THE FRONT ROW with MARK NELKE: Tales from the Road — Food for thought, a punch and a blessing

It was moments before his team was to take the floor for a postseason tournament game, and two of Bruce Bailey’s players were missing.

Where were they?

At the time, Bailey was athletic director and head boys basketball coach at Mullan High.

The 1A District 1 tournament was at Lakeland High, and since Mullan was the host school, Bailey was in charge.

“One of my boys basketball players was the athletic director’s aide ... he helped me set up the hospitality room for all the coaches and officials,” Bailey recalled. “He helped me pack in all the food and drinks and helped set everything up.

“Then we went out and watched the game that was being played before us. At the end of the third quarter we would normally go in and meet, and at that time, we only had six or seven players, and I started looking around and I only had five.”

So he asked the players that were there: “Where’s (so-and-so)?”

“We haven’t seen them.”

“So the clock was winding down, and I was looking all over the gym, and asking parents if they’ve seen them, and nobody’s seen them,” Bailey said. “So I started getting a little nervous, and right when the fourth quarter ended, I couldn’t find these guys — did something happen to them? Is this serious stuff or what?

“So I started walking around all the classrooms, and I walked in the hospitality room and there they were, sitting down, eating the food, drinking our drinks. With two officials.”

“We had a little conversation about where they should be, and what they shouldn’t be doing.”

The Tigers then got ready to play their district tournament game — two of them on a full stomach.

“If I remember right, they did all right,” recalled Bailey, now AD and assistant boys basketball coach at Wallace. “We did make it to state that year. They played on a full stomach — maybe that was the best pregame we had all season, I’m guessing.”

So much for having all the players in the locker room for a pregame talk.

“Maybe we talk too much sometimes,” Bailey said with a laugh.

FANS BARKING at refs happens at many games.

But usually it ends with the game’s final horn.

However this time, the chirping continued long after the game ended.

“I got in a fight one night,” recalled John Posnick, who has been a high school basketball official in North Idaho for more than 30 years, though an Achilles injury has kept him off the court this season.

Sometime in the 1990s, Posnick was refereeing a district tournament game at Lakeland, between Falls Christian and Clark Fork.

“Clark Fork got beat pretty handily,” recalled Posnick, who has been District 1 commissioner for the past two decades. “We were walking out to our car, and some car pulls up beside us. Some fan rolls down his window and says, ‘You guys oughta get a different job. You suck!’

“Of course me, I usually keep my mouth shut, but this time I didn’t. It was the last game of the year. I just looked at him and said, ‘Why don’t you come out next October? We’re always looking for refs. We can use a moron like you.’

“He puts it in park and he opens up that door, and as soon as he stepped out, I drilled him,” Posnick said. “And we got in a little scrap and (Dave) Oakes (who was reffing the game with Posnick) helped break it up. So I kinda got in trouble a little bit with the (District 1) Board of Control. The penalty was, I couldn’t go to Clark Fork for a season. And that’s kind of our least favorite trip.”

Posnick stressed that the people in Clark Fork were great, but the trip was rough because it was such a long one, with the last 25 miles or so on windy two-lane highway, particularly dicey in the winter.

“Jesus, bring him down, I’ll hit him again,” Posnick thought. “I won’t go for two seasons.”

THE LAST Coeur d’Alene High girls basketball season before the school split and Lake City opened began a bit rough.

But a chance stop at a restaurant in central Idaho provided a memory that will never go away.

Coeur d’Alene opened with a pair of hard-fought victories over a pair of schools from the Boise area.

“The following Tuesday we beat Moscow, then we went to Boise, and won in triple overtime with Capital, then beat Borah in overtime,” recalled Dave Stockwell, who was an assistant under Dave Fealko on that Coeur d’Alene girls team. “So we were 5-0, and we could have very easiliy been 2-3.

“On the way home, we went home through Idaho, and we stopped in McCall at Lardos,” Stockwell said. “We were all eating dinner, and the waitress comes up and says, ‘By the way, your meal has been paid for. A couple in the corner has paid your bill.’

The bill was for some 200 or 300 dollars.

“So Dave and I went over and talked to them, and they were an older couple from California that had a daughter that played basketball, and was killed in a car accident. They saw our girls, and the way they communicated and got along, and it just touched ’em. And I told Dave at the time, ‘Man, this team is touched.’

“And as it went on, we went undefeated and won a state championship, but the first two weeks were pretty memorable that way,” Stockwell said.

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