Wow, what a difference a week makes! When we left town last Saturday morning for our trip to Tennessee the ground was still pretty much completely covered with snow and I had still had piles that were three feet or taller on the sides of my driveway. Now, after some warm weather and even a couple of thunderstorms this week, all of it is gone! Maybe we will be able to start this racing season off as scheduled the first weekend of April in Iowa.
Several of my friends who are not into racing, including my lovely wife, have questioned my sanity after last weekend's road trip. One such individual asked me how long I was at the track and I told him about four hours. His response was "okay, so you drove nine hours to watch four hours of racing and then drove another nine hours home the next day?" See, it sounds pretty stupid when you just look at it like that, but when you are a race fan you don't just look at it like that. Plus, throw in the fact that those eighteen hours of driving gave me a chance to catch up with two good friends who I sadly just don't get to see much of anymore and it is easy to see why my response was "I'd do it all over again this weekend if I could!"
This weekend though is devoted to basketball as the Mount Pleasant Panther boys have advanced to the semi-finals of the Iowa Boys State Basketball Class 3A Tournament with a game tonight (Thursday) against Aidan Johnson's beloved Pella "Lil' Dutch" and then again on Saturday whether it be the Consolation game or the State Championship matchup. Trips to State have been few and far in between for the Panthers. The team that I played on in 1981 lost to the eventual state champions Central DeWitt at substate by seven. I still have an occasional nightmare about trying to guard a 6' 10" center by the name of Steve Muller. My brother Kurt's squad of 1984 made it to state and lost in the first round to Iowa Falls when 6' 6" Art Sathoff put up 56 points against MP. (I bet my brother has worse nightmares than I do). In fact, until this past Tuesday when Mount Pleasant downed Western Dubuque in the first round game in Des Moines the Panthers had only won one game in a state tournament sanctioned by the Iowa High School Athletic Association and that came in 1997 when they defeated Iowa Falls in the first round.
At the time I had the pleasure of doing the play-by-play of all the Panther boys games on KILJ radio and one of the kids that MP had to stop that night was a 6' 5" freshman by the name of Nick Collison. Iowa Falls came into that game undefeated and, after the loss, they went through the next three years unbeaten with three straight state championships. Collison went on to star for the University of Kansas and is now in the NBA, but the Mount Pleasant Panthers can proudly say that they handed him his one and only loss in high school.
Nick Collison
Hopefully the Panthers can pick up another win or two at State this weekend!
I was planning on trying to sum up my feelings on the Carl Edwards/Brad Keselowski incident at Atlanta, but honestly I could never even come close to describing my thoughts as well as Ryan Clark did. If you haven't seen it yet, please take a moment and visit "In Staging" at http://www.positivelyracing.com/. Great job Ryan!
While at the website please also take a look at the Calendar tab as that will let you know where all of the special events are going on in now, the very near future! Have a great weekend and remember our motto here on the Back Stretch: Be Positive, Support The Sport!
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