TERRY MOSHER
HAL LEE
It never occurred to me to be a writer. In fact, it never occurred to me to be anything. When I was 18 I was drifting through this world. I was still in what I call my “Dark Years” and just trying to stay alive without any meaning to what was going on or to what I was doing or not doing.
What I’m telling you, I guess, is I don’t know how I got here, how I managed for the last 46 years and counting to write sports. If you would have told me back when I was just out of high school that I would end up doing this I would have said you were crazy.
It was in 1958 that the brother next to me in age – David – showed up in Portville, NY where I had gone after graduating from Ferndale High School. Up until he said, “You are going to school, aren’t you?” I had no intention of doing anything except work, but because I didn’t want to admit to him that I wasn’t going to school, I said yes.
That impulsive reply led me on a seven-year college quest to find my way in this world and shake off my Dark Years. It took some doing, but when authorities at Western Washington finally despaired of me and tossed me my degree, I had followed my brother’s urging and did something I never thought I would do.
From there followed a series of jobs until the fateful day sports editor Bill Schey for some unknown reason decided to hire me at the old Bremerton Sun. That was Feb. 2, 1970 and now here I am still writing even though I don’t know how how I have done it.
It may have been my destiny to be a sportswriter, but there is nothing in my family background to suggest that this would be so. I really can’t explain how I got here from there, from my Dark Years, from my meandering through life, through the shadows, through the friends that since have left this world leaving me behind.
Amos, Dick, Dave, Frank, Adolph, Bobby, Ray, Pete, Lynn, Dale, God bless their souls, would have laughed at any suggestion that I would be a writer. You write? C’mon, have another beer, you aren’t going to do any such thing, they would all shout in unison.
But here I am.
I don’t consider myself a good writer. There are plenty of people who can turn a phrase with the greatest of ease and make the art of writing look so easy it makes me sick. I love to read Sports Illustrated because it usually has good stories written by writers who know what they are doing.
Me? I just wing it. I am what is called a hacker, a person who grinds away and if he is lucky can once in a blue moon slip in a phase that pleases. Those occasions are rare, however. I can remember once many years ago writing something and breaking out laughing at what I had written because, one, I didn’t know where it came from, and two, it actually was very good.
It’s strange, though, but I really like to write. As I said before, I never in a million years would have guessed that I would wind up doing this, but once I figured out the business a little bit I actually learned to love to write. It is a good way of getting rid of emotions that bother me and it is fun to figure out how to tell a story and tell it well enough that my bosses continue to let me tell them.
And I love to tell stories, especially about people. I think we do ourselves a disservice by allowing each other to go through life without others knowing about how we did it. We lose a lot of good historical information when people who have had an impact on our communities die before we learn much about they became successful.
I think of Hal Lee when I say that because Lee may have been the best athlete to ever come out of Bremerton, and maybe not only Kitsap County but the state of Washington. While I have read some things on Lee, I really don’t know him from those stories the way I would want to, and it’s a shame that we don’t have that ability to do so now.
Lee, who was born in 1910, died in 1977 in Bremerton seven years into my writing career and I confess I don’t remember anything about that fact at that time. And that’s a terrible shame. I feel guilty that I didn’t catch on to him, reach out to him, and do a story on him before he died. Actually, I feel really, really awful that I didn’t.
About four years ago, David Eskenazi did a great story on Lee for SportspressNW.com in which he covered Lee’s exceptional basketball career (Lee was a 6-foot-4 point guard at a time when guys his height were considered top post players) and baseball career at Washington and as a basketball referee in the Pacific Coast Conference. You can still read that story by punching in Hall Lee, basketball in your Internet browser.
Suffice to say, Lee was a tremendous athlete and I know little about his personality and his personal life and how he used his skills to become the legend he became.
That’s it for today. I’ve got to go and see which teams are winning in their basketball tournament finals. My St. Bonaventure team lost in overtime in the quarterfinals of the Atlantic 10Tournament Friday (March 11) night to Davidson after blowing a 12-point lead in the last six minutes of regulation and that may have cost the Bonnies a berth in the NCAA Tournament.
I found it a little amusing that one of the announcers for the game pronounced the city (Olean) where St. Bona is located as O-Lean. It’s Ole-An.
Keeping the Bonnies out of the tournament means you won’t get to see one of the better players in the college game in Marcus Posley, a six-foot shooting guard. Posley scored 47 points on March 2 against St. Joseph’s (29 in the second half) in a 96-90 win. That was the highest single-game total of the year in NCAA D-1 basketball until Washington’s Andrew Andrews matched it in the Huskies 99-91 victory over Washington State later the same night.
Posley scored 32 in Friday night’s loss to Davidson.
Ok, that is enough. I’m outta here.
Be well pal.
Be careful out there.
Have a great day.
You are loved.