My earliest basketball memory occurred when I was about 8 years old. We lived in Silverton, Oregon, a town of about 4,000 located 15 miles east of Salem at the foothills of the Cascades. Silverton was, and is, the type of town where everybody goes to the high school teams’ games. The football team was always about .500, wrestling (big in small-town Oregon) was always in the running for the state championship, and the basketball team was … not good.
But my first basketball memory was not of the many losses. Instead, near the end of the season, the 0-16 Silverton Foxes basketball team won its first and only game of the season, against a team from Sandy.