A wayward pencil, a cheeseburger and other gym oddities

Bill Adams was a fiery coach during his two stints as boys basketball coach at Sandpoint High.

But on this night, after getting excited over a play in the first half of a game against Kalispell in Bulldog Gym, he couldn’t figure out why his hand hurt.

“I went over to the scorer’s table and I was holding my hand,” Adams recalled. “And Rod Thurlow and Bobby Moore (who were working at the scorer’s table), I looked at them and they were just white.

“I said, ‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’, and they said, ‘Look at your hand.’

“Well, the pencil was sticking up through my hand.”

Adams recalled:

“I got excited and jumped up in the air, and the pencil flipped out of my sport coat pocket, and landed on the eraser and I came right back down on it with my hand when I slapped the chair or the table or whatever. And drove the pencil through my hand, between the thumb and the index finger.”

Ken Beaudoin, the Sandpoint High athletic director at the time, drove Adams to Bonner General Hospital.

“The doctor in the ER said, ‘What in the world happened to you?’

“So I explained to them ... ”

“The ER doctor said, ‘Who you playing?’

“I said ‘Kalispell.’

‘How you doing?’

“We’re beating the pants off them right now.”

“He said, “This is going to hurt.’

“Why’s that?

‘I’m on loan from Kalispell.’

Beaudoin drove Adams back to the gym, and he walked in in the third quarter with a bandaged hand, and resumed coaching.

Kalispell ended up coming back and winning the game.

DAVE FEALKO, who was coaching the Coeur d’Alene High girls at the time, recalled a game at Bulldog Gym in Sandpoint where he received a special delivery he hadn’t expected.

Sandpoint High played in Bulldog Gym up until the early 1990s, and the old gym was unique in that all the spectator seating was upstairs. The team benches were up against a wall, with bleachers right above the teams, behind a railing where you could look right down on the bench.

“The game was going on, and I don’t know if it was on purpose or not, but I never made an order to the fast-food place,” Fealko recalled. “But I got a cheeseburger and a milkshake that landed in my lap.

“There were a bunch of kids scrambling, but I left it at that. It didn’t cause too much damage,” he said.

The food hit right on his shoulder, “and luckily the milkshake had a lid on it and so just a little bit hit me, but most of it went on the floor. And I think the burger ... it wasn’t too messy, but it just surprised the heck out of me.”

Probably an accident, right?

“It seemed like it was too well placed, but I would never accuse Sandpoint of doing a thing like that,” Fealko said with a laugh.

THAT WASN’T the only occasion where something came down from upstars and struck a coach in Bulldog Gym.

Mike Curtis was minding his own business during pregame, before his Post Falls girls were to take on Sandpoint sometime in the late 1980s.

“We were just getting ready to go, and somebody on the balcony up above us had a clipboard, and it fell off and stuck in my head,” Curtis recalled. “Right on top of the head. It bled like a stuck pig.”

It didn’t hurt, Curtis said, but they had to do something about the bleeding.

“They just packed some vaseline in it and away we went,” said Curtis, who didn’t miss any of the game. “I think their coach and Chris Johnson (who succeeded Curtis as head coach, and at that time was a Trojan assistant) helped me with it, got the bleeding stopped and played a ballgame.”

Curtis said his head might have swelled up a little bit during the game, but it didn’t affect him too much.

“I’ve still got a scar from that sucker,” Curtis said.

BEFORE HIS current job as Post Falls High girls basketball coach, Marc Allert was an assistant with the Post Falls boys basketball team.

“We had just won the regional title at Lewiston (in current Trojan boys coach Mike McLean’s senior year),” Allert recalled. “Back then it was acceptable to cut down the nets after a regional win at the opponent’s gym. We had a pretty good crowd gathered around the basket as kids were cutting down the net. Lewiston had quite a few people in the stands watching.

“(Post Falls) Coach Scott Moore was cutting down the last piece when a water bottle came flying from the Lewiston stands and hit Moore. In an instant our fans and players were in the Lewiston stands. It got a little intense for a while with a lot of pushing and shoving and trying to get players back to the locker room. I had (Trojan player) Justin Curtis by the back of the jersey, and he was about 15 feet in front of me his jersey was stretched out so far.

“I think that was the end of cutting down nets in the opponent’s gym.”

COACHES: If you are a current or former basketball coach in North Idaho, and have stories you’d like to share of crazy bus trips, humorous encounters with referees or bizarre occurences during games, feel free to email me at mnelke@cdapress.com

Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 664-8176, Ext. 2019, or via email at mnelke@cdapress.com. Follow him on Twitter@CdAPressSports.