The championship game of the Public League basketball season is one of the city’s great squandered resources. If its location were fixed from year to year–say at the UIC Pavilion or even the Stadium–and if it were televised to accommodate the people who can’t attend and to draw in those who might, it would probably become a major annual event, a showcase for the city’s best young basketball players. Of course it would also lose some of its charm, some of those qualities that despite its size and importance evoke memories for anyone who ever attended high school anywhere: the partisan fans sitting on opposite sides of the court; the way one side disses the other’s cheerleaders; the unique manner in which high school students greet one another (“Yo, Fuckface. Where you been?”). Every year we plan to see more high school basketball, and every year we wind up blowing it off, from week to week, until the only game left is the Public League championship. That game, however, has become an annual event for us, and if the great mass of the city’s sports fans don’t want to take an interest–too bad for them. A week ago last Tuesday they missed seeing one of the great high school basketball teams of all time.
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This year’s title game had an atmosphere completely different from last year’s. For one thing, the semifinals and the championship were moved south, from the Pavilion to the International Amphitheatre, a strange old arena that has all the charm of a factory on the outside and an oversized barn on the inside. Its vaulted metal ceiling is scaly and acned, and the place is in such a general state of disuse that it’s hard to believe it was once home to major-league basketball and hockey teams–not to mention national political conventions–and that only a few years ago it was still a major concert venue. The public-address system is croaking and indecipherable, an echo within echoes, and the seats, while unobstructed (as they would be in any old barn with the stalls removed), are distant, especially in the balcony, where we were. The only advantage to the arena’s antiquity is the width of the wooden seats–a throwback to easier, more comfortable times.
(Not to give anything away, but when King went downstate the Jaguars ran up a 20-point lead in the closing minutes of the quarterfinals against West Aurora, in a game we watched on the cable SportsChannel last Friday. Cox then sent in his entire freshman team against what was, at very least, the eighth-best team in the state. Aurora soon ran the lead down to eight, and Cox got the seniors up and sent them back in for the final minute. It wasn’t only the freshmen who learned something there.)
Brandon is set to go back to Champaign to the University of Illinois next year, where he’ll join Deon Thomas if he clears Proposition 48 (the college rule that sets mandatory test scores for freshman participation in sports)– and, of course, if the Fighting Illini clear the NCAA investigation that began after they stole Thomas from Iowa in a heated recruitment battle a year ago. (There is talk that Brandon might transfer to Oklahoma if the Illini are put on probation or–perish the thought–if they’re given the “death penalty,” an extreme punishment that they are nonetheless eligible for.) Wherever Brandon ends up, we will remember this one last impression from his high school career: In the final minute, with a woman down the aisle from us yelling, “C’mon J.B.,” he took the ball in the backcourt and went one-on-one again. He came up on a scissors dribble, shaking and shimmying his shoulders and slipping the ball between his legs with each bounce. The Westinghouse defender was low and right on him, not willing to attempt a steal, but not willing to let Brandon by either. Left hand, right hand, between the legs and back again, step by step Brandon forced his opponent back and then fired up another powder-flash shot from the top of the key. Nothing but net.
