Jim Mashek column: The @#$%@ INTERNET … The Final Frontier

October 16, 2021
High School Football, Potpourri

WITH APOLOGIES TO JERRY GARCIA, WHAT A LONG, STRANGE TRIP IT SOMETIMES IS …

My checkout from the Days Inn in Madisonville, Kentucky had a little suspense and intrigue to it on Friday morning. A couple of police cars showed up about 10 a.m., when I was scrambling to make a doctor’s appointment about 30 minutes away. I said hello to the officer walking the second floor of the hotel, and minded my own business. Momma didn’t raise no fool …

Thought I had everything figured out.

Couldn’t reach South Warren High School football coach Brandon Smith during the week, as he was dealing with a short work week, professional responsibilities and a growing family with two precious daughters, including a newborn.

(I think it’s kind of cool, how the South Warren players’ wives and their kids congregate past the end line, and the goal posts, in lounge chairs for home games. Gives them a little buffer zone. Fans can be demanding, even in high school sports. No, now that I think about it, fans can be downright INSANE, even in high school sports. So I respect that, have learned to live with it. Kinda, sorta …)

But I digress, as I am wont to do.

I booked a hotel room in Madisonville, Kentucky on Thursday morning, about 30-45 minutes from Hopkinsville, where the second-ranked South Warren Spartans would scrap with homestanding Christian County. I knew what was up, or at least I thought I did … Turns out, I didn’t have a clue, Hoss.

I wasn’t hip to the fact that South Warren, then 6-1, and Christian County, then 1-6, had moved their game from a 7 p.m. kickoff to an hour earlier. I still left in time to make it for kickoff, or a little after, when I headed out U.S. 68 toward Logan County, Amish country, and the home of Russellville High School and Logan County High School.

I’ve traveled that road maybe two, three times since moving to Bowling Green in 2019. I hadn’t taken it farther west, toward Hopkinsville, in decades, maybe my undergraduate days at Western Kentucky University.

(They tell me I graduated, in 1978, and I got a diploma, but I’m trying to remember some of the details. Anyway, moving right along …)

I saw the road signs for the Commonwealth’s Jefferson Davis Historical Site, as soon as I rolled into Logan County, and I started to wonder. Hmmm, I remember Beauvoir, the shrine to the Confederacy, in Biloxi, which was Mr. Davis’ final residence or something in the late ’80s — that’s 1880s, in case you’re curious — before he bought the farm. Or seceded from it, we can’t be sure.

Anyway, I saw the 351-foot concrete obelisk, a miniature Washington Monument, if you will, from the highway. Pulled the car over. Didn’t cross the highway to enter the grounds. Had to get to Hoptown for a football game. So I proceeded.

The Jefferson Davis Historical Site, in Pembroke, Kentucky, was completed after World War I and has a picnic area and other amenities and is operated by the Kentucky Department of Parks. I didn’t stop, and stay, on my way to Hopkinsville on Thursday evening, but I did wonder if that’s where Trump advisor Steve Bannon was hiding from the U.S. House investigative committee examining the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in Washington.

There’s an old expression for Texas high school sports scribblers, as my boys Mike Forman of the Victoria Advocate, Mike Considine of the South San Antonio Southside Reporter and Dave Rogers, formerly of the Beaumont Enterprise/Port Arthur News/Baytown Sun/Orange-Vidor Leader, etc., will attest to, and can recite, on command:

“When you get to the town, follow the lights …”

I followed the lights.

Now, as anyone who’s gotten lost with me, in New Orleans or Dallas or Huntsville, Alabama, will tell you, I don’t just GET LOST. That’s not good enough for me. I gotta go for the gusto.

So I put “Christian County High School” into my GPS, as I’ve tried to get down with technology in my leisurely retirement years. (Yeah, right.) I followed the lights. To a slow-pitch softball complex. Boys and girls games, I believe. Little kids. I was confused. And it would only get worse.

I asked a nice lady about the Christian County football stadium. She told me it was right down the road, and sure enough, it was. And again, I followed the lights. And there were kids playing football, behind the Christian County Middle School. Albeit, they were SMALL kids. Everybody was watching in around the track and in small, ramshackle bleachers. I wandered up to the ticket stand, and the sweet woman told me I was looking for the Stadium Of Champions.

“It’s on the Bypass,” she said.

Oh boy.

In Texas, high school sports scribblers are taught to “follow the lights” when they get to a town where they’re covering the game, and don’t know their way around. I proved once and for all I don’t know my way around Hopkinsville, Kentucky. I followed the lights and the first thing I found was a slow-pitch softball complex.

