Of course there is only one sport in Oklahoma -
OU FOOTBALL
And we loved it and lived through arguably the "best of it".
But because of Dad, we got introduced to two other sports. My father was a long-time St. Louis Cardinal fan from listening on the radio in the small town in Kansas where he grew up. So we knew about the Cardinals early on. In the 50s in Oklahoma organized youth sports were not as prominent as it is today. In grade school we played what we called "work up".
This type of baseball was also called "Scrub" as described on the
Minnesota Public Radio blog:
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/baseball/archive/2005/05/scrub.shtml
I ( the blogger not MWS) was fortunate to grow up in a home next to a ball field. And every day -- or so it seemed -- we'd find enough neighborhood kids around to have a little ballgame. And if there weren't any kids around, then between me and my two brothers and two sisters, we
could find something to do with a bat, glove, and ball.
The game was called Scrub and I don't remember who taught it to us but it's baseball without teams. When someone wanted to play a game of Scrub -- say on the playground behind the school at recess or before the doors opened (before Mommy and Daddy dropped kids off in the SUV to the school's front patio) -- he or she simply yelled "Scrub!" (pronounced Scruuu ---
uhhh--- uubbb) and then the next person would yell "Scrub One," and the next "Scrub Two" and so on and so forth. (This was, we would later realize, our first foray into computer language in which the first item is not one, but 0.)
Scrub, Scrub One, Scrub Two, and Scrub Three would bat first and everyone else would take the field. You could bat as many times as you wanted, until you made an out. Hit a fly ball out to Scrub 11? Scrub 11 comes in to bat and you go to Scrub-11-field. For strikeouts and regular outs, the field would rotate as in volleyball until the pitcher was the next to go to bat.
It was perfect baseball. Nobody kept score. The goal was just to ... you know...play.
We also got introduced to tennis by our father, who had helped take care of the tennis court his father built in the pasture by their house in Wellsville, Kansas. As he described in his autobiography, "My Dad like to play tennis so he built a tennis court in the pasture just south of our house. It was fenced off from the rest of the land, had steel backstops covered with "chicken" wire. Since he was an electrician, Dad put lights on the court so we could play at night. (Dad said at least he knew where we were.) My responsibility (with Dad's help) was to keep the court in shape, which meant since it was a dirt court, to clean the grass and weeks off each year, roll the court with a hand-pushed roller, and put the white lines on using a special roller filled with lime." So Mark and I learned tennis on the OU courts just west of Owen Stadium and practiced in the handball courts in the stadium proper.
I continued playing tennis at Norman High (where we had to talk the administration into building the first courts in about 1958 - they were asphalt, faced east and west and had "chicken" wire nets - as I said, tennis was not a very important sport in Oklahoma at that time).
Tennis was an interesting game in both Oklahoma and New Mexico because of the wind. If it was blowing, you could just touch the ball (playing with the wind) and it would sail over the baseline. Conversely, if you had the wind against you, you had to really hit the ball hard just to get it over the net. In college I played on the team at Eastern New Mexico University.
We had a basketball hoop on our driveway in Faculty Heights and I think also on Cruce street. We just played "horse" and never anything organized. I did manage to break my nose playing a pick-up basketball game at the gym in the high school building where my Mom went to school in Hamilton, Kansas. This lead to my first sub mucous resection, which was the second surgery that I got to watch while still in high school in New Mexico.
I am just remembering that we took swimming lessons at OU with a South African swimmer named Graham Johnson. We got to swim in the university pool after our lessons. I tried out for the swim team at Norman High, but kept falling asleep in my books at night and let it go. Looking in Google, "Johnston was a pioneer in college athletics. One of the first foreign-born athletes to enjoy a full scholarship at an American college, Johnston received a full scholarship for swimming at the University of Oklahoma. While there, he achieved NCAA All American status three consecutive years." Graham Johnson continues to swim today at 77 and "set 8 world records at the 11th Fina World Masters Championships in California in 2006. Previously, that same year, Johnston was voted "Inspirational Swimmer of the Meet" at theCanadian Masters Nationals for breaking 4 World Records in the 200/400/800 and 1500 meter freestyle and accomplished all of them in the 1500 meter event.
He swam across the Strait of Gibraltar in December 2005, traveling 13 miles in 5 hours 9 minutes. He was the oldest swimmer at 74 to ever complete the swim."
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