The Team From Lincoln: a short story

The Team from Lincoln.

They had not won a championship in Lincoln Township – ever.  To be sure, the girls softball team came close two years in a row.  Carthage, just up the road, won three in football – in consecutive years, no less. But Lincoln had a big goose egg by its name for state titles.

That all changed when Randy Holly came to town. He brought with him three assistant coaches (The football coach, R.C. McAdams only had five coaches.) and an attitude that if you wanted to play for him, you had to bust ass every second of every practice and every game. And you had to bust the books in every class. The teachers loved him for this.

At first he wasn’t accepted. One, he was tough.  Beyond anything any of the kids that went to Lincoln could ever remember.  And two, he was white. They were mostly black. And he didn’t back down to them, nor did he treat them in any way with disrespect.  He just demanded a lot. At first some of the parents were mildly agitated with this ‘white man ruffin’ up our sons this way,’ but soon, they too were believers.

Then came a kid named Wallace Thorpe to Lincoln. Some say he was recruited, but others say it was an act of God.  The real reason was that his old man was a highway patrolman who had been assigned to the Carthage region, but wanted his son to go to school near their country home. They lived on thirty acres outside of Lincoln. The father wanted his son near his mom, in case she needed him. And his father wanted Wallace to take care of the farm, so wasn’t too sure about basketball.  It would take a lot of time away from his studies and away from being at home and his chores. But the kid was six feet, six inches tall and still growing. In fact, he grew three more inches his sophomore year alone. And Randy Holly put on a hell of a sales pitch. The father finally gave in. “Make sure he excels,” is all he said to coach Holly.

Thorpe had moved to Lincoln from Houston. He was an urban kid who knew the ropes according to the gangs of inner city life.

But this was the country. It was different.

Coach Holly told Thorpe the first day of practice he had to get rid of the attitude and become a team player. Thorpe pouted and Holly threw him out of the gym. Now some of this is here-say, but what happened next is the stuff of legends. Thorpe came back to the gym for six straight days and sat in the bleachers and watched practice. He never said a word or made a sound.  Just sat there and took it all in.  After practice, he would get his backpack and head home. After his dad picked him up in the black and white patrol car. Then on the following Monday Thorpe asked to speak to the team, with Coach Holly’s permission. Randy Holly agreed and the history of Lincoln High changed that afternoon.

Thorpe asked for the team to forgive him for being a shit head. Apparently those were his words. He wanted to play basketball at Lincoln and he was wondering if the team would have him back.  If they voted yes, then he would go and talk to Coach Holly.  Of course Randy Holly was standing right there while Thorpe gave his speech.

He won a unanimous ballot. He turned to a smiling Coach Holly who told him to come to practice the next day, thirty minutes early.

On Tuesday at 3 pm, a good thirty minutes before the rest of the team was due to come to the old wooden gym, Thorpe was running the bleachers and sprinting the hardwood court as fast as he could go. He was doing push-ups and sit-ups and running some more; until he thought he was going to die. Then Coach Holly made him shoot one hundred foul shots. And for every miss, he got a lap after practice.

By the time the team arrived to work out, Thorpe was dripping wet and exhausted. Coach Holly gave him a red net jersey and told him to play on the defense for the first half of practice. Lincoln played man-to-man. And under Coach Holly you played man-to-man as if your life depended upon it. No slackers. No prisoners taken. Nothing gets through. Or you run.

After practice that day Thorpe had fifty laps to run.  Others ran as well, but nobody had anything close to fifty.  On Wednesday, he had thirty laps to run. Thursday it was down to fifteen and by Saturday morning’s practice, which was open to the public, not there was a big crowd, maybe three old cusses and the local retired barber, Thorpe had but one lap to run.

There had been a transformation. Not just with Wallace Thorpe, but with the entire Lincoln Wildcat team. A squad of misfits who the past two seasons had been lucky to scrape together a half dozen wins were now poised to do something the school had never seen. Win.  And win big. And the heart of the Wildcat engine was Wallace Thorpe.

His sophomore year, Lincoln won a state Class AA championship, beating a Lamar team by over thirty points in Austin in the finals. The next year, Thorpe’s junior year, they repeated the act, this time beating a Lubbock area high school squad at the buzzer by one point. The team they beat had not lost a game all season. Of course, Lincoln had not lost a game in two seasons.

The off -season between his junior and senior year, saw Wallace Thorpe topped out at six feet, ten inches in height.  He ran five miles everyday, lifted weights and studied enough to finish his high school credits by August. With straight A’s.

