Clinton, South Carolina, Friday, January 26, 2018, 1:09 p.m.

I strolled over to Clinton Middle School yesterday. I went to school there. It was Clinton High School then. I walked into the new gym of the old high school, which is now the new middle school.

The middle school fields two basketball team, the Red and the White. They were playing each other. One of the games between the cross-school rivals is played during school hours, and the entire student body attends. I wrote about that game two years ago, and it was likely the largest crowd for a basketball game – high school, middle school, Presbyterian College – in town that year. The other game is played at the regular time – 5 p.m. for girls, 6 for boys – so that it’s easier for people in the community to attend. This time it was the latter. The crowd was also quite large.

Although I arrived early, I was one of few people who did not understand what was going on. I copied the rosters from the scorebooks. In the story I wrote for the website (GoLaurens/GoClinton) that retains my services part-time, I expect there were a few mistakes because the rosters had only initials and last names, which meant I had to inquire upon the first-name spellings with the students who kept the books, and I suspect some of those first names were approximate. Names have never been harder for sportswriters to get right. White kids tend to have unconventional spellings of conventional names. Black kids tend to have apostrophes in abundance. I have encountered at least one with multiple apostrophes, as in Na’Jah’Lika.

Then the game started, and I found it odd that the clock began with 5:41 remaining and the score listed as 18-15. My first thought was that it was malfunctioning. What I didn’t know was that, in the season’s earlier girls’ game, a player had collapsed on the floor and required medical attention. The game was thus suspended. This was the resumption of that game. Another full girls’ game followed, and then the boys. The girl who collapsed is just fine now.

I had decided to “featurize” the story, so I was paying more attention to expressions and reactions than I was rebounds and turnovers. Middle school kids are amusing. They possess a certain sense of humor that older kids sacrifice in the name of being almost grown up. Some of this was mentioned in my account of the games. The middle-school kids dance with each other in layup lines. They laugh at referees’ calls. They play hard. I was impressed with the athletic ability of the girls’ teams, though not the players’ shooting accuracy. Many layups seemed more likely to crack the glass backboards than swish through the nets. The nearly one and a quarter girls’ game(s) were wide open, and I was glad I had decided not to tally up the total shots and turnovers.

The boys’ game was more proficient in shooting, and the final score – Red 52, White 49 – was high-scoring given that the quarters were only six minutes long. The Clinton High teams have a bright future, I expect.

It followed closely after the girls’ game, and I had to copy the rosters quickly, some after it had already started, so I didn’t have the time to print them carefully. I could only scribble them cursively, and later on, I had to call John Lapomarda, who runs the middle school’s athletic program, and correct the spelling of two names I couldn’t read in my own handwriting. I’m glad I did. A Morris I found out to be a Mims.

I’ve always heard that politics is the art of the possible, which seems a stretch in these times. So is middle-school basketball, but I had a marvelous time.

It was a momentous day. I completed a fiction manuscript that I had been starting, restarting, revising and proofreading, on and off, for about a year and a half. Another highlight occurred when I got home to discover a new $20 pledge on Patreon from a racing fan. Some people value my NASCAR writing enough to pay money to read it on a monthly basis. To me, it helps to make all my writing worthwhile. My NASCAR and national sports coverage is now featured at montedutton.com, and my other writing, such as this, is available here. If you enjoy this enough to give a small amount each month, please examine the details here.

Most of my books are available on my Amazon page here.

Three of my novels – Cowboys Come Home, Lightning in a Bottle, and Life Gets Complicated – are available, signed, in uptown Clinton at L&L Office Supply and Emma Jane’s gift shop.