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Mountaineers now and forever

My one-handed catch of a pepperoni roll shot from an air cannon up into the stands at the Coliseum had to be the highlight of the West Virginia-Oklahoma State basketball game last Saturday in Morgantown.

For me, anyway.

“It was Miller’s first catch of the season, but it was a beauty, Ray! He really went up to pull in that pepperoni roll.”

That’s what the play-by-play guy would have said. Then the color guy would have said, “Miller is 74 and has a vertical leap of about one inch, Marty. He’d never have caught it without a push-off on his son-in-law, Snickers, who was going up on his left. There was no foul call, so the catch stands.”

“I gotta give him props, Ray, for turning and tossing the pepperoni roll to his grandsons. He was playing to the crowd but it was a classy move from a veteran grandpa.”

I wasn’t even supposed to be at the game with Lamppost Head, The 747 and their teammates and family members from the Oak Glen Middle School basketball teams. Their dad Snickers was supposed to go with them, then he couldn’t and I was going, then he could again, and their seventh grade team coach Matt Cashdollar had an extra ticket so I could still go too. Matt drove out from Chester the day before the game and handed it to me through his car window as we passed on snow-covered Gas Valley Road. He’s a guy you can’t out-give; coaching kids is life itself to him.

Matt and the eighth grade coach, Ken McElhaney, bought the tickets for the players. Jason Enochs is who I understand swung the last-minute move to courtside seats in the student section. We were supposed to be in peanut heaven. God bless their souls, they and whomever else was in on this excursion gave the kids and families a memory to treasure.

The Mountaineers manhandled Oklahoma State from the outset and won 69-50. I greatly enjoyed the game but didn’t necessarily want to see the Cowboys humiliated. My wife Honey and I lived in Stillwater four years while she was going to veterinary medicine school at OSU (the other OSU). Oklahoma was good to us.

Honey and I both graduated from WVU. Best five years of my life, as the saying goes. Both our fathers graduated from WVU. My sister Col. Peggy graduated there. So did our son Worshrag. I was there in 1970 when the Coliseum was built. Before that, I saw games in the old Field House, where Jerry West and Hot Rod Hundley played.

If you look at history, a lot of Okies were really transplanted West Virginians. All those oil wells in Oklahoma? Drilled by men who worked in the early West Virginia oil and gas fields. They took their mountain culture with them, such as it is. The great World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle felt that soldiers from West Virginia were the most friendly, next to the Okies.

So we love Oklahoma State and cheer for them . . . unless they’re playing the Mountaineers. Never mind that with the transfer portal very few OSU players (the other OSU) are from Oklahoma. The crowd booed forward Patrick Suemnick, who transferred to OSU after two years playing for WVU, but I didn’t boo him. Hey, I don’t think any of the WVU players are from West Virginia. They’re from London and Israel and God knows where else that new Head Coach Darian DeVries got them, but they put their arms around each other after the game and sang “Take Me Home Country Roads” like they were born in Hundred or Jane Lew or Muddlety.

For Lamppost Head and The 747, the enduring memory of that game will probably be the video of them and their Oak Glen teammates cheering and dancing. They were up on the stadium jumbotron and broadcast on ESPN for all the world to see.

Maybe, just maybe, they’ll also remember Grandpa Fred snagging that ballistic pepperoni roll. It was a heckuva catch.

Go Mountaineers!

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