CH 30 Midnight Madness

Gene Snell is one my oldest friends. The statement is true in regard to his age and the years we have enjoyed Christian fellowship. My first personal involvement with Gene was in over 30 basketball shortly after I moved to Winfield. It became apparent early that Gene was a real sports nut, even worse than me. The high point of Gene’s sports year is the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. During this time, Gene eats, drinks, breaths, and talks basketball. In recent years this time has become known as “March Madness.” What a fun time for the college basketball connoisseurs.

My personal basketball career also had its period of madness. I’ve come to call it “midnight madness.” During a two-year period from 1962-1964 I participated with 6-7 other guys playing basketball all night on Friday evenings at the Salvation Army gym at 136 N. Emporia in Wichita. We improved our basketball, but also built relationships that would be even more meaningful. We often had games scheduled those Friday evenings. We usually played either a group of officers from the police department or a native Indian team from the Indian Baptist Church. Each of the groups held great life lessons for me. They both also played great basketball and challenged our group to improve in order to compete.

Having been raised in a rough part of West Wichita my knowledge of police work had been limited and mostly negative. Many of my friends and acquaintances had various problems with the police. I was fortunate to avoid any personal run-ins, but still had a jaundiced view. My basketball experiences allowed me to view policemen in a different light. These men were good and decent people trying to protect us, often from ourselves. In the intervening years I have had good friends in law enforcement and have benefited greatly from midnight madness. Until we played the Indian group I had never had continuous contact with a minority group.

I would come to value this first exposure to diversity even though I didn’t know the terminology at the time. These men were just like us. They laughed, had fun, got mad, and loved the game. What a great truth that people are people! Some time and for some reason midnight madness came to it’s own natural end. When I run across one of my teammates or one of our opponents we can laugh and talk of those times. Time has changed us physically, but as we think of those days we become young men again and share those special moments frozen forever in our memories. Unintionally, what really happened has probably been erased by the way we would have liked to be.