Adjacent News

The sun cleared the rim of the arena roof this morning with the slow, pale reluctance of a cattle baron checking an empty ledger. There is no dust rising from the floor today. There is no stagecoach rattling down the hardwood, no frantic barking of the whistle to scatter the pigeons from the rafters, and certainly no smell of sulfur or hot steel lingering in the press row. October on the open plains of the Big 12 brings a strange, hollow kind of silence. The holster sits empty on the belt, and the iron is cold. It is an idle Saturday, the kind of afternoon where a man who spends his winters measuring the velocity of a twenty-foot jumper finds himself staring out the window at nothing in particular, wondering where all the outlaws went.

We talk a great deal about the fundamentals of the draw, about keeping the thumb steady on the hammer and clearing the leather before the defense can so much as blink an eye toward the perimeter. But nobody talks much about the stillness that settles in when the town is empty. The Oklahoma State Cowboys are resting their spurs this week, which means the only thing getting shot up around here is the supply of lukewarm coffee in the back corner of the media room. It feels unnatural, almost indecent, to sit in a chair that doesn't vibrate with the imminent threat of a shootout. A basketball floor ought to be a stretch of alkali dust where two posses meet at high noon to settle their differences with thirty-foot triples and hard fouls in the paint. Instead, we have quiet hallways and the distant, lonely squeak of a custodian’s mop.

Looking back over the long stretches of autumns past, you realize how rare it is to find a squad willing to walk down the middle of the dusty street without blinking. Too many modern outfits want to dance around the corral, passing the ball back and forth like a pair of nervous deputies afraid to clear leather. They want to run motion offenses that look more like square dances than gunfights. I miss the heavy iron. I miss the sound of a guard coming off a high screen, dropping his shoulder, and letting fly with the kind of reckless abandon that makes the referee reach instinctively for his holster. That is what this game was built for, back before the analytics men started counting every grain of powder and telling us how many yards we were allowed to walk before drawing.

This week offers no targets, no fast breaks to chase down the sideline, and no officials to argue with about whether a charge was drawn inside the cylinder or out on the open trail. It is just the empty arena, the high plains wind rattling the scoreboard cables, and the quiet realization that the guns stay cold until the calendar finally turns and the smoke clears enough to let us back into the fight. Until then, we clean the barrels, oil the hinges on the press box windows, and wait for the next stage to roll into town.