I have no real idea why I started to think of of the late basketball coach Jimmy Valvano, but I did; for that matter I have been doing so for the last few days. I remember walking out of the kitchen decades ago and meeting my father coming the other way; he was laughing and relating how a winning coach had run around looking for someone to celebrate with and had wound up beening kissed by the Athletic Director.  I think I though, “Okaaaaay.”

I didn’t think of it as a touchstone back then, but I realize now that most weekends there would be a sports event on the TV. I’m from Indiana  –  Hoosiers Indiana – and I went to basketball games at little unconsolidated schools before I have any memory of going. In fact, one of my bedtime stories from before the time I was five was about the night my cousin, who was considerably older, broke his arm playing during a high school game. I remember the story; I don’t remember it happening. My mother once remarked that my dad had gone with his nephew and brother-in-law to the hospital and she and I had come on home with my grandparents.

Basketball was such a part of small town Indiana life that decades later my father would remember some occasion he and and his family attended by starting his  sentence with: “I had an 8th grade basketball game that night . . .”

I have let nostalgia get in the way of my little story here. The coach who got kissed was Jimmy Valvano and he would later die of an aggressive cancer. Shortly before his death, he was asked to receive The Arthur Ashe Courage & Humanitarian Award. I doubt the awarding committee realized how incapacitated he was, but, after some consideration, he traveled to accept it . . . and make a speech. And what a speech it was. It’s on YouTube and maybe once a year I listen to it. If you want, you can take the 11 minutes to watch it, and if you do, I think you’ll be glad you did.