The Ballad of Danny heater took place on a cold night in a hot West Virginia high school gym:
He did it 31 seasons ago. He was 17 then and built like a boneyard and had a father who was out of work in the mines and a mama named Beulah who sang beautifully in the Methodist church, and on one improbable howling-cold January night, in a little band-box country gym that was so small it didn't even have seats, he vaulted up out of his West Virginia destinies to set -- in 32 minutes and four quarters of high school basketball -- a single-game national scoring record that no one has ever been able to touch.
"We're going to feed it to Danny every time we get the ball," the coach had told Luther Clayton and Harold Conrad and Charlie Smith and Donnie Brooks and all the others in the locker room. And why? Because they wanted to try and get the poorest kid on the team a ride to college.
60 years! Does he celebrate the day, after all these years? Is it depressing to think about it? How can there not be a movie of this already, I mean for fuck's sake I have the perfect title for it aaaaaaarrrgggghhh!!!!
UPDATE: Dammit. I thought I had come up with "The Ballad of Danny Hater", but I didn't...it came from the very article I linked to in the previous post:
This is the ballad of Danny Heater.
He did it 31 seasons ago. He was 17 then and built like a boneyard and had a father who was out of work in the mines and a mama named Beulah who sang beautifully in the Methodist church, and on one improbable howling-cold January night, in a little band-box country gym that was so small it didn't even have seats, he vaulted up out of his West Virginia destinies to set -- in 32 minutes and four quarters of high school basketball -- a single-game national scoring record that no one has ever been able to touch.
Grrrrrr. Pissed it's not my name. But go ahead and read the whole article, it's goddam Hoosiers-worthy.
No comments:
Post a Comment