The Story of the Story

FEATURED AUTHOR-GURNEY NORMAN The Story of the Story Ed McClanahan Okay, this is Ed, opening for Gurney: On a Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1969, three transplanted Kentuckians—myself, GurneyNorman, and an old Lexington friend of mine named Pat Monaghan—gathered around a tiny black-and-white TV inmy scruffy little twenty-five-dollar-a-monthwriting officeupstairs over a fish 'n' chips 'n' rock 'n' roll joint called The Poppycock, in downtown Palo Alto, California, for the purpose of watching—what else?—a University ofKentucky Wildcatbasketball game. I can't recall who the Cats were playing,but Gurney says he thinks it may havebeen LSU, and that Dan Issel was giving Pistol Pete Maravich a lesson in how the game is played. It was probably an NCAA tournament game, whichwould explainwhyitwasbeingtelevised all thewayto California on a Saturday afternoon. I know it was a Saturday, because Pat and Gurney were both off work. Pat and I had become friends back in Lexington by way of his friendship with my then-brother-in-law, Andy; Pat had migrated west to teach social studies in a Sacramento high school. Myfriendship with Gurney dated from my grad school days atUKin the latter '50s; Gurney was then an undergraduate journalism major, and we were in creative writing classes together. We had both landed in Palo Alto in the early '60s thanks to fellowships in creative writing at Stanford University. I had stayed on by clinging by my fingernails to a meager little teaching gig at Stanford; Gurney, after a stint in the Army and a few years in the journalism biz, was working for an outfit called the Computer Curriculum Corporation, writing sentences for the world's first on-line grammar workbook, but he too kept a little writing office in the Poppycock, a few doors down the hall from mine—the office in which he would later write Divine Right's Trip. So we three roundball-famished expatriate Cats fans were having ourselves a happy, rollicking Saturday afternoon up there in my secondfloorPoppycockpenthouse ,and whenthe gamehadcometo asatisfactory conclusion—UK having won it handily, of course—we got to talking, as Cats fans inevitably will, about Wildcat games of yore. Pat's favorite, he declared, was the championship game ofthe '58 NCAA, when UK's AU26 American Vernon Hatton racked up 30 points, and the Cats fouled out Seattle's great Elgin Baylor in the final moments, and emerged triumphant, BaronRupp's famousFiddlin' Five,collegiateworldchamps! But for me, the hands-down choice was the UK-Temple game in Memorial Coliseum earlier that same season, when the self-same Vernon Hattentied the scorewitha58-footsetshot—foryoubasketballilliterates, that's three or four steps beyond the center stripe—with two seconds left on the clock, after which UK went on to win the game in three overtimes. As it happened, I was at that game; someone had given me and my first wife, Kit, a pair of tickets, and we were particularly excited to be there because, that semester, the university's athletic department was paying us to "tutor" two star UK players—who in fact we'd never oncelaideyes onuntil theytookthe floorthatnight—ina correspondence course in English lit offered through the university's extension program. ("Getus about a C-plus," one ofthem instructed us,byphone, atthe end of the semester, when we were preparing to mail in their final exams. "We don't want no A.") So we were looking forward to seeing our two proteges in action and, at last, in person. "You were at that game?" Gurney said. "Hey, so was I!" "C'mon, you guys!" Pat scoffed. "Ifhalf the people who claim they saw that game had really been there, they woulda had to play it in Yankee Stadium!" Well, I told him in no uncertain terms, I was there, all right. If Td had a heart attack and died along about the second overtime, my obituary in the next day's paper would've been something like "Mr. Ed McClammerham, of such-and-such an address, expired last night of a heart attack in Memorial Coliseum during the final moments of the UK-Temple game, which UK won 85-83 in three...