This blog site has been created in conjunction with a book project tentatively titled Romeo, Mainie, and Me: A Basketball Love Letter to My Father.
My initial idea was to follow this year’s New Albany Bulldogs boys basketball team and, in a sense, chronicle their trials and tribulations as they pursue their second state 4A championship in three years. That’s still my plan, sorta, and I expect this to be a heck of a ride.
My grander ambition is to write a sort of memorial to my late father, Robert, who graduated from New Albany in 1944. Even then, he’d acquired the nickname, origin unknown, that he kept the rest of his life: Mainie.
Dad started on the varsity that year, and the team cracked the Top 10 before succumbing to a great Jeffersonville team in the first game of the sectional. I’ve gone into the The New Albany Tribune’s archives to read about that team, and the stories are a hoot. Mind you, this was before the jump shot took hold.
That nickname explains the “main” part of my blog title. “Ro,” of course, refers to the star of this year’s team, Romeo Langford, a five-star D-I recruit who has an outside chance to break Damon Bailey’s state career scoring record.
I’ll be at the games and weighing in on this blog with narrative, analysis, anecdotes and who knows what. Along the way, I’ll gather material for the book, taking in the present, thinking of the past, looking for connections between the two and generally seeing where the road leads.
Along the way, I welcome your comments and anecdotes about basketball; about New Albany High School basketball past and present; about family; and about how sports binds us together. The more the merrier.