Current Release: September 11th, 2007 | Vol. XXIV Iss. 10

Photo by Eric Zitz

Community gathers to show support

By Eve Blachman

The parking lot at Just George’s Sports Bar in Virginia Beach was so packed with the cars of basketball fans watching the Division I playoffs that my husband Alan and I had to hunt for a space.

Then, when we walked into the brightly-lit room with its booths, tables, rushing waitresses and 59 televisions, from small screen to giant-sized, we had to ask the manager to turn one of the TVs to CSTV, the station that would air the final Division III game between our Marlins and the Wittenberg Tigers.

“I’m a Wesleyan grad,” he said, as he accommodated our request. Our waitress, it turned out, was another former Wesleyan student who had been in one of my English classes. As she delivered food and drink, Kristie would stop and check the early progress of the game.

“Those guys are giants,” she observed, referring to the two players on the Wittenberg team who were taller than 6-feet-8 and way over 200 pounds. “It’s great that our guys have gotten this far,” she added, perhaps with an unspoken suggestion that the Marlins might be facing defeat.

Oh ye of little faith. I thought of the game our players had won on Friday against the Illinois Wesleyan Titans. Unable to go to Salem, we had watched it on our computer screen. And what about the two victories we had witnessed the previous weekend at the Batten Center against Lincoln and William Paterson teams? Both had players larger in stature than our team, but not in heart or game.

I knew several of these young men from my College Writing course. They were smart. Brandon Adair, Rodney Young and Norman Hassell appeared tall and strong when they walked into my classroom, but now they were dwarfed by those Wittenberg giants called “the twin peaks.” Our players couldn’t find their positions at the goal, and Wittenberg kept a 5-point, 7-point, 10-point lead.

“That’s OK,” my husband observed. “Our guys only have to get ahead once. As long as they stay within 7 or 9 points, this game is winnable.” Well, he’d told me that last week and had been right.

As we watched our Marlins play catch-up, using all the skill and brains and focus they could find, some of George’s customers, their plates piled high with crab legs, switched their TVs to the Division III game, and several tables of Wesleyan faculty and staff members materialized to watch and hope.

We cheered wildly when our guys scored and sagged visibly when they fell behind. The first half ended with the Marlins down by 10, and it looked like those giants controlled the boards.

When the manager and the waitress came over to watch early in the second half, they were polite but skeptical about our chances. I guess only a child or an old children’s lit professor addicted to ancient tales where the smart, little guys defeat the big, dumb giants could keep faith here. Alan, another believer, pointed out again that winning is more about guts and discipline and desire than it is about size.

Though we stayed within reach, our guys never caught up. But in those final minutes somehow the secondary game at Just George’s Sports Bar had become the first game. More than a dozen of those big-screen TVs were tuned to the Division III game; the whole room was watching; the tension was palpable. When Adair scored a lay-up, I pounded the table hard enough to put my husband’s Coke in his lap; he barely noticed.

“I’ll give it to those guys, they’ve got heart,” observed a man in a nearby booth as he switched his screen to CSTV, admiring one gutsy shot after another. Tyler Fantin scored 3, then we tied it up at 56, and Laskin Road became Salem East.

With 2 seconds left, Ton-Ton Balenga sank the three-pointer that brought our little college team ahead. I could read bewilderment on the faces of those Tigers, those giants as they came crashing to Earth, just the way the old stories said, and the team from VWC and all its admirers everywhere celebrated.