Still Making an Impact on Me

Basketball.  I have often wondered why I chose this particular medium to live out a great portion of my life.  Paradoxically, basketball for me has been the source of tremendous heartache and consummate happiness, as well as an outlet for the converging challenges of life and a battlefield of the mind.   This perpetual high-speed game has been the origin of a hundred rising suns and ten thousand desperate nights in my life. 

As a player, basketball was my chance to run and jump and enjoy the beautiful freedoms that life has to offer.  It was the playground that provided a group of men the opportunity to grind together, live together, share together, and suffer together in a communal environment with one goal in mind—victory.  Through basketball, I was able to feel the assuaging comfort of success and the callous reality of defeat.  It has furnished unending anguish and unrest, and extreme joy.  It defeated me more times than I choose to count, but yet I still made it my special game—the one that was closest to my heart. 

Most of my pleasant memories of the sport draw upon my days as a young boy at “Glen Clem’s Basketball Camp.”  Coach Clem was the head coach at Walker College, a privately-funded junior college in Jasper.  Clem stood about 6’5” and weighed over 250 lbs.  His skin was olive, and he had a thick black mat of course hair.  He wore plaid sportjackets and designer shoes and his nickname was Big Daddy.  Sure, there was a towering presence about him.  His most distinctive features were indisputably his large, bug eyes and echoing voice, like a thunderclap.  If Fred Flintstone could have been exemplified in a human being, Clem was it.

As my friend Matthew says, basketball coaches (unlike those of any other sport) have the most dominating and gregarious of all personalities.  Clem was no exception.  At Glen Clem’s camp, I witnessed firsthand the utter hilarity of this unique character.  He made basketball fun by utilizing wild and colorful terminology that I had never heard before.   He warned us not to wear “costume jewelry” while we were in camp, and swore that if we got out of line we’d be subjected to the lashings of his “black snake whip.”  He would often pick on longtime campers such as Kellen, who apparently was twelve years old but had been attending Clem’s camp for fourteen years.  He used downtime in camp to provide for our amusement his proverbial vaudeville act…shooting (and making) shots while he sat Indian-style at midcourt, hook-shots from thirty feet that drained the net, and many other offerings that split our sides and made us revere the Glen Clem circus. 

Still, he took the time to share with us little lessons of life, takeaways if you will, that stick with me to this day.  I call into question anything that gave me fonder memories of my boyhood than my time with Coach Clem.  He was the kind of coach that I wanted to be.  I could write an entire book about Clem, but for now we don’t have enough time.  What I will share with you is my proudest appreciation with the fact that I was able to share time with him and the further denotation of “coach” in the same exact office that he worked for thirty-seven years.  

Coach Clem passed away, suddenly, in 1996 in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.  To this day, he is still making a profound impact on my life.  I miss you greatly, coach, and I long to see you again one day if I'm fortunate enought to make it to heaven.