Trevor Windgate has arrived

Trevor Windgate was the first McDonald’s All American high school basketball player to enroll at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. They recruited Windgate for his perimeter shooting.

By mid-way through his junior year he would become the greatest scorer in the history of the Northwest Conference. Marketers anticipated his turning pro, joining an NBA franchise and becoming an endorsement machine. It was only a matter of time before he would have athletic shoes named after him and lend his visage and imprimatur to web portals, colognes, energy bars, over-priced automobiles and globally distributed electrolyte drinks. Tens of millions of dollars a year were assumed. It would become an odd footnote that one of the nation’s very best high school athletes would choose to attend a tiny, obscure institution of higher learning named after western explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, a school that only came to fame after it was disclosed that former presidential paramour Monica Lewinsky graduated from there in 1995 with a psychology degree.

The acoustics from those first couple of seasons left me disoriented. My hearing would cut out during pressure situations – the crowd going wild in animated silence. That is just one of several reasons why Trevor Windgate, despite his greatness and eccentricities, is no more than a secondary character in this story. Perhaps that is fitting for a young man who spurned full scholarships from basketball powerhouses like Connecticut, Duke, North Carolina and Kentucky to play in the obscurity of the rain-drenched forests of the Willamette Valley.

People’s motivations are rarely simple. There are complex layers and dimensions of experience and trauma that unwittingly inform just about every action they take. Basketball players only seem simple to the untrained observer because they operate

within the black rectangular lines that delineate a basketball court. The objective couldn’t be any clearer — put the ball through the basket. Yet the strategies and counter- strategies required to accomplish that feat is a human chess-match with an unrelenting number of variables. It often drives us to do truly idiotic things. We commit flagrant and technical fouls, scream at referees, argue with coaches, throw elbows and lose our grip on single most important key to successful play: concentration. In the locker room after the game we all speak in clichés to the sports reporters who watch us take showers.

That winter the rain was incessant, setting a modern-day record. We were mostly oblivious because we spent all our time indoors attending classes and practicing. We practiced twice a day in the Pamplin Sports Center for three hours at a stretch. We sweated and drank Gatorade. The coaches pushed us to be more aggressive until a skirmish erupted between overheated teammates. Then the coaches would have us regroup, lecturing us on self-discipline and gamesmanship. At night we holed up in our dorm rooms with textbooks, playbooks and copies of ESPN magazine.

I was one of the white guys. There was something otherworldly about being a minority member, being so deeply ingrained in the physicality of black culture, and going up against men whose milk-chocolate muscularity and quicksilver movements came so naturally. Just one other guy on the twelve-member squad was white, and he didn’t count. His name was Pavel Benda, an east European from the Czech Republic. I had less in common with Pavel than my black teammates. Despite numerous racial and ethnic divides, our commonality was a love for basketball and the adulation of cheering crowds. Our lives revolved around the shriek of the whistle. All our movements were ruled by the coach’s whistle. We started and stopped with a single, harsh blast. Multiple blasts indicated a major transgression or altercation. On game nights the referees had the whistles, and we kicked into frenetic motion or froze in our tracks on their audible commands. The Westminster Dog Show comes to mind.

Word leaked that Trevor Windgate was joining our team. We confronted the coaching staff and they confirmed the rumor without resistance. Some of the benchwarmers worried their scholarships would be canceled. As the team’s freshman point guard, I would be more positively affected by Windgate’s arrival than anyone. Having a dead-eye shooting guard on my wing would take the pressure off. Defenses wouldn’t be able to double-team or overplay me without risking the awful consequences of an open Trevor Windgate spotting up behind the arc to knock down three-pointers.

Trevor Windgate grew up in rural Kentucky where he developed a obsession for the outdoors and all the activities it had to offer – particularly hunting and fishing. This alone set him apart from his black brethren who were all products of urban settings where human beings belonging to rival gangs were the prey of choice. Wild game was basically never seen in the inner city, unless you counted rats and cockroaches.

Windgate shocked the collegiate basketball world by enrolling at our no-name school because it had the best environmental law program in the nation, and the state’s natural beauty and outdoor recreational opportunities had few rivals. He fancied himself a defender of the earth’s natural resources and would bring the full force of U.S. law down upon those who would otherwise defile Mother Nature’s moist and dry bounties. Of course, first he would have to earn his bachelor’s degree in environmental sciences, then he was off to the NBA to fulfill a contract worth untold millions of dollars. The off-seasons would be reserved to return to campus and study for his law degree.

Our prized recruit had an analytical mind and a gift for polemics. But there’s nothing he was more skilled at than shooting a basketball, especially from long range.

Few things in sports were as beautiful and dramatic as the thirty-foot jump shot. Fans held their breath as they watched the backspin and glorious arc through the glaring lights while the ball made its long journey toward the rim.

@copyright/Mike Consol