Hoop Dreams — Pamela Smith Hill

Dad, on the right, wearing jersey 33 at College of the Ozarks in 1946.

When I was a preschooler, my Grandmother and Grandfather Smith lived in a three-room board and batten log cabin in northwest Arkansas. Known as the Temple Place, it had electricity but no running water. There was a main room with the kitchen just beyond, and a bedroom to the side—where Mom, Dad, and I slept when we visited. Grandmother and Grandfather slept on a kind of porch, curtained off behind the kitchen. The outhouse was out back, along with several other buildings, whose purposes remained a mystery to me.

I came to believe Grandmother and Grandfather’s house was a fairytale kind of place, where almost anything could happen. It took so long to get there, over highways and gravel roads, across mountaintops and down valleys, over creeks and branches, and then—there it was. In a clearing, surrounded by forest. Like the cottage Snow White discovers in the woods, or the one where Sleeping Beauty shelters with the fairies. On warm afternoons, I’d scamper out the door, across the porch, and to the edge of the clearing, where I’d play on a cluster of big, gray rocks. There, I could be anything I imagined. Never did I see or feel or understand the poverty of the place. Instead, I daydreamed.

Anything to Provide for His Family

Dad—Dennis Smith—grew up on the Temple Place, and its poverty during the 1930s and 1940s was inescapable. He remembers that Grandfather farmed the land, “trying to make a living on a few cash crops of strawberries, tomatoes, potatoes, [and] peanuts….” Grandfather and my dad traveled to Kansas as migrant workers for the wheat harvest, and in the spring, the whole family went north to Pierce City, Missouri, to harvest strawberries. Grandfather “hacked saw logs into cross-ties for the railroad” and in the winter, worked at cotton gins as far away as Oklahoma and California—anything to provide for his family during the Great Depression. However, what was never in short supply on the Temple Place was a sense of possibility. Dad and his two sisters grew up in a family that nurtured daydreams and the imagination. Maybe that’s why the place felt magical to me when I was a child.

Tin Cans and a Wagon Wheel Ring

Dad’s dream growing up on the Temple Place was to play and coach basketball. Never mind that the family couldn’t afford a basketball hoop or even a basketball. Dad improvised. He made a hoop from a wagon wheel ring and attached it to the smokehouse. He used empty tin cans as a basketball. And he got pretty good. Eventually, his Aunt Dorothy’s family bought a basketball and set up a real basketball goal. Dad went there every Saturday to practice. He and his cousins “played so hard we beat the grass [under the goal] bare.”

Dad completed seventh and eighth grades in one year, which meant he graduated from high school at sixteen. Grandmother insisted that he go to college, even though it meant she’d have to leave the Temple Place to earn enough money to help pay for Dad’s tuition. She landed a job across the Arkansas River in Fort Smith at the Acme Mattress Company. She took “a sleeping room with cooking facilities” there.

Dad worried that Grandmother was making too many sacrifices for him, but ultimately enrolled at what was then the College of the Ozarks in Clarksville, Arkansas. I suspect a factor in Dad’s decision to enroll was his dream to become a basketball coach. “Some way,” he recalls, “I learned where the Student Union was as well as the gym and basketball arena and found time most every day to shoot a few rounds….” Within a few weeks, Dad decided to go out for the team.

It was 1946, and the basketball coach—Frank Koon—had “already recruited a number of World War II veterans as starters for his Mountaineers,” Dad remembers. Yet when January rolled around, Dad, now a seventeen-year-old, made the traveling squad. With the team, he traveled across Arkansas, and even played at “the famous Barnhouse Arena at the University of Arkansas.” The Mountaineers were hot that year, and made the NIT conference finals. But, as Dad puts it, “The very thing which I virtually worshipped was about to make me a sad, sad pilgrim.” Coach Koon had to cut the team for the NIT tournament in Denver from twelve to ten. Dad didn’t make the cut.

“Whatever hopes I might have had in pursuing a career as a basketball coach seemed an age away, almost impossible,” Dad says. “I tried to understand this and how lucky I had been, but the more I reasoned with myself about not going with the team, the less it comforted my heart to be left behind. It probably opened the door to the future for things at this time I could not see but in time it led me to become a different man and lead a different life.”

An Unexpected Turn

This new life led him away from college, away from Arkansas, and toward Mom—Carolyn Clark—in Missouri. He met her on a blind date in 1949, and while Dad was on leave from the Navy during the Korean War four years later, they married. He apprenticed with my Grandfather Clark, learned the printing business, and then unexpectedly, his life took another turn: he became a Church of Christ minister.

Nothing could have surprised his family in Arkansas more. To paraphrase my Aunt Odessa, Dad’s family always thought he’d turn out to be some kind of outlaw. Instead, he became an old-style preacher, and served congregations throughout southwest Missouri for over sixty years. His papers are now archived at Missouri State University, including his privately published autobiography, Meet the Man From Hobbtown, from which most of the quotations in this piece are drawn.

But Dad never completely gave up on basketball. On an icy, snowy morning on January 17, 1953, Dad was outside shooting hoops with the minister’s son. The minister’s wife stuck her head out the door and scolded him. “You get in here right now before you break your neck, Dennis Smith. You’re getting married tonight!” And not long after Dad and Mom moved my sister and me to the country in 1962, he installed his own basketball goal at the edge of our new driveway. He coached me on lay-ups, set shots, and free throws. Night after hot summer night, we’d play Horse or a quick game of one-on-one. Thanks to Dad’s coaching, I usually played roving center in my high school’s variation of the old half-court rules that governed girls’ intermural basketball in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Carrying On the Tradition

Dad continued to coach the next generation too—my niece, nephew, and my daughter Emily. At our house in Portland, we also had a basketball goal, and the three of us—Emily, my late husband, and I carried on Dad’s tradition. Emily even invented her own free throw shot, what she called the Martha Graham: from a deep second position plié, a player heaves the ball into the hoop. When I described the shot to Dad recently, he laughed and said, “That’s the way players used to do it.”

Now he’s confined to a wheelchair, but his passion for basketball hasn’t faded. He watched the NCAA championships and cheered on first Arkansas and then Kansas. And while he certainly watched the players closely, he was more interested in the coaches—how they inspired their teams to play the game.

During Final Four weekend, I once again shot a few hoops, this time with my nephew and his children. Dad’s training, decades old by now, came back, and to my great-nephew’s amazement, I even stole the ball from him and then went in for a perfect lay-up. Even my free-throw and set shots went in.

Dad was a good coach, and he passed that tradition on to his children and grandchildren. After I demonstrated the Martha Graham, my great-nephew sank one on his very first try. I realized then that Dad’s boyhood dreams on the Temple Place hadn’t died. They’d simply evolved.

Now they live on in this latest generation.