This is a story about my wife, one of her distant relatives and a basketball that found its way home.
It began on the night of Jan. 21 at the U.S. Cellular Arena where the Milwaukee Hoopfest 2008 was being held to honor Martin Luther King Jr's birthday and his dream of racial harmony. Whitefish Bay Dominican had just finished beating village rival Bay in the final game of the evening and after some fine interviews with the likes of Dominican's Paul Wollersheim and Kwamain Mitchell and Bay's Dave Shaw I trudged out to my car parked next to Major Goolsby's and was pleased to see I would have a clear line into traffic on this snowy night as no cars were parked in front of or behind me.
I warmed up the car and brushed off the snow, but just as I was walking around the front to pop into my rapidly warming vehicle, I saw a very curious thing: a basketball, a very fine, deep-grooved, well-worn but extremely functional ball sitting propped up in the snow right in front of my grille. Seeing no one around and knowing that the doors to the Arena would by now be locked I chuckled and threw it into the backseat. Who it belonged to it seemed, was a mystery.
My hoops fan wife Cathy Markwiese was pleased but puzzled at my unusual present as I stomped the snow from my boots and placed my notebooks down on our cluttered kitchen counter. I tried to spin the ball on my finger but just as I had the couple of hundred or so times I've tried that trick in the past, I failed, with the ball bouncing its way towards the refrigerator to be forgotten as a mere trinket, a bit of swag. I told the story to the rest of the sports staff the next day and quick laughs and puzzlement ensued.
Flash forward to Jan. 29, the night of howling winds but not quite the blizzard the Doppler-enhanced weather gurus on TV had forecast. Cathy's hoops affection is channeled through a marvelously simple and pure adoration of all things Marquette. She's been a passionate season ticketholder for many years (we even drove to New Orleans five years ago for the Final Four) but this night with South Florida in town, she was feeling so poorly that she gave away the tickets at work and bundled herself under blankets on the couch to watch the game on TV.
By this time the basketball had migrated to the living room where I was idly twirling it while sitting on my end of the couch. If I hit a lamp with it I would be in deeper trouble than a Tom Crean disciple who didn't hustle for a rebound. In my idle revelry, I paused, noting some faint writing on the ball across a seam that I hadn't seen before. I turned on the overhead lamp, looked carefully again and then shook my head, thinking I was hallucinating. I asked Cathy if she had written anything on the ball since I brought it home and she told me she had not. That's when I gave it to her, told her to look closely and then asked her if I were nuts. After several long moments, her words were along the lines of "Oh My God!".
For on the ball, was scrawled the name "Johnny Markwiese" plus a phone number. Seeing as there are only a few Markwieses listed in the vast metropolitan phonebook, this either had to be a one-in-a-million shot or something very cosmic and strange. Cathy mentioned that she had a distant cousin named Dave Markwiese who was a licensed WIAA official, maybe Johnny was his son. I checked the hard-to-read number on the ball, looked in the phone book and sure enough they matched. It was a Whitefish Bay area exchange.
Life's joys come in the small things, the little surprises that jolt you out from under the covers of dull reality and what ensued was just one of those moments. I spoke briefly with Dave's wife and she enthusiastically put me on the line with him. I told him I had a ball and where I had found it. He almost howled for joy because his son John's seventh grade Whitefish Bay boys basketball team had lost just such a ball. It turned out that they had been at that same Bay-Dominican contest (Dave is an assistant coach for the seventh grade team) to support the Blue Duke varsity in a losing cause. It was only when they got home that they realized that in the jumble of putting stuff into the back of the car, that the ball must have been jostled and fallen out onto the street, probably looking for a mean playground game to get into.
Dave and I just laughed at the serendipity of the moment and fell into easy conversation. It turned out that the Blue Duke seventh graders had been having a very good season, that is until they lost that ball. They went into a tournament the weekend after I found it and promptly lost to two teams they had beaten before. Dave told the head coach "It was because we didn't have the ball." We quickly made arrangements for him to stop by and pick it up the following day and then I gave the phone to Cathy.
It turns out that they are indeed related. Cathy's grandfather and his grandfather were first cousins and the athletic lore is rich on both sides. Cathy's late grandfather played football for Marquette University in the early part of the 20th century when the Hilltoppers were a regional power. And it turns out Dave was in the same class at Whitefish Bay Dominican with the legendary Greg Dandridge, whose group was part of the fabulous Knight teams in the late 1970s that won a state-record 60-plus games in a row. Dave was a fair hoops player himself but had to content himself with CYO basketball after his sophomore year because he simply couldn't make the cut on the talented school squads his junior and senior years.
He had older brothers who were also standouts at Dominican. Cathy remembers back when she was in high school (about that same time) at Catholic Memorial taking ribbings from relatives of Dave's everytime Dominican beat Memorial in basketball.
Time passed quickly on the call and Cathy gave the phone back to me. It turned out Dave continued his love of hoops by becoming a highly-qualified high school official. He's worked many WIAA sectional tournaments and has had the privilege of working several state tournaments. I couldn't wait for us to meet.
The chill clear air of the afternoon of Jan. 30 let through my door a very pleased and gracious individual. Dave Markwiese is still tall and fit, very much a hoops man even as middle-age continues to creep forward. I handed him the ball and he just started to laugh again. He said his son was overjoyed when he told him that they would be getting it back. We then fell into hoops talk, chatting about coaches we both knew and programs that were on the rise and those that were on the fall. He was endlessly appreciative and seemed a natural storyteller. I was a little sorry to be losing a very nice souvenir of my 25 years experience in the reporting game but was profoundly happy to see it get back to its proper owners.
I know Dave will spread this story far and wide and he will probably be greeted with hoots of disbelief. As a better writer than me said long ago: "Truth so strange, it has to be fiction."
But just to verify my half of the truth, I took a picture of him and the ball on my digital camera just before he left. We laughed again and exchanged a hearty handshake, vowing to look for each other at future games. He said he would also like to catch up a little more with Cathy and exchange some more Markwiese family history. I closed by telling him I hope the ball would bring the team good fortune.
He said he was certain of it. The team has another tournament in Sussex this weekend and there was no doubt in my mind that the ball was going to be carefully stored and handled because it still has a lot more wins to author and a lot more stories to tell.
