It had been a while since I’d heard good-natured laughter aimed at players in a sporting event, but I heard some last week at the Holiday Classic, a high school basketball tournament in downstate Bloomington-Normal. Galesburg’s senior center Jermaine Fuller, one of the tallest players on the team at 6-foot-4, got the ball in the low post against Thornwood’s 6-11, 300-plus-pound Eddy Curry. Considered one of the top high school talents in the nation, Curry has promised to attend DePaul next year–that is, if he doesn’t try to leap straight to the NBA. Curry had already shown his credentials with a couple of beastly dunks, but he’d awed the crowd the moment he walked into Shirk Center, an elegant little gym with a capacity of about 3,000 on the Illinois Wesleyan University campus (it’s a building paid for, by the way, with a donation from the mogul of Beer Nuts, which are manufactured in the twin cities). My father–whom I was in the area visiting, thus the chance to take in what claims to be the nation’s biggest high school holiday hoops tournament–happened to be at the snack bar when Thornwood first entered the building, and he got enough of a glimpse of Curry to report, “He’s big enough to hunt bears without a switch.” Indeed, Curry soon sat down in the stands with his teammates to watch the game before theirs, and in his big black Thornwood jacket with the huge T on the chest he looked like a tent the team had set up to establish its base camp.
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Understand, this wasn’t the humiliating hooting of most sporting events. This was sympathetic; watching dwarfed opponents face the prospect of getting around Curry, there was nothing to do but laugh. Holiday high school hoops tournaments–especially ones that draw teams from out of town, as this one does–tend to attract aficionados, and the crowd at the Shirk Center the night we were there, to see the class AA quarterfinals, resembled a bunch of devoted college students studying in a quiet library during intersession. Sure, there were a few fans and family members who had accompanied the Galesburg players, or the team from Lincoln High School in the game before, but very few came all the way from suburban South Holland to cheer Thornwood or from Chicago to root for the Marshall High School Commandos. Those teams and players, the class of the tournament, weren’t cheered but studied. Galesburg received polite applause when its players first took the floor for warm-ups, but Thornwood entered to utter silence.
In any case, Curry is dominating at the high school level, and Thornwood had plenty to go with him, beginning with 6-6 Melvin Buckley, a smooth forward who played Keith Wilkes to Curry’s Bill Walton. In fact, after Galesburg rallied in the third quarter–inspired by 6-2 Joe Wilson, who twice took on Curry with high, arcing hook shots right out of the 50s that prompted a fan in front of me to stand and salaam–it was Buckley who shepherded Thornwood back to a 20-point lead with Curry on the bench in the fourth quarter.
