xii · basketball
A Posse’s Lament for the Empty Range Where the Six-Pounders Used to Bark
There are no stagecoaches coming down the stretch this week, just an endless stretch of prairie grass and the quiet whistle of a cold wind through an unloaded chamber.
It is quiet on the frontier this week, the kind of quiet that makes a man check the cylinder on his Smith & Wesson just to feel the reassuring click of steel against brass. Out here on the Oklahoma State range, the dust has settled deep into the floorboards of Gallagher-Iba Arena. There is no smoke on the horizon, no rival gang of outlaws riding hard toward the corral, and certainly no frantic clatter of iron-shod wheels signaling an oncoming fast-break raid. October has settled over Stillwater like a wet saddle blanket left out in the midnight frost, and the silence is beginning to wear thin on men who prefer their business settled at a brisk trot and twenty paces.
Down on the hardwood, the chalk lines lie deserted, devoid of the frantic scuff of high-top leather that usually sounds like a skirmish outside the dry-goods store at high noon. We are between raids, caught in that peculiar, purgatorial stretch of the calendar where the holster stays buckled and the trigger finger gets stiff from simple disuse. A college basketball season is a long cattle drive across badlands and alkali flats, but right now, the herd has been bedded down for days, and the drovers are staring into the campfires, wondering where the next brushup is coming from.
It is a hard thing for a proper gunfighter to spend his Wednesday afternoon doing nothing more dangerous than sharpening a pocketknife against an oily whetstone. The modern game has evolved its own strange customs, preaching patience and ball-movement geometries that look less like a smoking Colt and more like a polite committee meeting in a church basement. But down in these parts, the old code still lingers. We measure a possession not by the tick of a shot clock, but by the clean, lethal arc of a twelve-foot jumper that clears the defender’s outstretched hand like a bullet parting the sagebrush. When that isn't happening—when the schedule lies empty and the ticket windows are shuttered—the press box feels less like a command post and more like an abandoned ghost town with tumbleweeds ghosting across the center circle.
One can only stare at a depth chart so long before the names start looking like Wanted posters pinned to a telegraph post, each one promising a reckoning that the calendar simply refuses to deliver today. The coaching staff sits in the back rooms, no doubt oiling their tactical irons and drawing up plays designed to ambush an unwary zone defense, but for now, the powder remains dry and safely stored in the barrels. There are no officials blowing a quick-draw whistle to halt a disputed cattle rustle in the paint. There is only the vast, empty expanse of an arena waiting for the first match to strike.
Until the spurs start jingle-jangling again and the doors swing wide for the next showdown, we will sit here on the porch, tilting our hats against the autumn glare and waiting for someone to finally ride over the rise. Until then, the iron stays cold, the holster stays snapped, and the quiet of the empty range remains unbroken by anything louder than a restless sigh.