So I found it, the Stadium of Champions, and the game had already started. In fact, it was well into the second quarter. I wandered in from the service entrance, opposite the giant grandstand, and matriculated to the South Warren sideline. At halftime, an old-timer from South who I met at the Kroger gas pumps told me about everything I’d missed. All the Spartans’ scoring plays. He summoned help from another fella for a couple of them.

I dutily wrote it all down.

The second half went by quickly, thanks to a running clock in the fourth quarter. (Thank you, Kentucky High School Athletics Association, for this practical move. They’re too serious to do something like that in Texas, or Mississippi, where I have previously covered high school football.)

Anyway, I interviewed Brandon Smith quickly, after the Spartans closed the door on their 51-20 victory over Christian County. Caden Veltkamp, the 6-foot-5 quarterback headed for Western Kentucky University, made eye contact with me and figured I was looking for him. I grabbed a couple quick quotes and moved on to some other kids — Eldar Dervisevic, Preston Parks, Keegan Milby, a couple others.

Veteran South Warren coach Brandon Smith addresses his team after the second-ranked Spartans whipped Christian County 51-20 on Thursday night. South Warren improved to 7-1 heading into next week’s district game with Greenwood.

I was gonna write when I got to Madisonville.

And I did. Filed the story around midnight, right here for jimmashek.com.

I wanted to do a preview for the Bowling Green High School-Greenwood game, kicking off at 7 on Friday, and I needed quotes from both head coaches. I’d heard from Greenwood’s William Howard, a fine man and a former WKU defensive lineman, on Thursday, but still needed some input from Mark Spader, the personable Purples coach who understands how to reach the adolescents of today.

Shoot, Bowling Green won the school’s seventh KHSAA state championship last December, just two or three days before Christmas, in Lexington.

Mark sent me a text message, answering my two or three questions, and apologized for missing me on Thursday. I told him, hey, no problem, it happens, and I started hackin’ …

Then it came on.

Like a “Check Engine” light, or a dead end in a dim alleyway in the wrong part of town, I got the notification, “you’ve used all your data for your hotspot, Hoss, you’re SOL …”

Or something like that.

I used the Days Inn wi-fi to knock out the BGHS-Greenwood preview and got ready to hit the road. Hopped in the shower, packed my bags, called my bookie … (OK, everything but the last part.)

I was ready to roll.

When I got back to Bowling Green, on Friday, a few hours before the BGHS-Greenwood kickoff, I tended to some things around the domicile. Took care of Piper, my puppy. Ran a quick errand or two. Headed to Greenwood High School without a worry in the world …

Then, bam.

Bowling Green rolled to victory over Greenwood, winning 38-8 on a soft, damp field that has become the Purples’ playground over the years. Did my interviews, with Spader and a handful of players. Got a phone number or two for further use. Hopped in the Gray Ghost and headed home.

To write.

Yeah, right.

I had no hotspot data. I had no Internet. I tried, oh how I tried, to split that atom, and that atom just wouldn’t cooperate. So I told Piper it was time to crash, and I’d write on Saturday.

So that’s what I’m fixin’ to do. Write on Saturday. With the UK-Georgia kickoff in a couple hours from now. I think I’m gonna do a column instead of a game story. Everybody already knows what’s happened, anyway. Greenwood will live to fight another day. Bowling Green has evened its record at 4-4, and trust me, Spader’s Purples will be ready to play come KHSAA playoffs time in November.

In another life, in a town probably far, far away, I woulda left that suitcase and cooler for safer ground when the police were snooping around my hotel on a weekday morning. I caught wind of what happened later in the day. They made some drug busts. Evidently some of the culprits were crashin’ at the Days Inn on the northern outskirts of Madisonville.

Thanks to all the coaches, in South Central Kentucky, for working with me. Sharing other phone numbers, allowing me to come to the tail end of practice to interview players. To me, that’s the best way. Interview the kids in person, as opposed to over the phone. Tell the story. Try to make it interesting.

That’s what I’ll be doing, with jimmashek.com. Some of the content will be mainstream sports, the Warren East victory over Allen County-Scottsville on Friday night, for instance, and some of it will be stream-of-unconsciousness, damn-the-torpedeos misadventures of a sports scribbler whose brain works overtime, even when his body tells him to shut up and go to sleep.

So I’ll get to work on my BGHS-Greenwood column. And say thanks, once again, to Greenwood’s William Howard and Bowling Green’s Mark Spader. Spader even let me take refuge in the BGHS tent, behind their bench, during the weather delay on Friday night.

Y’all make it fun. Appreciate it. 10/16/2021

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