A childhood hero remembered

All kids, when they’re growing up, have heroes.
Sometimes, the heroes are other kids.
That’s the case with Dave Bennett.
Dave was only a couple of years older than I was.
But he existed on a plateau that I could never hope to achieve.
These days, he’s a school administrator, or more likely a retired school administrator. And he would be embarrassed to read these words.
But back about 45 years ago, he was a star.
A hero, and not just to me but to scores of other kids whose hand-eye coordination was less than perfect, who struggled to get over the hurdles, who sometimes took a basketball pass in the face.
His accomplishments in athletics were the stuff of record books: 16 high school letters in four different sports — basketball, football, baseball, and track.
And his accomplishments in the classroom were just as stunning.
He was salutatorian of his high school class in 1964.
While those are dazzling, it was really his behavior as a kid — as one of the older guys in the neighborhood — that made the biggest impression.
Our house on Pleasant Street had the best backyard basketball goal on the west side of Portland in those days.
It wasn’t big enough to play a real half-court game. One side angled in.
But it was concrete, and the goal, mounted on a backboard on a pair of what were probably telephone poles, was regulation height.
In other words, it was a popular place.
The only standing rule was that if you wanted to shoot baskets, you asked an adult to move the cars in the driveway.
It attracted some great basketball players over the years, including Greg Williams, who starred at Portland High School and Rice and has gone on to a successful coaching career, and Dave, who played his college basketball at Missouri before going on to become a coach and an administrator.
Dave, as some old friends and I have been reminiscing via e-mail, could take you on for a one-on-one game, let you get an apparently insurmountable lead, then come from behind in a matter of minutes to defeat you, all while making you feel that you were his rival rather than his student.
It wasn’t so much a game as a tutorial in how to play.
But when I think of Dave, it’s not basketball I think of.
It’s fishing.
For reasons I’ve never understood, Dave and his dad asked me to go fishing with them when I was about 8 and Dave was about 10.
We hit the Wabash in northeastern Jay County, and we didn’t catch much.
I snagged a “sucker,” a carp. And we caught some catfish.
But the real gift was that Dave treated me like an equal.
And when you’re dealing with heroes, that’s about the best thing that can happen.[[In-content Ad]]