“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” — Stephen King

It’s his birthday today.

I think he’s written two masterpieces. The Stand and 11/22/63 (a book Don DeLillo has been trying – and failing – to write for 40 years #sorrynotsorry). I was a rabid fan in high school, college, my 20s, reading every book as it came out. Somewhere around Tommyknockers I fell off a bit, not following along. Not for any particular reason, I just was focused on other authors. The copies, though, of It, The Stand, his early horror books … I have my original copies, so dog-eared I’m afraid to read them again. They’re falling apart.

For his birthday today, I want to post an excerpt from Under the Dome, an interesting novel with a very silly ending (my nephew Cashel and I read it together) … but there’s one passage in it – a passage that’s basically character development and scene-setting – not plot-driven at all – that is a perfect example of why I love King, and why I go to him again and again.

If you grew up in a small town, the anecdote has such a ring of truth, and it’s a truth I’d never heard put together before in such an accurate way. I grew up in a small New England town and when I was a junior/senior, the girls’ basketball team was the hottest ticket of the season. Normally our school was all about boys’ football. But they weren’t doing so hot that year. Neither were the boys’ basketball team. But the GIRLS were a winning JUGGERNAUT. My group of friends felt it was unfair that the boys’ teams had cheerleading squads, and the girls teams didn’t, especially since “our” girls were so phenomenal. So we formed our own cheerleading squad, called The Phys. Wrecks. You can read all about our experience there. In our own adolescent way, we exposed the underlying sexism behind much of high school sports, AND pointed out the absurdity that girls’ teams didn’t have cheerleading squads. Why is it WEIRD to have cheerleaders for a girls’ team? Why did people snicker? You snicker at yourselves, at your own shame. Creating The Phys. Wrecks is one of my proudest high school achievements. We wanted to acknowledge the great accomplishments of our unbeatable high school girls’ basketball team. And, as King writes below, those games were ferocious in a way that the boys’ games weren’t: King NAILS this very specific dynamic, how a whole town can become obsessed with high school kids running around on a basketball court.

There are other books about the furor around high school football in small towns, or college football. But high school girls’ basketball? A phenomenon that swept MY town back in the day? Not so much.

This is Stephen King at his very best. It brings me to tears.

Other than town politics, Big Jim Rennie had only one vice, and that was high school girls’ basketball – Lady Wildcats basketball, to be exact. He’d had season tickets ever since 1998, and attended at least a dozen games a year. In 2004, the year the Lady Wildcats won the State Class D championship, he attended all of them. And although the autographs people noticed when they were invited into his home study were inevitably those of Tiger Woods, Dale Earnhardt and Bill “Spaceman” Lee, the one of which he was proudest – the one he treasured – was Hanna Compton’s, the little sophomore point guard who had led the Lady Wildcats to that one and only gold ball.

When you’re a season ticket holder, you get to know the other season ticket holders around you, and their reasons for being fans of the game. Many are relatives of the girls who play (and often the sparkplugs of the Booster Club, putting on bake sales and raising money for the increasingly expensive “away” games). Others are basketball purists, who will tell you – with some justification – that the girls’ games are just better. Young female players are invested in a team ethic that the boys (who love to run and gun, dunk, and shoot from way downtown) rarely match. The pace is slower, allowing you to see inside the game and enjoy every pick-and-roll or give-and-go. Fans of the girls’ game relish the very low scores that boys’ basketball fans sneer at, claiming that the girls’ game puts a premium on defense and foul shooting, which are the very definition of old-school hoops.

There are also guys who just like to watch long-legged teenage girls run around in short pants.

Big Jim shared all these reasons for enjoying the sport, but his passion sprang from another source entirely, one he never vocalized when discussing the games with his fellow fans. It would not have been politic to do so.

The girls took the sport personally, and that made them better haters.

The boys wanted to win, yes, and sometimes a game could get hot if it was against a traditional rival (in the case of the Mills Wildcats sports teams, the despised Castle Rock Rockets), but mostly with the boys it was about individual accomplishments. Showing off, in other words. And when it was over, it was over.

The girls, on the other hand, loathed losing. They took loss back to the locker room and brooded over it. More importantly, they loathed and hated it as a team. Big Jim often saw that hate rear its head; during a loose ball-brawl deep in the second half with the score tied, he could pick up the No you don’t, you little bitch, that ball is MINE vibe. He picked it up and fed on it.

