Are you like me? And believe me, I hope you aren’t, but if you are, you question terms sometimes. For me one of those terms is the word “rat.”
I am kind of hot and cold on this word. I am not particularly fond of it when it refers to the creature that sometimes is presented to you by your family cat as a gift. That has happened to me on several occasions over the years, most recently by one of the family cats named “Cola.” Thanks, but no thanks I hoping for something else for Christmas. Okay, my wife is right, as she usually is, that gift was a mouse, not a rat…a tiny one, like a inch big but the hysteria in the house that caused is another long, long story. But, they are kind of the same, of course the rat has the plague associated with it. You remember the disease that killed more than half of Europe once?
On the other hand I do have warm memories for the term too. You see, Pat Durham, currently the boys’ basketball coach at Mansfield St. Peter’s, had that nickname when I first became aware of him in the late 1970’s as a teacher and coach at Clear Fork High School. He would go on to be the most important adult in my life other than my parents previous to me marring my wife. As a side note, in my days at Clear Fork, a half court trapping press was called a “mouse” and the full court press a “rat.”
Also, the term can refer to a young boy or girl who spends almost all of his or her time in a gym with a basketball in his or her hands, a gym rat. I don’t wish for more of those disease carrying rodents, but I do wish there were more gym rats around these days instead of kids carrying their IPods or plays stations around with them.
I love basketball, I was never very good at it, that’s why I was coach Durham’s equipment manager not his point guard. Well, another reason was I was 5’6” and 110 pounds as a senior in high school and dribbled mainly with my right hand and shot with my left, but coach Durham could have fixed that. One of the things I see missing in the game today is guys that have a great mid range game or the ability to score from 15 to 18 feet out or more importantly make free throws. The ability to cash is on a charity toss, when no one is guarding you from 15 feet out is a lost art for many high school players around here and I believe a lot that can be attributed to the fact that there aren’t nearly the number of gym rats as there used to be.
Basketball is one of the few sports where all you need is yourself to get better. Just get the ball in your hands and become as familiar with it as your dog. Everywhere you go it goes. Walk down to the road to get the mail? Take the basketball along. Need to kill a couple of hours on a summer day? How about taking 1,000 free throws. You can do it right at home. In the driveway of your suburban home or that basket that is attached to the wall in your barn. Go to bed with it. Always have your eyes on it.
You can’t do that as much in football. You can run past the mannequin in the yard, but he is unlikely to tackle you, okay kind of like a Browns defensive back, but you get the idea. Unless you have a pitching cage at home tossing the ball up in the air won’t make you the next Ted Williams. For those of you under 40 go to the internet and find out who Ted Williams is.
So, you want to become a better basketball player, and if you have uniform on then you do, become a gym rat.
After years of toil and sweat behind radio station microphones, longtime broadcaster, Jeff Swank joined the new generation of sports followers on the web.
Swank launched his internet radio station with nothing more than some wire, a box with some knobs and switches, and an itch to do much more than just scratch the surface of everything sports.
Richland Source is proud to introduce Jeff as a writer focused on high school sports. He will contribute a weekly column and analysis of a featured game of the week from one of our area high schools.
In addition to his work at Richland Source, Jeff provides complete high school sports coverage for over 70 Ohio schools at his web site, http://www.swankonsports.net76.net/.