Photo assignment in dimly lit gym kickstarted my love for basketball

By David McElroy · March 15, 2018

I felt panic when I got the photo assignment. I was an 18-year-old part-time reporter and photographer with only a couple of months experience. Sports editor Mike Kilgore handed me a piece of paper with an assignment for later that night — and I had no idea how to do what he wanted.

The assignment was simple. I was to shoot pictures of a basketball game at Cordova High School, a small school about 10 or 15 miles outside of town. But I had never covered a basketball game. I had no idea what to shoot — and I told Mike that.

“Oh, you’ll be fine,” he told me. “Just get in a position to one side or the other behind the basket and shoot what feels right.”

The game was a blur to me. Since I didn’t know what I was doing, I shot several rolls of film, hoping for one usable photo. I felt as though I was in way over my head. The gym was badly lit. I didn’t know a soul there. I couldn’t move the camera fast enough to catch the action.

I walked out feeling like a failure. I was scared to turn my film in.

When I got to work the next day at 1 p.m., the presses were just starting to roll with the afternoon paper. I ducked into the pressroom and grabbed one of the first copies to see if any of my pictures had been good enough to use. I was shocked to see several of my pictures — and I was even more shocked that they were really good photos.

That was the first of many hundreds of basketball games I shot over the next five or six years. I also shot a lot of high school football and some baseball, but I never experienced the same thrill I got from shooting basketball.

I’m thinking about that today as the NCAA men’s basketball tournament starts. I’m nervous about Alabama’s game tonight against Virginia Tech. This is the first time my alma mater has made it to the Big Dance in six or seven years. Basketball isn’t that big a deal in this part of the country — because football is so dominant — but I’m one of those who’s excited about the renewal of Crimson Tide basketball.

This is a young team that looks unbeatable on some nights but looks like a team that could lose to a high school team on other nights, so I have no idea what to expect. I find myself thinking, though, that if it weren’t for that photo assignment at Cordova High School many years ago, I might not even care.

I love football and I love that my alma mater has dominated college football over the last decade. I have a lot of pride in being part of something — even in such a peripheral way — that makes me feel as though I’m part of the best. But as much as I love all those national championship trophies, there’s something about basketball that gives me an entirely different feeling.

Over the course of my years covering high school and small college basketball, I developed an emotional attachment to the players, the coaches and the atmosphere. There’s nothing like the speed with which a game can turn around. There’s nothing like the tenacity and determination that characterize good fundamentals, especially on defense. And there’s nothing like the thrill of a perfectly executed offensive set that results in a thunderous basket.

For me, basketball was an emotional game. I got caught up in the stories and the desire to win. Even though I was supposed to be an impartial journalist on the side of that court, I cared about the players and the contest as much as any fanatic in the stands.

Covering the Walker County high school basketball tournament became a big deal for me. Whether I was working at the newspaper at the time or if I was off at college just freelancing, I would always return for the tournament to take pictures. Even though none of our local teams were great, there were tremendous local rivalries — and the rowdy, packed gyms at these small schools would explode with excitement as one team would rise to the top and dominance was established.

The best experience of my time as sports editor of that newspaper — several years after I was the inexperienced rookie — came when the local community college hosted the state tournament. I was there for every game. I took hundreds of photos and wrote thousands of words. I worked ceaselessly for that week — but it was such an exciting time for me that I didn’t care. (Walker College happened to win the tournament that year — and went to the national JUCO tourney — so it was exciting to be part of that with them.)

I mostly experience basketball on television today. I don’t care much about the NBA, but I still watch a lot of Alabama games. It’s not the same experiencing it from my bedroom as it was standing court-side with a camera. But on those times when my team wins — especially against long odds — I still feel that old rush of adrenaline.

Basketball is a beautiful game when it’s played well. It’s unlike any other sport I’ve experienced in person. So even though I was terrified when Mike Kilgore sent me to Cordova High School back then, I appreciate the lifelong love that it gave me for this emotional thrill.

I’m nervous about Alabama’s chances tonight. I’m afraid we’re going to be bounced out after one game, but I’m hopeful that the unbeatable version of our young team will show up. Either way, though, I’ll be glued to the action and my heart will be in my throat. As the NBA’s advertising used to say all the time, “I love this game.”

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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