Before 2004, the Lady Wildcats made the state tournament only once in twenty years, that appearance a one-and-done affair against Buckfield. Then had come Hanna Compton. The greatest hater of all time, in Big Jim’s opinion.

As the daughter of Dale Compton, a scrawny pulp-cutter from Tarker’s Mills who was usually drunk and always argumentative, Hanna had come by her out-of-my-face ‘tude naturally enough. As a freshman she had played JV for most of the season; Coach swung her up to varsity only for the last two games, where she’d outscored everyone and left her opposite number from the Richmond Bobcats writhing on the hardwood after a hard but clean defensive play.

When that game was over, Big Jim had collared Coach Woodhead. “If that girl doesn’t start next year, you’re crazy,” he said.

“I’m not crazy,” Coach Woodhead had replied.

Hanna had started hot and finished hotter, blazing a trail that Wildcats fans would still be talking about years later (season average: 27.6 points per game). She could spot up and drop a three-pointer any time she wanted, but what Big Jim liked best was to watch her split the defense and drive for the basket, her pug face set in a sneer of concentration, her bright black eyes daring anyone to get in her way, her short ponytail sticking out behind her like a raised middle finger. The Mill’s Second Selectman and premier used car dealer had fallen in love.

In the 2004 championship game, the Lady Wildcats had been leading the Rock Rockets by ten when Hanna fouled out. Luckily for the Cats, there was only a buck-sixteen left to play. They ended up winning by a single point. Of their eighty-six total points, Hanna Compton had scored a brain-freezing sixty-three. That spring, her argumentative dad had ended up behind the wheel of a brand-new Cadillac, sold to him at cost-minus-forty-percent by James Rennie Sr. New cars weren’t Big Jim’s business, but when he wanted one “off the back of the carrier”, he could always get it.

Sitting in Peter Randolph’s office, with the last of the pink meteor shower still fading away outside (and his problem children waiting – anxiously, Big Jim hoped – to be summoned and told their fate), Big JIm recalled that fabulous, that outright mythic, basketball game; specifically the first eight minutes of the second half, which had begun with the Lady Wildcats down by nine.

Hanna had taken the game over with the single-minded brutality of Joseph Stalin taking over Russia, her black eyes glittering (and seemingly fixed upon some basketball Nirvana beyond the sight of normal mortals), her face locked in that eternal sneer that said, I’m better than you, I’m the best, get out of my way or I’ll run you the fuck down. Everything she threw up during that eight minutes had gone in, including one absurd half-court shot that she launched when her feet tangled together, getting rid of the rock just to keep from being called for traveling.

There were phrases for that sort of run, the most common being in the zone. But the one Big Jim liked was feeling it, as in “She’s really feeling it now.” As though the game had some divine texture beyond the reach of ordinary players (although sometimes even ordinary players felt it , and were transformed for a brief while into gods and goddesses, every bodily defect seeming to disappear during their transitory divinity), a texture that on special nights could be touched: some rich and marvelous drape such as much adorn the hardwood halls of Valhalla.

Hanna Compton had never played her junior year; the championship game had been her valedictory. That summer, while driving drunk, her father had killed himself, his wife, and all three daughters while driving back to Tarker’s Mills from Brownie’s, where they had gone for ice cream frappes. The bonus Cadillac had been their coffin.

The multiple-fatality crash had been front page news in western Maine – Julia Shumway’s Democrat published an issue with a black border that week – but Big Jim had not been grief-stricken. Hanna never would have played college ball, he suspected; there the girls were bigger, and she might have been reduced to role-player status. She never would have stood for that. Her hate had to be fed by constant action on the floor. Big Jim understood completely. He sympathized completely. It was the main reason he had never even considered leaving The Mill. In the wider world he might have made more money, but wealth was the short beer of existence. Power was champagne.

Running The Mill was good on ordinary days, but in times of crisis it was better than good. In times like that you could fly on the pure wings of intuition, knowing that you couldn’t screw up, absolutely couldn’t. You could read the defense even before the defense had coalesced, and you scored every time you got the ball. You were feeling it, and there was no better time for that to happen than in a championship game.

This was his championship game, and everything was breaking his way. He had the sense – the total belief – that nothing could go wrong during this magical passage; even things that seemed wrong would become opportunities rather than stumbling blocks, like Hanna’s desperate half-court shot that had brought the whole Derry Civic Center to its feet, the Mills fans cheering, the Castle Rockers raving in disbelief.

Feeling it.