When I am driving around rural North Dakota doing stories on agriculture, I often pass through small towns where I played high school basketball in the 1970s.

Many of the high schools have formed cooperatives and some of them no longer exist, but the memories of riding the bus to those towns to play in their gyms still are pretty clear. Those memories are more humbling than good, which means that even though they don’t make me smile, they remind me of what I learned about myself during my basketball playing games.

I started playing basketball in 1974 when I was a sophomore in high school. By started playing I mean that’s the first time I dribbled a basketball. My three older brothers were wrestlers so I didn’t even play pickup games of basketball before I joined the high school basketbal

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