When a city's only professional sports team takes a night out of its preseason schedule to play a scrimmage on a court that it has donated to a local high school, there are bound to be 1,000 great moments (most captured on iPhones and already uploaded to Facebook). Indeed, everyone left Cleveland High with smiles tonight after the Blazers put on a great show and dedicated a new basketball court.
My moment, and it's short, is about the young man that was sitting next to me. He was a Cleveland High student. Pretty quickly I realized he was on the student newspaper. How could I tell? Well... he was keeping a play-by-play account of the game (stats, substitutions, etc.) in his notebook and furiously writing down verbatim the pre-game statements from Coach Nate McMillan, Larry Miller and the other Blazers bigwigs. After the game, he was leaning around TV guys, scribbling down the post-game statements from Coach and KP.
A lot of kids tonight got to see their basketball heroes up close and personal, and many got autographs. This young gentleman got himself something better: a story. An honest story about good people doing a really good thing.
That was cool.
I don't know if Cleveland High's student newspaper sells subscriptions, but that's a story I'd like to read.
-- Ben (benjamin.golliver@gmail.com)