b l o g o s

In Memoriam: Larry Neil Ricker

Nearly four years ago now (well, three and three quarters), I learned of the boating accident that left my high school basketball coach in a wheelchair and killed his son Neal. I posted about the accident fleetingly here. The intervening years have been both swift and unkind. There was the deep, deep depression that came with his son's death and with his own transmogrified body, the latter no doubt a constant reminder of the former. There was the enormously difficult therapy that returned movement to his arms. There was the bittersweet ceremony a couple years ago to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of his first state championship, where his dejection was palpable. But it was the cancer that got him.

Those of you who knew Coach Ricker won't learn anything new here, but a few details bear remembering, especially his combination of toughness and tenderness when it came to his players. The same man who opened his home to our point guard when she was having family trouble also slammed opened the van doors for his players, commanding us to get out and run on steaming summer asphalt after a particularly bad performance at team camp. And run we did. We ran for four years straight. This man caused me vastly more physical pain (through just this sort of team punishment) than anyone, even Pat Summitt. He raked in two state championships during our time there (even more in coming years). And he spurred immense emotional and personal growth.

I first met Coach Ricker when I was in the eighth grade and he came to see my grade-school team play. I knew he was there, and I knew he was there to get a look at me for the high school team, one of the best in that part of the state. I was so nervous that I ended up hyperventilating in a paper bag. He came up to me afterwards and said "we just need to get you in shape." I breathed relief into my bag.

And get me in shape we did. That summer he made me and LO, the other almost-freshman player who would start that year, learn all the plays in one night at overnight team camp in Pulaski. I sat sniffling with LO, our sleeping bags curled up around us, while the two seniors impatiently gave us a crash course on all the offenses. He laughed at me when I got kicked out of a game for fighting with a girl twice my size. He once told me to box out, a command that resulted in the opponent's tooth being knocked out at the three point line. The next season my own tooth got knocked out by one of the big-haired Erwin girls, and he knelt by me and calmed my panicked shrieks.

Half time was his most animated, the locker room his theater: he dented lockers, broke clipboards, threw things, shredded game plans. The man had a temper. It always worked, his activating that temper: he got our attention, we played our guts out. His neck veins stood out as much when he was angry as when he was amused. Sometimes he could be both at once, like when he got thrown out of a game at Oak Ridge, bought popcorn, and returned to the stands to heckle the referees. The man was full of life, drive, love. He loved his job, he lived the game, and he drove and loved his players.

And we loved him. Love him still.

lady goo goo

I've got other, more private spaces where I'm posting pictures and videos of the new (now not so new!) baby, but sometimes there might well be baby-related spillage of the discursive variety onto blogos. And of course there is the whippet-baby combo in the upper left. Given that both JM and I are in the business of language, and that I have written about imitation as a means of learning, blogos seems the appropriate place to document what happened today.

What happened is this: the baby imitated us both when we said "goo goo" to her. Now, she is only nine weeks and some change, so we were both in turn rather startled when she did this. She did it with JM first while he was changing her diaper. Thinking it was a fluke, he repeated the experiment again and again. Then he brought her down to me and told me that I might think he was crazy, but that she just imitated him saying goo goo. So I tried it, and she did it with me too. We would of course go crazy praising her when she did it, which made her smile and giggle as if our words were tickling her. Beyond the praise, we went back and forth goo-gooing like eight or nine more times until she got tired and started to squeawk (that's my new word for one stripe of noises she makes). But pre-squeawk she was very definitely saying "goo goo."

Bananas. 

here's one

An April 1st never goes by when I don't 1) call my Mother, whose birthday is today--imagine all the pranks she endured as a kid, especially with her trickster younger brother!--and 2) flash on the worst April Fool's day I can remember.

It was 1990, twenty years ago now, and I was a college sophomore sitting in the stands with my teammates watching the women's national championship. Yes, watching. In the stands. On our home court in Knoxville. The nosebleed tickets and requirement that we attend were part of our coach's not-so-friendly way of reminding us that we hadn't managed to make it to the final four that year despite all predictions and expectations to the contrary (see this post about that loss's immediate aftermath). At the championship, we were both watching and being watched, so that we really had to pay attention to the game and couldn't seem to be having any fun at all. Not that we were. It was rather miserable to be there in street clothes and have another team in our locker room, on our floor, being cheered on by a crowd that would have been ours, and it would have been a capacity crowd had we made it. As if living in the (im)perfect tense weren't enough, Regina had to go and bring on some devastating future-tensed news at half time.

She was transferring.

We are talking about my very best friend here. The one who informed me on move-in day that it wasn't cool to wear flat dress shoes, even if you're as tall as me. The one who I immediately liked a ton. We shared a room on every road trip, having received special dispensation from the policy that we had to share around, because our teammates were tired of her silliness and my sloppiness. Regina, "RG" as she was known to the team and to our fans, and I were inseparable. Only Regina was bold enough to bop Pat on the head with a wadded up pair of dirty socks on the bus, and only Regina, in doing so, could draw laughter and a head shake from Coach Summitt. Regina, who would pose with me Hans-and-Franz style in our sports bras and shorts in front of the big orange-framed locker-room mirror, to the squealy delight (and some amused eyerolls) of our teammates. Regina, who helped stage the gymnastics feat that would chip my tooth on Lisa Harrison's knee. Who, once forgetting she had already been in the game, removed her playing jersey thinking it was her shooting shirt as she was squat-running to the scoring table to check in. Who mouthed "I love you, Jeff" to the ESPN cameras when we were losing to Stanford, and then became horror-stricken when I told her the coaches would use that as the game tape. Who, when she got to meet Michael Jordan at half time of an exhibition game, skipped the protective barrier and locked her arms around his waist, nuzzling her cheek just below his sternum and refusing to let go until Jordan politely informed her that he was "all sweaty," and gently pried her off of him. Regina, who would go through a pitcher of lemonade at road restaurants before our food would come and would inform the waitress before she even poured the first glass that she "might as well bring another." She was the center of the "eat-em-up crew," a nickname given to the five freshmen the previous year because we all ate with such, well, gusto. Regina, who brought life to our team, was leaving, as were many of our teammates following that turbulent season, including our teammate also named Debbie whom we adored, and whose departure would leave the "freshman five" as four before two years were done. But Regina was to make it a stumpy, lifeless three, and I was devastated.

She explained to me how the coach from Michigan State had gotten in touch with her, and how that had been her "other" school when she was being recruited--the path not taken, we all had these--and how the coach had asked her to think about coming back home, and how she had thought about it, and would ultimately do it. She would be a superstar there, I knew it. And I understood her decision, on the surface. But I was already mourning. She looked away, and I knew she was crying, so I looked back at the game which had just resumed, a wet blur of non-orange.

And then, making sure that we weren't being watched by the coaching staff, Regina came in for a sideways hug. I started to heave a little, and she got really close to my ear and whispered,

"April Fool's."