Column: Here's to 1-2 punches - the good kind

I was talking with an acquaintance Wednesday and I mentioned that – again, I’m old – I was in attendance the last time Flathead High School won a boys’ basketball championship, in 1989.

I’d been thinking about it quite a bit lately, partly because I now work at the Daily Inter Lake and maybe because, well, there’s this place in Missoula called Red’s Bar.

“Home of the White Sox” it says on the outside, but on the inside there are dozens and dozens of football helmets from inside Montana and out, along with plenty of sports fans. Last time I was there, on the eve of the Western AA Divisionals, the bartender was a Missoula Sentinel assistant and threw out a topic for discussion:

Name the best 1-2 punch in Montana high school basketball history.

It got lively. Somebody nominated Hellgate’s JR Camel and Ryan Dick, another patron mentioned Billings West’s John Lazosky and Pete Conway and then somebody older than even me nominated a duo from Anaconda Central, which hasn’t been a school for decades.

And I remembered Mark Gilman and Eric Hilleboe for that 1989 Flathead team being a great, great 1-2 punch. Gilman was a standout shooter and Hilleboe was impossible off the dribble. They gave the late Bill Epperly above-average size at guard.

“Too many horses for us,” Billings West coach Bill Ryan said, after his team trailed wire-to-wire in the semifinals. The Braves then knocked off unbeaten Butte 53-50 in the championship.

That’s just part of the reason. That 1988-89 season I was at the Bozeman Chronicle and was allowed to see two state tournaments: The State A in Missoula and the AA in Billings. The A was a week earlier and when it was over Livingston had used a devastating 1-3-1 zone to win three games handily.

A week later I wondered how the Rangers would have fared at the AA, since they’d handled Bozeman twice and the Hawks ended up third in Billings.

But what I also will always remember is a game I saw in December 1988. Butte High was scrambling to make sure its students were inoculated for the measles – one had come down with the disease, reportedly after a visit to Kalispell, where there’d been an outbreak. Suddenly a lot of sporting events were up in the air.

Long story short I got a measles booster shot and covered a boys’ game between Bozeman and visiting Butte in a nearly empty gym.

So here we are. With COVID-19 looming the Big Sky Conference scrapped its spring championships Wednesday and we’re not sure if the MHSA has any chance of holding theirs.

Something you never should say: “I’ll never see that again.” Something else: “It can’t get any worse.”

I remember a reporter phrasing a question like that to Kansas City manager Bob Boone, back when the Royals were truly terrible nearly every year. “Well, skip, it can’t get any worse.”

Boone’s response: “Oh no – I never say that.”

This could get worse, and it probably will get darkest before the dawn. That’s the pessimist in me; we journalists can be a cynical lot.

But the optimist in me? He’s hoping to see some state track and field, and some Pioneer League baseball.

And he thinks Kelly Koontz and the Livingston Rangers would have given Hilleboe, Gilman and Co. a really good game in 1989.

Fritz Neighbor can be reached at 758-4463 or at fneighbor@dailyinterlake.com. You can follow him @Fritz_Neighbor on Twitter.