For four years, when I was in school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I kept stats at every men’s basketball home game for the UNC Office of Sports Information.
After I graduated in 1966 I went to work for the afternoon paper in Charlotte and, three years later, Charlotte got its first pro basketball team, the Carolina Cougars of the fledgling American Basketball Association.
[The team had a distinct local flavor with former Duke player Bob Verga, and three former UNC players, Doug Moe, Bill Bunting and Larry Miller.]
The home team is responsible for keeping statistics — rebounds, fouls, shots attempted, shots made, and so forth. One of the Cougars’ front office guys heard I had kept stats at Carolina and he called me and asked me to put a stat crew together.
The three people I hired had never kept stats and we had no opportunity to practice. Actually, we could have worked an exhibition game, but the Cougers wouldn’t pay us to work what amounted to a practice game and I wouldn’t work for free. So the opening home game of the season would be our trial by fire.
We got burned, bad.
The woman who was supposed to type a running record of each score, and record each time out, was a disaster. She couldn’t keep up and then she just gave up.
During a time out one of the referees walked over to our table and asked:
“Who’s in charge.”
“I am,” I said.
“How many time outs have the Cougars called?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s on the play-by-play, look on the play-by-play.”
“No, it isn’t,” I said.
“Yes it is!” he yelled at me. “There’s a league rule that says it has to be!”
NOTE1: What was I thinking when he said that? I was thinking, “A league rule? Goodness, gracious! That means it’s there, somewhere, got to be. Why don’t you look for it yourself, you idiot.”
NOTE2: After the game I replaced two of the three people I had hired and we started over. We did just fine after that.
Coming Friday: The Best Weekend Ever?
NOTE: I met Killebrew last month in Lumberton, N.C., where he and I worked together on a Baptists on Mission disaster relief team. We helped cook for other teams who were repairing houses flooded by Hurricane Matthew in October 2016. That was 18 months ago and, still, hundreds of houses in Lumberton and elsewhere in Eastern North Carolina are in need of repair.