Three-Man Weave

[KG]

There are underdog stories...and there's what happened in North Dakota in 1988

By Chuck KlostermanPOSTED JUNE 8, 2011


More than 23 years ago, a pair of low-profile junior college basketball teams played a forgotten game on a neutral floor in southeast North Dakota. The favored team was a school best known for its two-year forestry program; the underdog was a miniscule all-Native American college whose campus is located outside the Bismarck, N.D., airport. You've (probably) never heard of either school, and — in all likelihood — you will (probably) never hear of either one again. And if you remember this game, you (probably) played in it.

Games described as forgotten typically earn that classification because they deserve to disappear; traditionally, it's a modifier historians use to marginalize or dismiss a given event. But this game is "forgotten" in an actual sense: There's almost no record of its existence. Fewer than 500 people watched it happen. It was not televised and there's no videotape. It wasn't broadcast on the radio. Only a couple of small-circulation newspapers made mention of what transpired, and — because it happened before the Internet — Googling the contest's details is like searching for a glossy photograph of Genghis Khan. The game has disappeared from the world's consciousness, buried by time and devoid of nostalgia. And this, of course, is not abnormal. Junior college basketball games from 1988 are not historic landmarks. We are conditioned to forget who won (or lost) the opening round of the North Dakota state juco tournament because those are moments society does not need to remember. They don't even qualify as trivia.

But something crazy happened in this particular game...

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/6625899/three-man-weave