College coaches from around the nation visited the little gym everyday.  Duke, North Carolina, LSU, Kentucky, Arkansas, Michigan. They were a drooling at the chance of signing Wallace Thorpe. Every practice had another recruiter coming and timing him, measuring him and talking him up. But he gave all the credit to his coaches and to his teammates, whom he called the greatest friends a guy could ever have.

On the third day of practice their senior year, Wallace Thorpe and Sydney Collins got into Syd’s Buick Skylark and headed home.  Both young men were bone-tired from Holly’s strenuous practice.  Perhaps that why neither saw the truck veer into their lane. They were both killed on the spot.

Their lost was one of the biggest blows to a town you could imagine.  The all-state center and his all-star point guard, both of whom were bound for Division I basketball the next year – were gone.

Every person in Lincoln turned out for their combined funeral. The cheerleaders all wept.  The band, under the direction of Tom Rich, played some somber music, even the fight song at the end of the ceremony was sad and seemed to be pitched in a minor key.

As everyone left the Crosstimbers Baptist Church, Reverend Toby Hart pulled Randy Holly aside and said, “Coach, you know those other boys are going to be counting on you.  This is a time to show some true wisdom and leadership. They truly need a man to lead them though this.” Holly, with tears of his own in his eyes nodded and left.

The first six games that year Lincoln lost.  And lost big.  It was like old times. Then Coach Holly did something special.  He had his wife frame two 8x10 photographs, one each of Wallace Thorpe and Sydney Collins. He placed the photos in the dressing room on a bulletin board and never said a thing about them, but beneath each picture was a blank area where anybody who wanted to could leave them a message. The first message that was up there was on a torn piece of paper and all it said was, “Boys, I’m sorry we’re letting you down. We miss you.” Coach H.

Soon other pieces of paper began to appear.  Each with a confession or a promise or a thought of inspiration. Some were written, some typed some were even spelled correctly. But in the end they became a rallying point for the Wildcat team. Before each game, the remaining eight players would stop in front of the homemade shrine and touch it. There was hardly a dry eye on the team each time they did this simple act.

And the victories started reappearing. Like magic.

First, the Wildcats beat a 4-A high school from Kilgore. Then Gladewater fell and so to did Overton and Tatum and then another 4-A team, Henderson. And before long the six losses were history and the Wildcats were back. And they were heading for the state championship in Austin once again.

Eight young men and three coaches came together that year and did something nobody would ever forget. They won a state championship without their two star players. They did it all on heart and sheer determination. They beat the same team from Lubbock only this time they did it with an eleven-point margin. And the school from west Texas was again undefeated until it ran into the Lincoln Wildcats.

None of the eight ever got a college scholarship offer. Not to a big university, a small school or even a junior college.  Nothing.  One became a welder.  Two went and studied business at Stephen F. Austin in Nacogdoches. Two went into the service. One became a Baptist minister and another two started businesses there in Lincoln. Eight young men, who each day left notes to two lost buddies on the bulletin board of the gym’s dressing room.

At the end of the season, I got to go into the gym dressing room, as a reporter for the local paper and I saw for the first time the two pictures and the notes all penned and taped beneath Thorpe and Collins. The last entry, the last note on the board, before the state game caught my eye. It was written by a junior, a kid named LaJames Gilmore. It said, “Watch us.  This one is for ya’ll.”

The next season Coach Holly moved away.  He went to a small college in Louisiana and took one of his assistant coaches with him. The other coach that had been on the bench there in Lincoln moved to Longview to teach chemistry full time. A new coach came to town. His name was Earl Pittman. A good man.  A Baptist deacon and a God-fearing, big-mouthed coach who believed that you lived and died by zone defense.

The story goes, that as Earl walked into the gym, he saw the bulletin board and told one of his new assistant coaches to “clean that shit up.  Get it down and get me a good blackboard in here where I can teach.”

In four seasons under Pittman, Lincoln never won more than eight games in a year. Pittman was fired and the school board, short on cash, hired one of the young assistants. He happened to be the one who took down the bulletin board.  (He had heard the legend from townspeople about it, so all those years he kept it in his home.) And on his first day as head coach, he placed that shrine back in the Wildcat dressing room.  He added eight photographs to it –one for each of the other teammates from those three championship seasons.  Then he left the first note. “Sorry we’ve been away.  But we’re back.  Come watch us grow.” Coach Sparks.

The Wildcats are undefeated this season. They seem to be headed toward Austin in March. There are no superstars on the team. No college scouts sitting in the bleachers.  Just eleven guys who want to play basketball.  And eleven guys who have each other’s back. And every day, after every practice and before each game, the team leaves a note to those ten guys that came before them.

And Coach Sparks has them playing man-to-man as if their lives depended upon it.