For a guy who grew up in the hills of southeast Missouri where we just didn’t play much basketball, I sure got a good dose of it last week with all the tournament games going on at Gentry High School.

And I must say that trying to take pictures of the fast action with a digital camera in less-than-ideal lighting for photography demands a little bit of creative ingenuity to bounce enough light off the ceiling and hit the shutter button at just the right fraction of a second to catch the action. I remember when I first started shooting basketball photos with a digital camera which had a delay of a half second or more between what was happening in real life and what a fellow was seeing in the view finder. Though I've never tried it myself for a true comparison, I reckon it might be like trying to shoot rabbits on the run with an old black powder rifle. By the time a fellow pulls the trigger, the hammer falls and the powder finally ignites, the rabbit is almost in the next county.

Though we played plenty of softball and baseball all year round where I grew up, and sometimes even in the snow, we didn’t have a gymnasium and basketball court at my school, so I never really learned much about the game. When my folks moved to a place where basketball was played and I went out for the team, I found out how little I knew. The coach told me to screen somebody out, but I couldn’t figure out how bringing in a screen door would help the game much. When the coach picked me up by the back of the neck because I didn’t do what he said, I figured the game just wasn’t for me.

Well, anyway, seeing all the games last week and taking lots of pictures of some of the action has given me ample opportunity to try and figure out the object of the game, and maybe even the root source of the whole activity.

I figure that basketball just might have originated from trying to see which bunch of guys (or gals) could get the most pumpkins in their bushel basket at the opposite ends of the patch, though I don’t think real pumpkins could ever take all the abuse of bouncing them on the ground while you are running and tossing them into a basket from so far away.

After some time, I figure somebody must have thought that it would be more of a challenge to mount the baskets up in a tree. Of course, it could be that team members were trying to keep the other team from stealing their pumpkins out of the basket, which could also explain why somebody got the wise idea of cutting the bottom out so the pumpkins would just fall right through and let the other team grab them up and run them down to the basket at the other end of the patch and throw them in there.

What I have been wondering about is why they have those convicts out there in the striped shirts, waving their hands around and blowing whistles. Could it be that basketball ended up being a popular prison sport since the whole point of the game seems to revolve around stealing pumpkins?

Well, anyway, with all the pushin’ and shovin’ and grabbin’ going on out there, someone needs to set a few rules, even if it is a few escaped convicts!

I haven’t quite figured out the scoring yet either, especially since the pumpkins fall right out of the bottom of those baskets. It’s my guess this must be the reason they have to keep track of it up on those big, lit-up boards on the wall.

As far as their reckoning each pumpkin in the basket as two points rather than one, what can a fellow expect from a game made up of stealing! And, I suppose, if you can toss that pumpkin into the basket from way back behind a line on the floor without smashing it, there isn’t much harm in counting it for three.

Randy Moll is the managing editor of the Westside Eagle Observer. He may be contacted by email at [email protected].

Opinion, Pages 4 on 02/20/2013