Every veteran of high-school sports has their own "if only" story of what might have, or could have happened to their careers "if only."
Granby High School boys basketball coach Tim Sheehan gives the game ball to Logan Brown in 2006 after Brown scored his 1,000th career point during a game in January that year.
I’m a fan of the Granby High School boys basketball team.
What’s unusual about it and what causes some of my friends to consider my fandom a bit eccentric is that I have absolutely no other connection to the town of Granby. Indeed, I would be hard pressed to count the number of people that I know who live in Granby on more than one hand.
Following the Granby High Rams fits for me because I can go to games where I don’t know a soul, maybe having supper at a town eatery before the game, and get away from it all. I might as well be spending a winter night in Iowa, or Pennsylvania, or Kansas.
High-school sports are wonderful, slice-of-American-pie of the youth that leaves us behind.
I can’t remember the exact year that I started following Granby High basketball. It might have been the 1999-2000 season, which was also their coach Tim Sheehan’s first year.
I experienced the agony of defeat when the Rams went to the Western Massachusetts Division III finals at the Curry Hicks Cage at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and lost; I also experienced the joy of victory when they won the title in 2005.
In the interest of disclosure, I should say that I took a hiatus from following the team full-time toward the end of the last decade when they had a bit of a dry spell. This year’s team, though, has given me my fervor back.
At many home games, I’m now ensconced in my traditional seat in the bleachers behind the Granby bench (I’ve even been known to go to road games!). Part of the drama of the game for me is seeing and hearing Coach Sheehan’s interaction with his players. That’s why I sit right behind him.
Over the years, I’ve seen a number of kids come and go. I’ve heard it said, “A good pool game is the sign of a misspent youth.” In a somewhat similar vein, I think that you can tell a lot about a kid by his hoop game.
One of the kids who I followed from his freshman year in 1999-2000 was a kid named Mike Beck.
Coach Sheehan used Beck as a “three,” a big guard-small forward. He could score, he could pass, and he did a lot of both when the play called for it. You had the feeling that Beck wasn’t one of those kids making mental calculations about his individual statistics while he played.
Sheehan says of him, “He was a good kid and a better teammate. Having him out there was like having a coach on the floor, an extension of me.”
I realized that I wanted to write about Mike Beck when I was at a recent Granby game and looked up to see the banner honoring 1,000-point career scorers in Granby basketball history. I recognized a few of the names, including Keith Roy and Logan Brown, who is now an assistant to Coach Sheehan.
Despite having a four-year varsity career and being a consistent point contributor, Mike Beck’s name is not on the 1,000-point banner.
Before I tell you the story behind this story, I must say what I find myself saying quite a bit when I write about high school sports. There’s a lot of guys around, many of them good, stand-up guys, who’ve got a story about their high-school sports days which include words like “if only,” as in, “If only I didn’t blow out my knee.” Or, “If only I didn’t blow up at the coach.” Or, “If only I didn’t blow up the chemistry lab.” I’ve got my own personal “if only” story.
In the case of Mike Beck, his “if only” story is very real, and forces greater than himself wrote it.
In his senior year, Beck was on a trajectory to score his 1,000th point, if he just did his average scoring for the rest of the season. They might have already had flowers picked out for him when they stopped play after his 1,000th point and had his family join him on the floor.
But, then, fate got in the way.
In January, he got mononucleosis and was forced by doctor’s orders to miss nine games.
By the time he got back in the game, 1,000 points was out of reach unless he “gunned” to get them, played with a calculator in his head, and that wasn’t the kind of kid Mike Beck was.
He ended up with 960 career points, or some such number.
Anyway, looking at the 1,000-point banner made me remember Mike Beck and how sometimes in this life, if you’re lucky, you get yourself on line to score 1,000 points and it happens. Sometimes, though, it doesn’t happen, and your name doesn’t go on a banner for people to remember you. Sometimes in this life, you just accept a hard knock and keep on playing.
Mike Beck worked as an assistant to Coach Sheehan for a few years after high school graduation, while he attended Holyoke Community College, and then became a correctional officer at the Hampden County Correctional Center, working all night and completing a degree in criminal justice at Westfield State University during the day.
When you hear the words his supervisors at the correctional center say about him, you see shades of him on a basketball court and hear echoes of Coach Sheehan talking about him.
Said one supervisor, “Officer Beck performed at high levels when it came to the quality of work and quantity of work. Whenever I called for ‘any available officer,’ Officer Beck was the first to answer. He oftentimes went above and beyond his post requirements to help out other officers. He is a valuable contributor to the team and a team player.”
This year’s Granby High basketball team looks to me to be headed to playing for all the marbles at the Curry Hicks Cage again this March, although Coach Sheehan says not to put any pressure on him.
They’ve got a junior named Corey Baker, who’s headed for his own 1,000 points and seems to manage to come away from a game with a high point total and still fit just fine into team play. They have a senior named Andy Gifford who is a dead-eye with an outside shot, and a sophomore named Jesse Molin, who can pass or score, depending on what the play calls for, and who plays with a relaxed fluidity. He reminds me a little of Mike Beck.
If this year’s team makes it to the cage in March, a lot of old ballplayers will probably be in the stands. Mike Beck might be one of them.
I imagine that some of the old ballplayers will be telling “if only” stories about their own glory days. My sense is that Mike Beck won’t be one of the storytellers.
That’s why I wanted to write this, to tell his story for him.
That’s why I wanted this column to be his banner, hanging high for all to see.
Richard J. McCarthy grew up in Springfield’s Mason Square neighborhood; he still makes his home in the Pioneer Valley.