Excerpt
In the best days of Indiana high school basketball, five-hundred high schools or more had signed up for the single-elimination state tournament.
And, despite how it may have been proscribed in neighboring states, a school’s size was not considered, enrollment was no discriminator.
It was simple, really.
The game of basketball required only five players, and almost every community in Indiana had at least that many of good ones.
Most had more.
The high school state basketball tournament held a madness all of its own.
“Sectionals”, some of them hosting as many as fifteen teams, determined the initial round of sixty-four.
Sixteen “Regionals” determined the second round winners, followed by four “Semi-States”, and ultimately the “State Tournament” or “Final Four”.
The last three rounds were played by exactly four competing teams at each site, with games at noon and two o’clock and the championship game at eight that evening.
The last team standing was the State Champion.
For the Bearcats, the Sectional had been played at the Fieldhouse, the Regional at Crysler Fieldhouse in New Castle, and the Semi-State at Hinkle Fieldhouse on the campus of Butler University.
The location of the State Finals had rotated over the years from the Indiana Fair Grounds to Hinkle Fieldhouse to the various homes of the Indiana Pacers, to the thirty-three-thousand-seat Hoosier Dome.
Every community had its own gymnasium.
The seating capacity of a town’s gym was a source of enormous civic pride.
Despite the fact that the number of citizens often totaled less than the capacity of their local gymnasiums, the communities usually had little trouble filling them on Friday and Saturday nights, during the basketball season.
New Castle’s Crysler Fieldhouse was the largest.
With an official capacity of 9,325, it often swelled to over twelve-thousand on game nights.
Billed as “The Largest and Finest High School Gymnasium in the World”, it was certainly that and had been officially number one on the list since 1959.
In fact, fifteen of the top sixteen high school gyms in the nation were located in Indiana. Many were within an hour’s drive of Muncie, whose 6,929-seat Fieldhouse had fallen from the top spot in 1929 to number sixteen, over the course of its eighty-year history.
Hinkle Fieldhouse had been the iconic yardstick by which all others were measured, however. Constructed in 1928, the building had been designed to hold only fifteen thousand fans, belying those who claimed that the old gym’s actual capacity had often crept to well-over twenty.
When configured for basketball, there was simply no other venue like it in the world.
It was during his Sophomore year at Hinkle that the “thing” had occurred.
Entering the Indianapolis Semi-State as the state’s number one team and the prohibitive favorite, his Titans had been beaten by an aggressive team from Rushville.
That single event had changed his life.
After fighting back from a double-digit deficit, the Titans had taken the lead with an opportunity to push ahead and secure the win.
And, that is when, “it” had occurred.
The referee, seen later on film looking directly up at the play, had simply missed the call.
With it, the course of history had changed.
Attempting to convince himself otherwise had been a losing argument.
And, afterward, he had been physically sick for days, emotionally troubled for years.
It had never occurred to him that his team might actually lose the game. The real challenge had not been expected, until the highly anticipated State Finals match up against second-ranked Marion.
Docremedy’s reaction had been predictable.
He had sat alone, high in the stands on the opposite side of Hinkle, away from all the others, watching in utter horror, as a tired and disinterested Rushville Lyons team was thoroughly hammered in the Championship Game that evening by Columbus North.
He would never be the same again.
Bob Williams of the Indianapolis Star saw fit to list him, the only Sophomore, on the ten-man All-State team, a fact which unexpectedly uplifted him.
Yet, the loss had remained a crushing blow.
Two years later, he closed out his career in despair, suffering a first-round tournament loss to neighborhood rival, Yorktown.
His last and final high school points had come on a rim-rattling, two-handed dunk. The clock had run out, as he was left hanging on the rim in desperation and pain, violated by the very game that he had loved so much.
Adding further insult to injury, Bob Williams of the Indianapolis Star, favoring the inner-city kids, eventually dropped Docremedy from the All-Star roster, despite his status on the All-State first team for three years.
To be clear, being selected as “All-State” in Indiana was one thing, but being chosen as an Indiana “All-Star” was quite another all together.
Each year the high school All-Stars played a home-and-home series with Kentucky, pitting the best against the best. The team as selected by Bob Williams and some other Indianapolis sports writers.
Docremedy had been refused, he was told, due to his team’s lack of success.
Guilt by association?
Though he had begun the year as a Mr. Basketball candidate, consistently rated as one of the top three players in the state, he was never able to play in the famed All-Star series.
If any pain had cut deeper than the tournament losses, it was this lack of recognition as an Indiana All-Star, the most emotionally damaging event in his life.
It was this devastation that, for all of these years, had kept him from returning and spending his life in the state, enjoying his success and raising another generation of Indiana All-Stars.
It had even become difficult to understand who he was and how he wished to define himself and his life.
Am I a basketball player?
Am I something else?
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