Fast Break (Part 1)

Somewhere in rural western Oregon, at the foot of the Cascade Range, depleted timber and ranch country, a high school boys basketball team with the preposterously plural Elks as their mascot is playing a Friday night game against its arch rival in the last standing gymnasium in Oregon constructed by the CCC during the Depression. It is also the last gym in the state to sport a sign that reads Fallout Shelter and violates the ADA.

The joint is packed to the rafters. It stinks of sweat and sap. The gym is tiny, a cracker box they used to call them. It has ancient wooden bleachers that will shiv splinters into asses through Carhart pants and Wrangler jeans. The court is smaller than the regulation junior high size of 74 feet long and 42 feet wide. All the coaches in the league detest playing here because they can't play their usual style of basketball, which amounts entirely to shooting three-point shots. In this cracker box, a player can't shoot three-point shots near the baseline because to do so would mean standing out of bounds.

But that's not why the home team hasn't lost a game in this gym in two decades. They occasionally lose on the road. They win because they never take three-point shots. They make layups, lots of them. They go to the hoop. Most of the layups are uncontested, but sometimes a player who drives hard to the hoop with its medieval metal backboard will end up crashing into the padded cushions bolted to the concrete wall three feet from the end lines. Many concussions and separated shoulders have resulted because of these collisions. Even a couple broken legs. The coach isn't a sadist, far from it. He's a basketball purist and purists love mid air collisions near and under the rim.

Time has stood still here. The voters will never pass a bond measure to build a new gym. Three attempts at arson by school board members have also failed and no one was ever prosecuted. The town likes their gym just fine. It reminds them of better days when conservative Oregon was really conservative Oregon.

And in many ways they were right about the good ol' Oregon days. Tom McCall was governor and decriminalizing marijuana. Prisoners in the state penitentiary published a classic literary review. Coffee was coffee. Donuts were donuts. Beer was beer. Strippers weren't dancers. Cheese from Tillamook was produced by the state's most successful socialist enterprise (and still is). Steve Prefontaine was alive and breaking long distance running records while hungover. The Portland Timbers were a bunch of washed-up drunken Brits. Senator Mark Hatfield was saving Yaquina Head from ending up as a rock quarry. Senator Bob Packwood was saving Cascade Head from ending up as a clearcut. The state sponsored a rock festival attended by naked hippies. And the only homeless people were the winos sleeping in the doorways of Old Town in Portland.

Or they could travel even farther back in Oregon time to an era when the gym was constructed by the CCC boys in less than a week, out of lumber milled from local 500-year-old Doug firs felled by crosscut saws, and the federal government hired an unemployed Communist to paint a mural on one of the walls, a mural of muscled men felling towering trees with crosscut saws that hid a few furtive IWW symbols that were so subtle that the capitalists couldn't detect them.

It was right there, above one of the backboards, painted in that gloriously proletariat style of murals from the New Deal, (and with a dash of Diego Rivera). It was a living (if not fading) lesson from American history that any of the high school's social studies teachers could have used to teach about the New Deal, FDR, WPA, CCC and the Federal Art Project. All they had to do was march their students down the halls, into the gym, tell them to look up, and start asking questions of the mural and the gym itself. After that, they could take the stairs to the fallout shelter and pretend it was the Cuban Missile Crisis and the end of the world was on its way in the form of a nuclear winter.

But no, these teachers didn't know a damn thing about the murals or the fallout shelter. They demanded their students fill out rote worksheets on a fancy tablet that sent advertisements to the students as they “studied” streaming shows and gambled on NFL games.

Everything about the gymnasium proclaimed the case for the practical grandeur of American-style socialism, but that is another story to tell and has nothing to do with a high school basketball team that was invincible on its home hardwood, won state title after state title, but played in such a remote rural area that hardly anyone outside the Timber Valley League ever saw the unique old fashioned way they conquered at home and marvel at their magisterial method for total domination.

Even the hometown fans didn't grasp what they were seeing in the team's winning ways because they were too dumb to grasp the meaning of a beautiful metaphor running up and down the court in front of their eyes. People who watch Fox News all day and night can't grasp metaphors, let alone reality. But they do come out to support high school sports in podunk Oregon towns, and do give up, at least for a few evenings, Tucker Carlson for that.