do all those things if