I actually started this about the time we had the semifinal game. The second game between Houston and Florida is going to be a good one! I predict that. It will be a good one. Houston has a fascinating team. They look like they never stop and you can see what they’re trying to do defensively every time you turn the TV on. They are a very good, scrappy ball club and I say that all joking aside. They are not a talented team. They don’t look like a talented team but all they do is get there on, I don’t know, I don’t even know what their coach even called it. Duke is a terrific team. They look so much better. But Houston won the ballgame 70 to 67. It was just a phenomenal game. Here Houston is, probably the least talented team of the final four, and they’re going to play the last game. The last game.
It got me to thinking about Howard Payne in the past and you know, I’ll tell you a funny story. Back I think in the 70’s Howard Payne was a member of the Lone Star Conference. They didn’t even have a women’s conference. Howard Payne was a dominant team on the men’s side but on the women’s side, you could either play or not play. The fact is, I would say in the 1960’s or somewhere back in there all they had was men’s basketball and only a few teams played women’s basketball and even fewer than that played, well what the University of Texas and places like that were playing. They were playing D1 women’s basketball.
By the way, I hated women’s basketball at that time. Howard Payne had a program that was hung somewhere in there. They weren’t Division 1 and they only started playing somewhere in the ‘60s or ‘70s I think. But anyway, they were a nonfactor. All of them were nonfactors because there was no conference. There was no title that they gun for.
One weekend, I think Derryberry was the coach, and we went to Stephen F. Austin. It was our annual swing through that neck of the woods. We played Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston State.
We weren’t terribly good. This one was one of Bob’s early teams and he decided since we couldn’t score a whole lot, we would depend on just “get after it” defense. We were told we would play a 2:00 game on that day. By the way, I’m going to give you a lot of facts that sound like they’re real, but they’re not facts, just what I remember. We won in front of, I don’t know, about 1,500 fans and we won 51 to 50 I think, but I know we won the ballgame.
Derryberry told us we were welcome to go eat after we showered and if we were looking for something to do that night, we could join him and Arvid Koopman and they were going to go watch a big time college basketball women’s game in the same gym. We were nice guys. We couldn’t think of anything to do the rest of the night but check out a women’s basketball game so we did. We watched them play and it was a heck of a ballgame. It went overtime and I don’t remember the score, but it was like 100 to 100 and they were doing everything but acrobatic acts on the court. This other team that they brought in – now Stephen F. played for a women’s national championship or whatever – but they lost that game in overtime and for the life of me I can’t remember who they were playing but they lost. It was like Stanford or LSU or somebody like that. But I fell in love with women’s basketball that night and I knew that it would be a part of my life for evermore. They played a scintillating ballgame.
Now they have Division 1 National Championship, Division 2 and Division 3 and Howard Payne won it all in 2008 or thereabouts Now, everybody plays, everybody, everybody, Division 1, 2, 3. Everybody has their same tournament and now the women are just like the men. They play for a National Championship. It’s amazing, amazing, how recently that was that you didn’t play for anything and some of the teams didn’t even play.
Until next time, so long everybody.
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‘Out of the Box’ with Dallas Huston is published each Monday morning at BrownwoodNews.com. Dallas was the radio voice of the Brownwood Lions and Howard Payne Yellow Jackets for more than 55 years. He currently is Pastor of Center City Baptist Church and hosts a Men’s Bible Study in Brownwood on Monday evenings. Your comments are welcome at lindalh2@verizon.net.