Life's Best Memories of Razorbacks Began with Sweet, Rebellious 4th Grade Teacher

It began in fourth grade with a teacher by the name of Jan Smalling. She was the sort of teacher who only exists in books most of the time.

She took us to the circus to study animals, had us doing challenge words in spelling like antidisestablishmentarianism because she knew we could, and made us learn to spell the names of the countries competing in ice hockey in the winter Olympics and a fact or two about that country.

She clearly loved two things — us and her daughter. There was no questioning it.

However, there was a deep third love for Mrs. Smalling — the Arkansas Razorbacks. Before going to the circus, everyone got the opportunity to listen to the end of a tight game between the Hogs and Baylor Bears before we all met up.

And even though I had no idea what the NCAA Tournament was at the time, she reserved one of those TVs on a rolling cart and made sure it could get CBS because it was important to her that we get to experience the Razorbacks play in the first round of the Southeast Regional against Villanova.

I was a year away from hitting that point in life where I kept up with Razorbacks basketball. Up until that point, I had heard Joe Kleine's name on the radio in association with a coach named Eddie Sutton and I watched outside the doorway into the room the adults were in when Cannon Whitby hit a free throw that was apparently pretty important against Arkansas State.

As for the year in question, all I really knew about that team that would turn out to be the first to really feature a full set of Nolan Richardson players was there was a center named Andrew Lang whom I thought was pretty good.

He wasn't nearly as good as I imagined apparently. Despite being just shy of seven-feet tall and 245 pounds, he averaged nine points and seven rebounds in his final season with the Hogs.

Still, as I sat at my desk at what was Westside Elementary in Warren at the time, I believed he would help Arkansas take down some team I had never heard of with a weird name in Villanova. Little did I know they won the national championship a few years earlier and still had players from that team.

Arkansas battled to within four with just over 30 seconds left and forced a turnover that would give them a chance to make it a winnable game in the final seconds, but it didn't work out. Still, I was hooked.

The best place on the planet to watch March Madness was at a public school in South Arkansas. A year or two after that, Pizza Hut began a joint campaign with the NCAA where people could buy commemorative basketballs from their signature booth while chowing down on pizza and blowing quarters on the Juke Box and the Ninja Turtles arcade game.

It just so happened one of the first years they did it was a ball with mountains all over it for the Denver Final Four, which was the first Final Four to which Richardson took Arkansas. Unfortunately, that ball got played with and worn out.

It's certainly a piece of history I wish I could display in my office next to my football signed by the entire football team of the Hogs' last year in the Southwest Conference. Despite the Razorbacks' success, it was in junior high that the NCAA Tournament experience truly got fun.

The librarian set up a viewing area in a closed off section of the library where we could rush up to after choking down our food to watch the various tournament games play out. It was in this room that we all watched this big center with crazy ears named Popeye Jones of the Murray State Racers nearly take down Alabama in the opening round.

Unfortunately, the Razorbacks didn't play until just after lunch. However, I was prepared for this to happen.

The first half was to be played during my science class with Mr. McClellan. Now here was yet another wonderful, caring teacher who taught both my father and myself.

He was kind and had an air of Mr. Wizard about him. Knowing his students would be more focused on the basketball game than science, he arranged for a film day on one of the old reel to reel projectors that were outdated even back then and agreed that every 10 minutes a student could run up to the library and report back with the score.

Meanwhile, I had figured out how to detach the headphones from the metal frame that held them on your head. This meant I could plug it into a walkman hidden in the inside of my jacket, run the wire up my sleeve and hide the speaker in the palm of my hand. All I had to do was prop my elbow on my desk, lean my ear on my hand as if I was paying close attention to the film and let Mike Nail and Rick Schaeffer tell me directly what was going on.

The No. 1 seeded Razorbacks obliterated Georgia State, 117-76, in the opening round. I would report the score to my unknowing friends just before the volunteer student would return from the library and they were stunned by my accuracy.

Even with such obvious information as to what was going on available, my friends didn't figure it out until I showed them in the safety of the hallways after class.

Speaking of the radio, the 1995 season that almost resulted in another Razorbacks national championship features a game almost everyone has forgotten except me and most of the guys who were on the bus as memeber of the Warren High School baseball team.

Arkansas was the No. 2 seed and defending national champions. Yet, as we drove from Warren to Monticello, complete with pulling over and removing our caps for a funeral procession, we listened as Texas Southern took it to the Razorbacks.

The game was still tight as we arrived for our game against Monticello, so our coach, Kelvin Gragg, yes, the father of a pair of Arkansas Razorbacks players including tight end Chris Gragg, kept us on the bus. We listened as the Hogs fought a gutty team and appeard on the verge of suffering one of the greatest upsets of all time.

However, Arkansas pulled it out, 79-78, down in Austin and continued the run to the national championship game while we scrambled off the bus to get warmed up before out game that was now going to start in just a few minutes.

The last game I recall us watching was in high school. I am pretty sure it was the 1995 season because in the memory a few people from the grade above are present, but that's no for certain.

All I know or sure it was in my Computer Aided Drafting class with yet another amazing teacher simply deemed "Larry!" He had a formal teacher name by which I was always careful to call him, but in my old age, while I can see his face and all the pens spanning his pocket on a pocket protector, I can't clearly recall his last name.

All I can remember is my classmates constantly referring to him as "Larry!" which was his first name and was said in this case in as strange of a way as possible, perhaps like Aunt Bea from the old "Andy Griffith Show" calling out to an old friend enthusiastically. It certainly wasn't meant to be disrespectful by them.

It was purely out of love as he was their fun wise uncle who happend to also show them how to draw plans for machines and design houses on AutoCad. While he was uneasy at first, Larry agreed to use the TV in the upper corner of the classroom for the explicit purpose of showing Channel One each morning to let us watch the game.

Unfortunately for him, as random students from the shop class at the end of the hall wandered in for various reasons, word got out and eventually we had lots of visitors watching the game as well. I don't remember much about the game other than Arkansas won and we all apologized even though we had nothing to do with the stragglers who wandered in.

Since then, the NCAA Tournament just hasn't had the same vibe. There's no match for crowding into a school library to watch it all happen on one of those TVs on a giant stand.

There was a feeling that we were getting away with something. We weren't allowed to talk in class or even wiggle, yet here we were riding the highs and lows of the teams we'd never heard of, but wanted to pull the uspet while in a school library.

The ultimate room of quiet was full of energy and cheers. It was as rebelious as it gets at the time, yet in each case, school employees encouraged it.

Those days are gone now. Students just watch it on their phone as if it's a normal thing.

School districts even schedule spring break around the beginning of March Madness to not have to deal with it anymore.

It's just one more way life doesn't quite have the quality for young people that it once did. Instead, it's gone the way of the commerative Pizza Hut basketball, lost to a magical decade people try to recreate on television, but that will never truly exist again.

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