An article in the NEW YORK TIMES:
February 22, 2007
Playing and Winning Together in Louisiana’s Sabine Parish
By JERÉ LONGMAN
PLEASANT HILL, La., Feb. 18 — After nine hours of basketball, the air-conditioning system seemed to have a nervous breakdown. Still, more than 500 fans shoehorned into the tiny, sheet-metal gym at Pleasant Hill High School on Saturday night. When the bleachers filled, some people grabbed folding chairs. Others sat on the floor along the baseline. Flashes of yellow rippled through the crowd as spectators fanned themselves with a booklet of team rosters.
They had squeezed inside to see the Zwolle Hawks, the county power that is either 43-0 or 44-1 this season, depending on the inclusion of two informal games. Some fans had arrived in the morning, sitting through six previous games of the Sabine Shootout, a tune-up for the Louisiana state playoffs that begin Feb. 23.
There are thousands of one-blink communities like Zwolle (pronounced ZWAH-lee) around the country. Some, in states like Indiana and Kentucky , have become mythic for their hoops-on-a-barn devotion. But perhaps nowhere does basketball zealotry surpass the rural fervor of the timber and railroad towns of Sabine Parish.
All seven parish high schools have won a state championship in boys basketball; five of the girls teams have. The nation’s greatest schoolboy scorer and its leading career rebounder played in this poor, racially diverse county on the Texas border in north-central Louisiana . So did the highest-scoring boys and girls teams, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations.
“If it’s not round and bouncing, it don’t matter around here,” Bradley McLaren, 24, the Zwolle coach, said.
Zwolle is seeking a second consecutive championship in Class B — the second smallest of Louisiana ’s seven classes — and an 11th title over all. The Hawks won state titles seven years in a row from 1988 through 1994 — a streak surpassed by only two schools nationally. Victory became so dependable that some of the town’s 1,780 residents planned their vacations around the state tournament.
It would be tempting to call them Cajun Hoosiers, except that Zwolle bears a Dutch provenance and proclaims itself the tamale capital of the world, a reflection of the area’s historic American Indian and Spanish influence. The high school enrollment of 215 students is 41 percent Choctaw-Apache, 37 percent black, 21 percent white and 1 percent Hispanic — disparate ethnicities united by basketball.
The sport is the talk of Zwolle , from the Roundup Grocery to Bill and Sissy’s Diner to the plywood mill, where stacks of pine are processed into sheets of veneer, sending white plumes into the sky and producing a sweet, baked smell that resembles cornbread.
“It’s exactly like Indiana basketball,” said Bert West, the coach at East Texas Baptist University who previously won four state titles at Zwolle . “You’ve got these rural hotbeds where they don’t play football. A lot of these kids have never seen a high school football game and have no interest in seeing one.”
If that seems exaggerated in a football-mad state, it is not. Twelve of Zwolle ’s 14 basketball players said they had never attended a football game. Of the seven parish high schools, only Many (pronounced MAN-ee) fields a football team.
At Zwolle , Florien (pronounced floor-EEN), Negreet, Converse, Pleasant Hill and Ebarb — places with names that trill like birdsong — basketball is essentially a year-round sport. It is said that there are only three seasons around here — hunting season, fishing season and basketball season.
“It’s pretty much school and church,” Clay Corley, the athletic director of Sabine Parish schools, said. “Church is Sunday and Wednesday. During tournaments, basketball is Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. It’s up to you what to do on Monday.”
Basketball practice begins the day after Labor Day. As many as 50 games are played during the season and another 30 in summer leagues — more than in most states. There used to be no limit on games. Converse High won a state championship in 1945 with a 70-2 record, playing every game on the road because it had no gym.
Sons and daughters immerse themselves in a sport that their mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles and cousins played before them. The game is passed down from generation to generation like jewelry.
Kim Smith, the mother of the Zwolle forward Joevoskie Mitchell, was the most valuable girls player in the state in 1987. Bruce Williams, who became the nation’s second-leading career scorer and leading rebounder while at Florien High from 1977-80, has a daughter, Tarkeisha Wysinger, who plays at Many High and could be named the top player in Class 2A for the third consecutive season.
“I came out of my momma with a basketball in my hand,” said Darias Montgomery, one of five Zwolle players averaging double figures in scoring.
There is even a weekly radio show devoted to Sabine Parish basketball. Rivalries are so fierce, with some county teams playing each other seven, eight or nine times a season, that games assume the suspense of potboilers, said the radio show host, Brad Ford.
In the 1989-90 season, the Florien girls defeated Zwolle eight times, only to lose to the Lady Hawks in the state championship game, school officials said. Thus, each game “is like reading a book, and you have no idea how it’s going to end,” Ford said. “It’s a book you can’t put down.”
