BBN’s Biggest, Baddest Fan Ever

When I was maybe four or five
Dad spent hours at Brookings’ Restaurant
eat­ing chili till he could hold no more
wait­ing to ask Coach Rupp to auto­graph
a bas­ket­ball for me. But Coach was sick,
he nev­er showed that day. So Mom,
years lat­er, reluc­tant­ly admit­ted
“Dad auto­graphed the ball that Santa left”—
Coach Rupp’s first name misspelled.

My friends and I didn’t care
we played with that ball for years, till
our var­i­ous garage-mount­ed goals fell
into dis­re­pair. On them we always made
need­ed fade­away jumpers and last minute
free throws that always salt­ed away NCAA
cham­pi­onships galore. It was so easy for us.

Why didn’t our beloved Cats win more?
On March 27, 1978, when UK won its
5^th cham­pi­onship Mom screamed at Dad,
“It’s time! I need to go to the hos­pi­tal. He’s here!”
“Well, dear,” Dad said patient­ly, “we have to wait.
This is Kentucky, the doc­tors and nurs­es
will be cheer­ing, too.”

In high school and in col­lege, I knew kings
of court and dreamed with them of vic­to­ries.
Some came, some van­ished. Once, Christian
Laettner (a name I only now dare to squeak qui­et­ly) shot down
my team’s cham­pi­onship dreams with but a sin­gle arch­ing
shot. And always we were “Cheated” of vic­to­ries—
no mat­ter how few defeats came our way.

Adolph, Joe B. and Ricky P., Tubby, Coach Cal—
Most recent­ly, Coach Pope, a for­mer UK hard­wood cap­tain;
I have watched them all.  Sometimes I have been In
 the are­na to watch my team stand tall or fall
vic­tim to an unlucky bounce or a wrong call
Sometimes loss rolled onto loss: One and two, even three
But nev­er, nev­er in the House of Rupp!
Nay, none have van­quished Big Blue there!

At fifty I am now part of Big Blue Nation
if only from my couch., where I coach and moan
of bad luck and worse deci­sions deliv­ered
from men to boys who do not lis­ten
to me squawk. Nor do they even squeal
when I cry “what stu­pid­i­ty!”
So again UK becomes a team doomed
due to a fail­ure to lis­ten to my well-earned
years of coach­ing strate­gies and wisdom.

Indeed I am a part of Big Blue Nation
whose only chance of influ­ence is to
cheer and boo and drop a scathing Facebook
post or two that assures the world Coach Cal
knows not as much as I, a fount of near­ly half
a century’s worth of wis­dom, strate­gies, and truth.

I have no way to sky for a dunk
or even sit the bench so I must set­tle
 in and scowl and glow­er at my TV
and yell my team to vic­to­ry!
Sometimes, I am con­vinced I did just that,

“We won!”

It was I who burned my mother’s favorite
 couch in a State Street vic­to­ry eupho­ria
in 1996, (or maybe, 1998?) before spend­ing
two months wor­ry­ing whether Mom would ever
let me come home again.

But now—when UK wins anoth­er cham­pi­onship —
will I be con­tent with only smok­ing a grandson’s
cel­e­bra­to­ry can­dy cig­a­rette? Indeed,
in my fad­ing glo­ry years I have to won­der
how Big Blue will ever win again.

Eventually, to tears no doubt,
I will van­ish
under dirt and grass
nev­er ever again
to be Big Blue Nation’s
biggest bad­dest fan, ever.