Lifetime of memories at ‘The Big House’

Maya was sitting on my lap, having a conversation with me about the recent events in her life.

We were situated on a chair stationed at a makeshift studio desk toward one end of the large, noisy, dusty open space.

I had walked up into the main seating area moments earlier and rescued Maya from her mother and the rest of her Leedey family, all of whom had made the pilgrimage to OKC to watch basketball.

Maya and I toured the concourse, then went to “my area” which was set up to film and broadcast highlights and interviews of the state basketball tournament.

It had probably been a week or two - or maybe even longer - since I had seen Maya. At the time, she lived 90 miles away from me and I was nearing the end of one of my marathon playoff marches.

She was 5 years old, the year was 2014 and we had some catching up to do and were fully engulfed in each other’s words (well, I was definitely interested in what she had to say; I doubt it went both ways).

As we were chatting, Heath Ritchie, who produced all of those shows we were making for CoachesAid.com, grabbed his camera and got Maya’s attention.

The image he captured is perhaps my favorite photo in what is one of my favorite places in the world.

A place that will be no more.

•••

The final chapter of state basketball games at State Fair Arena closed last Saturday night. Lincoln Christian’s narrow victory over Douglass in the Class 4A girls state championship game will forever be the final game played there.

Not long after the final buzzer sounded, the court was dismantled, the goals were taken down, the tables and chairs were all removed.

Dirt was hauled in for the Oklahoma Youth Expo… also the last one to be held in the old arena.

It will soon be torn down. With it goes 60 years of championships, glorious wins, devastating defeats, thrills of several lifetimes and so much more.

Its name is Jim Norick Arena, but nobody truly calls it that.

It’s State Fair Arena or, more affectionately, The Big House.

Of those 60 years, I spent the last 28 covering games in the arena.

Some were for the Kingfi sher Times & Free Press. Some were for CoachesAid. Some were for Skordle.

Some were for a combination of the newspaper and the other two.

I spent hours on end in those chairs that sit courtside, cataloging the history that was taking place on the 90-ish feet of hardwood in front of me.

I didn’t have a team to cover last Saturday. I had no duties for CoachesAid, which is long gone (and the hundreds of stories I wrote for the online publication are also in the wind).

I had nothing for Skordle. I had nothing to broadcast.

But there were eight championships to be decided on that day and I figured I - someone who has covered as many games there as just about anyone else in history - probably needed to be there.

So I got up early, arrived for the second half of the 9 a.m. game and spent the next 13 or so hours watching basketball.

It was glorious. When the last game ended, I lingered around, got my picture taken a time or two, snapped some photos of my own, talked to one of the coaches who suffered one of the biggest heartbreaks ever in that arena, gave the retiring Amy Cassell a hug and I slid out the back door, never to return again.

•••

It’s hard - so hard - to make the state tournament.

People on the outside think of Class B and Class A as a “lower” level of basketball, but even if it is, they have to navigate so many more teams to make it to that elite eight.

I cover six Kingfisher County schools: Kingfisher, Cashion, Dover, Hennessey, Lomega and Okarche. That’s 12 basketball teams.

They’ve competed in Class 4A down to B…for the most part. Dover and Lomega have always been in Class B. All the others have made at least one move (Okarche has been everything from B to 2A; Kingfisher dipped down into 3A a few times; Cashion has been 2A and A; Hennessey has been 2A and 3A).

To me, the amazing thing is every single year, I’ve had at least one of “my” teams make the state tournament.

The closest I got to not having one?

My first two years…1998 and 1999.

Only one team - the Lomega boys - punched their ticket to state in 1998. They made the state semifinals that season.

They played their quarterfinal game down in Moore that year, I believe, then played Boynton in the semifinals at State Fair Arena.

It was my first game to cover at The Big House… and I did so from the stands.

I was still a green reporter. Hadn’t been there before. I saw press row down there, but wasn’t exactly sure how to get there or get in.

So I covered the game from the cheap seats. Among the common folk.

It’s ironic that I was so hesitant that first year because now I don’t even show my OSSAA pass to the arena workers and security.

They know me…at least my face…and know I belong.

•••

After that first year, I became a regular.

The Cashion girls made a run to the semifinals in 1999 and I was there, courtside, to document the action.

Then something cool started happening.

Championships. The Cashion and Kingfisher girls won titles in 2000…on two different weekends.

On that second weekend, Kingfisher had the first game of the day. If I wasn’t the first person in the arena, I was the second.

The other? Kent Weems. We exchanged pleasantries and I asked him what was going on and he told me, “Here to see the girls win that gold ball.”

They did. In 2001, it was the Dover girls starting their historic run as well as the Lomega boys winning titles.

Kingfisher County swept Class B. You think I didn’t have a strut in my walk down press row?

It was also in 2001 that I began my tenure with CoachesAid.com. The upstart high school media company was looking for someone in our area and Brad Gore, Dover’s baseball coach at the time, knew the people running the website and he knew me.

He connected us and the rest is history.

I covered not only Kingfi sher County teams at the state tournament, but was now there to cover all the teams from across the state.