Built on basketball and logging, Sabine Parish is a mostly isolated and impoverished place. According to the 2000 census, the median household income was $26,655 — $15,000 below the national average. One in five residents live below the poverty level.
Few Sabine players receive college scholarships or reach the pros. Perhaps they are not big enough or fast enough or confident enough or prepared enough in the classroom. It is one thing to jump for a rebound and another to leap beyond privation’s desperate gravity. But, for a few years in high school, basketball is a way to gain the community spotlight, to break a father’s record or equal a mother’s cache of championship rings, to measure up against the best in the area and the state.
“There’s not a lot of positive things to get into in a small town,” Brenda Maxie, the aunt of Zwolle forward Antonio Holmes, said. “Basketball is something for kids to look forward to.”
Some begin youth basketball at age 4 and play as many as 30 games a season in junior high. Many begin with the most rudimentary equipment. Greg Procell, a 5-foot-11 Choctaw-Apache player, set the national scoring record for a career (6,702 points) and a season (3,173) while playing at Ebarb High from 1967-70. He learned to shoot by tossing his father’s beer cans into a foot tub. Later, he dipped pine knots in kerosene to provide lighting at night, so he could shoot against a backboard made of scrap wood.
Mitchell, the elegant Zwolle forward and its leading scorer, followed his mother’s example by nailing a bicycle rim to a tree and polishing his low-post moves around a tree stump. Darnell Maze, an all-state guard, and many teammates ran up and down on earthen courts until their socks became caked with red dirt, playing beyond sunset in the glow of a street lamp, going home “muddy and bloody.”
Perhaps the best player out of Sabine Parish was Michael Cutright, a 6-4 guard who led Zwolle to a state title in 1985 and was drafted by the Denver Nuggets in 1989. He was a self-assured scorer who used his thumbs and forefingers as pantomime pistols, taunting the opposing crowds with his six-shooter hands after frequent and spectacular baskets.
Those crowds responded by occasionally hanging him in effigy in their gyms, Cutright recalled. Still, little distracted him from his appointed duty of scoring 32.5 points and grabbing 10.5 rebounds a game.
“That’s pressure,” Cutright, who drives a school bus and referees basketball, said of being hung in effigy. “It didn’t bother me, because I was from Zwolle and I knew we were going to win.”
Then, as now, one style is accepted in Zwolle — run on offense, press on defense. The Hawks have scored more than 100 points in 18 games this season — one below the school record. Zwolle ’s offense, like the plywood mill, never shuts down.
It is that way around much of the parish. The Florien girls went 48-0 in 1990-91, setting a national record by scoring 3,589 points. The Florien boys played 65 games in 1979-80, setting their own national record with 4,947 points. (Ebarb and Zwolle boys have scored more points in a season, but their totals were not submitted for record consideration.)
In that 1979-80 season, Williams, Florien’s 6-5 ½ center, completed a career that left him second nationally to Procell in total points (5,367). Williams’s point total has since been surpassed, but he remains first in rebounds for a career (3,059) and a season (1,139). He now works in the plywood mill in Zwolle .
When he tossed the ball inbounds at Zwolle High, Williams said with a laugh, fans would pinch his legs or grab his jersey, trying to unnerve him. After one tense victory, he said, his team needed a police escort out of Zwolle ’s gym.
Civic unruliness remains a sensitive subject. The border area that became Sabine Parish was a lawless, no-man’s land for a period after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Even into the 1970s, Zwolle was known as a rough place. According to the local joke, visitors were stopped at the city limits and checked for weapons. If you had no knife or gun, one was issued to you.
Basketball has helped to deflate that roguish perception.
“We were always known as the bad people,” said Susan Lovitt, a reading instructor and basketball statistician at Zwolle High. “This is our way of proving we don’t have thugs. We have good kids who want to excel.”
The atmosphere here was convivial, if not suspenseful, on Saturday as Zwolle exhausted Springhill by 81-63. It seemed like the whole of Zwolle had been in the gym, Mitchell, the forward, said. Maze, the all-state guard, laughed.
“Good time to rob the bank,” he said.
Expectations are high, as they always are. Zwolle basketball fans are like Brazilian soccer fans — everyone considers himself a coach. If he does not win a second consecutive state title, McLaren said, “I’ll be the sorriest coach ever.”
Either way, basketball season will end in no more than a few weeks. Baseball simply will not have the same appeal, lamented Jimmie Phillips, a retiree and self-described hoops fanatic who attends about 150 games a season.
“In baseball, only two people are doing anything,” Phillips said. “The rest just stand around scratching.”
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Just wish I knew where Sabine County is!!