Proud to Be a Golden Gopher



When I was growing up I can remember a time that my Daddy got tickets to see the Harlem Globetrotters. At the age I was I thought they were the best basketball players I had ever seen. I can remember just laughing and laughing and laughing. They could shoot from anywhere and hit “nothing but net”. We were so entertained. We got to hang around afterwards and get their autographs.  

You could never convince me that I could repeat a portion of my childhood in one night in our little town of Fancy Farm, Kentucky. But it happened last week.
I have a nephew who has some of the best ideas, but more importantly, he turns those ideas into reality. He went to see the Harlem Globetrotters when they came to the Murray State University basketball arena over in Murray, Kentucky. I don’t know if he talked with someone over there that night or if that just gave him one of his big ideas, but he found out that he could get a team to come to our little town of Fancy Farm, Kentucky and play some of our school’s alumni in basketball as a fundraiser.
He went to work. He got it approved to use the old school’s gym. He got a couple of local sponsors. He kept telling everyone that this was going to be huge. Most everyone thought it would be fun but not too many people thought it was going to be huge. But he advertised all over social media and started putting together a team of alumni.

The thing is Fancy Farm hasn’t had a high school basketball team since the 1980’s. That’s when the high schools all merged to become Graves County High School. But back in its heyday Fancy Farm Golden Gophers was a team to contend with. That’s what the school was all about: basketball. They were too small to have a football team. They played baseball but not as part of the school. Basketball was it. And in putting together a team my nephew twisted a few old arms and told them that it didn’t matter if they didn’t play well, this was all going to be so much fun and besides it was a fundraiser for the youth in our community. In the end there were basketball alumni who had played for the Golden Gophers, some as many as 50 years ago; some who had played for the Graves County Eagles as little as two years ago.

Then, there were the cheerleaders. Same thing here. There were some cheerleaders who currently cheer for the Graves County Eagles. These are award winning cheerleaders. Then there were some who had cheered for the Golden Gophers way back when. I wasn’t going to ask how long ago. It wouldn’t have been polite. But they were into it as much as the kids were.

So, everything was in place. Now it was time to sell tickets. I’m sure there were some who thought it was going to be really hard to sell 100 tickets. They were going to call it “sold out” at 400 tickets. Honestly, I don’t see how that gym could hold 400 people. But they weren’t going to sell that many. They decided to limit the ticket sales to 300. In the end they called the event sold out at 350 tickets.  

Wow!  

On the day of the event the “Harlem Ambassadors” did a promo event at Fancy Farm Elementary School. Those kids were like putty in the team’s hands. They were mesmerized. And when the team took to the court in front of a sold out crowd they had the entire crowd in the palm of their hand. They had everyone whooping and hollering for the game of basketball. Of course, it wasn’t really a game. It was an event. I mean, our poor alumni couldn’t keep up with these guys. But that didn’t matter. They gave it their all. And each time they scored a basket the crowd went wild. But I noticed that they were taking themselves out of the game and talking someone else into going in for them. They weren’t ready to run up and down that court like they did when they were 15 or 16 years old. But they went along with the show. At one point Billy Ricketts (Graves County High School Class of ?) was intentionally fouled by two of the Ambassadors. The next thing you knew those two players were up in the crowd saying there was no way they could have fouled Billy because they had been up in the stands with their “Mom and Dad” all along. Their Mom and Dad turned out to be Kent Curtsinger and Nancy Towery. They went along with the act and the crowd was almost on the floor laughing so hard.  

At halftime they brought all of the kids down on the floor and they were all dancing with the team after the cheerleaders’ halftime show. At one point they had 5 or 6 kids come out on the floor. They had to do 5 jumping jacks, 5 push ups, then they had to find their shoes in a pile of shoes, put them on and then go back to the other end of the court and make a basket. These kids were all about it. Of course they had help from the team. For instance, one of the Ambassadors helped the kids find their shoes by kicking the pile of shoes all over the floor. The winner got a free t-shirt after much fan-fare.



When I went to my Facebook page after the event all I could see were tons of pictures of the evening. Everyone had so much fun. But what I loved most about this evening was that everyone was having such a good time and not just enjoying the entertainment but enjoying each other. Yeah, that’s why I love this town.