Bottom Left Low Tidings

When a bunch of guys - sans wives - are holed up in a two-bit motel 300 miles from home for four days, you can be sure the beer is going to flow and the malarkey will be flying.

So it was when a bunch of us clowns found ourselves together in Glens Falls for the 1997 New York State high school basketball tournament.

The impetus for our trip was the fabulous Bridgehampton Killer Bees, the defending champions looking to repeat.

We were to leave Friday morning at 5 for the 3 p.m. semifinal game, but with the ominous threat of snow forecast we opted for a Thursday afternoon getaway. I rode with Sponge and Grillo. Jack Graves, an erudite penman for this newspaper, took off with two lesser lights (we referred to the three of them derisively as the peanut gallery) in a second vehicle. Bryant Carpenter, the stellar sports editor of The Southampton Press (who, I would argue over a couple of beers later that weekend, has toiled in my shadow for the better part of his career), made his own way up.

We were to spend an inordinate amount of time together during the next four days acting like adolescents, a degree of maturity I attained some time ago and have continued diligently to maintain ever since.

I met Grillo five years ago. I found out years later that he was a painter. Like a house painter, I figured. But no, he was an artist, and a famous one at that. Go figure. Who knew? I sat next to him for maybe 50 games, spent hundreds of hours with him, and never asked him anything about himself. We talked hoop, and only hoop. Hey, we were busy.

We pulled into Glens Falls in the midst of a severe snowstorm, fortified only by the two dozen Dunkin' Donuts I had purchased for the ride. Graves, Carpenter, and the rest were already bunked down. Sponge had a cooler of beer, bless his soul. We waited for Grillo to fall asleep, shoved a half-dozen jelly doughnuts under his sheets, and retreated to our room to watch college basketball and talk hoop.

I had gotten Sponge a press pass that allowed him free access to all the games and a seat at the press table. By the time the weekend was over he had become a fixture there, taking notes, interviewing players, keeping statistics, even taking photos. "What the hell are you doing?" I asked him at one point as he diligently recorded the action in his notebook. "My job," he replied.

"Jim," I had to tell him gently, "you're a carpenter."

The Bees faced a severe test in their first game Friday afternoon, taking on Notre Dame, an undefeated team that had won 25 straight games. Grillo, who often arrived at games before the players, was there by noon. The Bees started out slowly, and he fretted uncontrollably up in the stands. By halftime, they were still losing by three points. I left the press table to try and console him. He was nearly weeping.

But the Bees exploded in the third quarter. Their marquee player, Maurice Manning, put on a show. The trademark Beefense, the players strung like barbed wire, cut and gashed repeatedly. The Bees won by 30.

We went to the motel bar, played video crack, drank beer, and watched more hoop.

We all ended up back in our room. Sponge hid several more doughnuts in Grillo's bed. We ordered a pizza for the noisy family in the next room and giggled with glee when the deliveryman insisted on payment. We spilled beer on ourselves and the rug, ate junk food, and burped freely, as real men do.

Graves showed up with some scholarly book. During the entire tournament, wherever he went, he carried some book or another, the subject too complex for any of us jocks to grasp. We kept feeding him beers. Every time he went to the bathroom, we'd move his book marker back eight or nine pages. He'd unplug his hearing aid so he wouldn't have to listen to our nonsense and immerse himself in the book. He read the same eight pages over and over again. He never noticed.

The next morning Sponge woke me up at 7, stating that he was unable to sleep because I was snoring so loud, though I didn't hear a thing. "Do you realize a bunch of grown men stayed up until 3 a.m. talking about Mo Manning and the Killer Bees?" he asked. "Yeah," I replied. "And I'm looking forward to another full day of Mo talk."

We watched four more high school games at the arena - Grillo insisted on getting there early - and countless more on TV. The Bees played for the championship in their classification at 7 p.m. and quickly opened up a 35-point lead. Graves and Carpenter started writing their stories in the second quarter. I doodled in my notebook. The other reporters dozed. Sponge alone took his journalistic chores seriously.

We debated how to celebrate. Always on the cutting edge, always willing to try something new, I suggested we go to the motel bar, play video crack, drink beer, and eat what at this point were three-day-old doughnuts. Instead, we retired to our motel room, where we hid petrified doughnuts under Grillo's sheets, drank beer, ordered pizza for other unsuspecting guests, spilled beer, and talked about Mo and the Bees.

Playing in a state title game is a dream never realized by most high school athletes. Winning one is a dream come true. Winning two in a row is an unthinkable, unfathomable feat. But these are the Killer Bees, who expect to win, and do. With that in mind, we began planning our 1998 trip to Glens Falls during the drive home. We argued most of the way.

"I'm not staying in the same room with you," Sponge said to me. "You snore too much."

"It could be worse," I replied. "You could get stuck with Grillo." We stashed some cream doughnuts on his seat for the way home. He sat on them, I'm convinced, willingly.

We all agreed to find a different motel for the next tournament. "Too many pizza guys running around this one," I pointed out.