Eye of the Storm
This is unverified. You should know that going in. There’s some fragmentary evidence, of course, mostly archived web pages and bootleg videos and such, but the rest is basically hearsay and whole cloth invention, and it all involves this Grinnell grad from the 1990s, a guy by the name of Goins. He had an obsession with D3 basketball. Used to drive all across the Midwest with a handheld camera, and one night he’s up in the middle of nowhere Minnesota, and St. John’s beats St. Thomas at the buzzer, and half a dozen monks and a few hundred students storm the court. The monks look dignified. The students look drunk. And nobody’s seen the footage, but apparently this becomes like a formative event or something because all of a sudden the only thing Goins cares about is court-storming. Empty bleachers. Crowds sucked into midcourt and sweat and popcorn and boiler heat all fucking mixed together in a nothing town, and there’s something different about non-scholarship celebrations, something more abandoned. Meaner. Urgent and unpredictable and frenzied, and it’s like a certain kind of pornography, and now it’s Goins on a quest. Goins on the road. Goins in Moorhead and Mt. Vernon and Kenosha and praying he can capture something spasmodic and violent and exhilarating, and he surfs rivalry games. Massey ratings. Sagarin, etc. He understands that hatred and improbability are the drivers of cataclysmic celebration, and there are moments when he doesn’t know if he’s after the ecstasy or the catharsis or maybe the potential for a Hillsborough-type tragedy, and obviously most of the time he doesn’t get any of that (or even a particularly good game), but he always lucks into at least one or two storms and then finds a few more in late February and early March, and as the years go by he develops a kind of system. A feel. He thinks about matchup history and bad blood and conference standings (as well as local and national events, about socioeconomics and town-and-gown dynamics), and eventually it all gets pretty sophisticated. Algorithms are involved. He can tell you within a few percentage points either way the chance that any particular game ends in a court storm, and he starts a blog about it. Solicits donations. Doesn’t get many. But there’s a following. The nichiest of athletic niches, and there’s some micro targeted ad revenue, but mostly Goins just goes a little nuts and takes out a loan. Hires a few assistants. Sends them out west. He manages to catch a few extra court storms a year, and the videos don’t exactly light up the internet, but there is a market, and pretty soon Goins (who by this point has started drinking pretty heavily and become obsessed with a creepy form of underground fame) is a known quantity. A pseudo-celebrity. He’s an in-joke for message board denizens and assistant coaches and desperate alumni, and some of these people start showing up in the videos. They wait until the court storm’s moved to the second act, and then they find the guy with the camera. You can’t miss him. It’s almost always Goins himself. They stand in front of the lens and make faces. Hold signs. And Goins cuts around them pretty good, but he doesn’t eliminate them completely (probably on account of he likes the attention (or the acknowledgement anyway)), and so these guys (and it’s always mostly guys), they send the link around. Have their own little moment of look-at-me minor fame, and it doesn’t end there either because even though Goins never publishes his location (part of the mystery, he liked to say), a few enterprising fans replicate his algorithm and are then able to guess, with alarming accuracy, where he and/or his staff might be on any given night, and then they just spread the word on campus. They storm the court no matter what. Win or lose, and the whole thing becomes orchestrated but no less interesting (though certainly interesting for different reasons), and this goes on for a while until one night, at Gustavus (they say) or Augustana or Wartburg or La Crosse (and maybe it’s a regional final or else a mere conference championship), the host team wins it late, and the whole thing is ripe for adrenaline. For revelry. It’s classic textbook court-storm time, and instead what happens is a race to the bleachers. To the camera. It’s all lost footage unfortunately, but word is it’s a jumbled mess and mostly just shaking and the rustle of fabric, and Goins is under there somewhere, and he’s sweating. Breathing. The chanting around him is rhythmic and sort of primally deep, and the only surefire fact is someday somebody’s go
BRETT BIEBEL teaches writing and literature at Augustana College in Rock Island, IL. His (mostly very) short fiction has appeared in Chautauqua, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Masters Review, Emrys Journal, and elsewhere. His debut story collection, 48 Blitz is available from Split/Lip Press. You can follow him on Twitter @bbl_brett.