Point of View: They Play as One
Near the end of an interview about the Killer Bees, during which I rhapsodized at great length about the school that’s out-Hoosiered the Hoosiers for more than a generation in the old sense of the word, for 30-plus years in short, I was asked if I’d ever seen any of the players cop an attitude on the court, and I said, on reflection, that I never ever had.
Why did I think that was, I was asked.
“Because they’re confident,” I said, still marveling at the insight and holding up my old compound-fractured tennis racket frame, a relic of tantrums not all that long past, as an example of what one does if one, despite having lived more than the allotted three score and ten, hasn’t yet gained the confidence and maturity that treats victory and defeat as the imposters they are.
When I mentioned Roger Golden, the progenitor of the Killer Bees’ long history of success, to Scott Rubenstein the other day, after the interview, and asked him what it was about him that had got the first group of Bridgehampton’s boys basketball state champions to play so well, he said, “He was calm — they were so used to being yelled at, yelled at by everybody. He respected them, he cared about them, and they respected him in turn.”
Undoubtedly there have been, are, and will be egos in Bridgehampton, but I’ve never seen evidence of personal pique or rub-your-nose-in-it swagger — as I have elsewhere — when a Killer Bee team plays.
I remember saying Emily Dickinson said you knew it was poetry if it took the top of your head off. “Watching your first game in the Beehive is like that,” I said. “It takes the top of your head off.”
If I didn’t say it in front of the camera, I’d like to say now that the Killer Bees play with confidence, they play with grace, and I’d like to say they’ve always played as one — a lesson for us all.
At their best, which is to say more than a few times over the 36 years I’ve been covering them, the Killer Bees have approached perfection, something so few of us do.
And in so doing, they have been blessed.