The Dover girls went on to win titles again in 2002 and 2003 to become the first girls team to win three straight titles in the 5-on-5 era.

I was there to document it.

The Lady Longhorns were in the midst of seven straight appearances in the state championship game. Seven! Not just the state tournament, which is impressive in and of itself… but the state finals. Not sure we’ll see that again.

I was there for them all. Dover won another in 2005. In the semifinals, Dover beat Lomega by 31 points.

The Lady Raiders had been dormant by their standards for a number of years, but were starting to reemerge.

Little did we know at the time how big a resurgence it would be.

I didn’t technically work at the newspaper in 2007, but still was helping out.

That year, Lomega won its first girls state championship since 1992.

Cashion’s girls also won another title as Bailey Welch cemented herself in Lady Wildcats history with a buzzer beater to win it.

In 2008, the Lady Raiders of Lomega repeated.

Then in 2010, it was the Okarche girls winning the first of their three championships in a five-year span.

The Lady Warriors, under coach Cherie Myers, won again in 2013 and 2014.

In 2012, 2015 and 2016? Lomega’s Lady Raiders were hoisting that gold ball.

The 2015 crown was a record breaker, snapping the tie with Byng (11) for most in girls Oklahoma history.

It’s safe to say there’s some distance between Byng and Lomega now.

In 2017, the Kingfisher boys shocked a lot of people, including myself, by making their run to the 4A boys championship.

It was the first of seven consecutive appearances by the Jackets in the state tournament.

They won titles again in 2019, 2021 and 2022.

They, too, were historic. I was there to cover them all.

Anyone remember 2020? What a year.

True story: I was Big House bound to watch some basketball as “my teams” didn’t play until later in the day on this first day of the small school state tournament.

I had been fairly sick for a number of weeks, which wasn’t abnormal for me that time of year. I hit a coughing spell while at the red light at Northwest Expressway and Piedmont Road.

The light turned green, I proceeded east toward Oklahoma City as my coughing got worse. The next thing I know, I’m waking up down in a flood runoff area on the other side of the new Mercy clinic just east of that stoplight. I had passed out coughing. Tim Taylor can vouch for me as he came to check on me.

I was fine. My Ram 1500 was not.

I had to get it towed back to Kingfisher (hitching a ride in the meantime). Was able to secure a vehicle from my mom and made it back to OKC to cover my teams that night.

Lomega’s girls went on to win the title on that 2020 weekend.

The next weekend never happened…as we all know (and wonder what could have been with the KHS boys team).

The Lady Raiders were again champs in 2021 and went undefeated in doing so. They were one of the most dominant teams the state has seen. Go back and look at the numbers.

I was there for it. The county was denied a championship in 2023, but made up for it with two in 2024.

Kevin Lewallen won his eighth championship as a head coach for Lomega. That tied him with the late great Bertha Teague atop the state’s record books.

I was there. I was also there with a tremendous amount of pride as Aaron West guided the Okarche Warriors to their first title since 1979.

His dad, Ray, got close multiple times with the Warriors, but watched from above as Aaron brought it home.

The younger West followed it up just two weekends ago with a second consecutive championship… and a perfect 32-0 record.

It was historic. I was there (well for that second half, anyway).

If you lost track, that’s 25 state championships for Kingfisher County teams in the years I’ve covered.

Of the 28 years I’ve been at the Big House, county teams brought home at least one championship in 20 of them.

The county brought home two state titles in five of those years.

Eight different teams have won titles in my tenure: Lomega girls top the list with 8; Kingfisher boys and Dover girls with 4 each; Okarche girls with 3; Okarche boys and Cashion girls won 2 apiece; KHS girls and Lomega boys 1 each.

That doesn’t count the number of times our teams came close with runner-up finishes, but I won’t bring those up because Lewallen still remembers that Kremlin- Hillsdale game and Trey Green’s teeth still probably hurt from that 2018 collision.

•••

Yeah, I’ve been proud as a peacock many a Saturday on press row. It goes without saying.

I became a well-established figure down there, not because of any particular talent, but because my teams kept putting me there.

But even if my teams weren’t playing, I was there.

I saw just about everything over a span of a couple of decades.

I saw OSSAA directors come and go, one of whom chewed me out because I didn’t tell him he had a bracket wrong when presenting it to the coaches on a Sunday meeting at the arena.

I saw buzzer beaters. I saw blowouts. I ate tons of bad food. I had soda bottles fly over my head and onto the court. I saw blood. I saw cats. I saw the roof leak. I saw the lights go out. I felt the temperature rise when the old lights fired up. I saw dogpiles galore. I saw heartache. I saw tears. I saw sobs. I saw triumph. I saw tragedy. I saw death there once, way up in the stands. I’ve seen just about everything there.

I saw Rotnei and Keiton and Blake. I was there the night the Riverside and Sequoyah-Tahlequah fans packed the place. I saw amazing individual performances and I saw the epitome of teamwork get it done. I saw a team score three points in the second half and still win a state championship. I saw a team score 80 and lose one.

I saw cousins win state championships. I saw cousins lose in the state title game.

