"I'm getting old,"
Ivan said. "I didn't realize just how old I was getting until one of those chilly days we had a week or so ago. What happened was - a nubile young thing with a trophy rack came walking in wearing a tank top, shoulders back, apparently wearing one of Victoria's Secrets. You know what my first thought was - that girl needs to put on a sweater. Now let me tell ya - that is old."
"I really disciplined myself on my Christmas eating this year," Ivan said. "I didn't eat any more for Christmas than I did for Thanksgiving."
"The quietest thing in the world," Ivan said, "is a conversation among J.C. Chance, Jay Schmidt, and Roger Kelly. When those three get together, the only sound you'll hear is bone-on-bone scraping when they shrug their shoulders and a gravelly sound when they nod their heads."
"When I was in grade school back in the 30s," Ivan recalled, "we didn't have obese kids in our class, but we did have a lot of snotty noses. You would bring a clean handkerchief to school in the morning and by noon it would be snot-soaked and abrasive to the nose. These soft, disposable tissues have almost done away with the sore red nose that was the result of wiping your nose with a rough handkerchief."
"One thing we used to have to do when I refereed basketball," Ivan said, "that they don't have to do nowadays - we used to have to get both coaches together before the game and go over the ground rules. It was a lot different then. Had overhanging balconies, posts along the side of the court. The backcourt line was never across the middle of the court. The courts were not long enough for that. The Harlan gym had a heat radiator above the backboard, so you had to shoot a low trajectory shot. Portis had a heating stove in the corner. It was surrounded by fencing so no one would crash into a red hot furnace. Athol had a heating grate below the basket. One time at Athol I was driving in for a set up. Bud Conaway undercut me, and I landed on that hot grate. Put a waffle brand on my butt that lasted into July. Kensington's gym was long enough but it was so narrow that it was almost like playing in a hallway. I remember you had to walk from the dressing room through a tunnel to get to the court. The two best courts in the county were at Lebanon and Gaylord. But the tough place was where the wall was out of bounds. When you gave the ball to a player to throw it in from out of bounds, you always had to back the defensive player back so the out of bounds player had a chance to throw the ball in."
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