I’ve been there so much and for so long that when Chris Wilfong put together the state tournament program for the 2018 edition, he asked me to write about the craziest day in the arena’s history…championship Saturday in 2008. Wilfong, who lives in Kingfisher, is now the premier historian for high school sports in Oklahoma and now has the pleasure of sitting courtside along with his wife Ellen documenting just about anything and everything that happens at the state tournament (follow their socials for IWasAtTheGame).

My story appeared in that 2018 edition. Then, before this last year at The Big House, Wilfong asked if he could re-run the story in this year’s programs.

I’ve been doing it for so long…that I’d already forgotten I’d written the original story.

Of course, I said, so in this year’s program, the last dance at The Big House, was a story written by yours truly.

•••

In 2014, Heath Ritchie and I decided we’d try something new with coverage. We had this fantastic idea to get video highlights of all the state games and package them together with interviews of coaches and players.

We would call it “Big House Live” and we did in fact go live two and three times a day each day from inside the Big House. We live streamed previews of the upcoming games for our first show of the day, then later had highlights and interviews, some of which were pre-recorded and some of which happened live on the air.

I was the host of the show and we were stationed down at the north end of the arena (which opens up to the other State Fairgrounds barns). They literally set up cattle panels for us to mark off our area.

We did that for a few years. We had no true experience in such a production going into it, but we somehow pulled it off. I’m still not sure how.

We ended up capturing a lot of great moments, getting some incredible interviews and made a lot of great memories.

After that, with Skordle, I started doing post-game interviews with championship coaches and players.

That also went on for a few years and we captured a lot of great sound bites from people who had just realized a major dream.

My career covering state started with me using a black and white film camera and a notebook. Then I moved to a digital camera. Then I was writing for a website. Then I was live streaming a studio show and then recording interviews to be forever documented in the internet world.

The last few years, I’ve rarely had to worry about photos myself. Guys like Chris Simon and Russell Stitt themselves spent countless hours in the arena capturing those moments of our local teams and even Kaitlin St. Cyr has somehow managed to smuggle a pass and made herself a well-known commodity on press row.

•••

I couldn’t begin to document all my memories from The Big House. It would literally be a book and, well, we don’t have space for a book on these pages.

I’m in the club of sad to see the place go, but also very aware that it’s time for a new arena (which is still being built right next door).

The Big House has an aura. There’s just something about it that you can’t put your finger on. It has the ability to provide a big-game atmosphere quite unlike any other gym in the state. It’s just special.

But it’s also dirty. The locker rooms are terrible. It smells at times. There’s a certain particulate in the air that seems to make some people sick (who knows, maybe it’s the asbestos).

Simply put, it’s a dump, but it’s our dump and we love it.

Someone else had the perfect description and I wish I would have noted who wrote it when I read it.

TheBigHouseis“well-seasoned.”

That it is.

I love it. I loved it when my teams were hoisting gold balls. I loved it when I was hating sitting there for the 14th straight hour of the day.

But it’s time for it to go and I’m OK with that.

•••

The second-to-last week of The Big House was one of the most grueling in my career.

I had games at 9 a.m. and 7:30 p.m. on that Tuesday, then again at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday. On Thursday, it was back at 9 a.m. and then to Stroud for a 2:30 game. On Friday, we had a morning game at the arena, then back to Stroud for a 6 p.m. game, then back to the arena for the 9 p.m. tip. Saturday saw a 6 p.m. game at Stroud and then break several traffic laws in the rain to make it back to the arena for the second half of Okarche wrapping up its 32-0 season.

I was toast, but I loved it. That last week of The Big House was my most special moment and, like I said, I didn’t even have a team in the finals.

It was last Wednesday, the Class 4A quarterfinals.

The Kingfisher Lady Jackets were making their 28th appearance at the state tournament.

This one, however, was different.

My daughter, Maya, was on this team.

Some 11 years after she was sitting on my lap and telling me about her gymnastics class or how much she loved ice cream, I was sitting on the edge of my seat as she got to play at The Big House in its final year.

I pride myself on being emotionless sitting courtside, but I won’t lie. I did have a tear well up when she got into the game.

My daughter had become part of the history of the place that had become so special to me.

It’s a lasting memory. Kingfisher’s dream ended that night. Kingfisher lost and the tournament moved on.

She did get to make one more trek onto the court as the Lady Jackets were presented the academic state championship.

As the final game was being played that evening, I coaxed Kaitlin into taking another picture of Maya and I.

I wanted it to be back in that north corner of the arena where we sat some 11 years prior.

I didn’t want to re-create the photo because Lord knows I can’t hold her up like that anymore and Lord knows she wouldn’t want me to.

But I wanted something similar and I got it.

Same two people. Same area of the arena. 11 years later.

Like The Big House, I’m much more…ahem… well-seasoned than I was 11 years ago.

Maya has blossomed from a vibrant child into a beautiful young lady who makes me proud in one form or another everyday.

Maya and Julie joined me for a few hours that last day at The Big House. We watched basketball. Ate some bad food. We enjoyed each other and soaked in what State Fair Arena had to offer.

One last time. I was there…this time with my two favorite people in one of my favorite places in the world.

Thanks, Big House. Thank you for everything.