I don’t know how many times I’ve fallen. Two? Twenty? But this time I’m lying face down in Victor Creek. Groping for the far bank, I stumble to my feet and find myself smiling, strangely amused at my own plight. This is what I signed up for, the adventure . . . living life. Continue reading
A spectacular summer day was brewing in Twin Falls in June 2013 when I bought a video camera to film a musician friend during his live performances. He wasn’t playing that day, but I was anxious to try out my new camera, and looked around for something to shoot. I was near the I.B. Perrine Bridge and decided to hike over and take a look, as I’d heard about people jumping off the bridge for fun. Continue reading
Idaho is rodeo country from head to toe, and wherever you may be in the state this summer, odds are you’ll find ridin’ and ropin’ not far away. A great spectator sport, rodeo also has long been an attraction for photographers, as our cover photo this month attests. Continue reading
At mile sixteen, I felt as though I had officially been adopted by the thirty-eight-year-old man in a blue shirt and black running shorts just a few steps ahead of me. Kyle Fulmer was running strong. I was running strong too, but I was running faster than usual to keep up with Kyle. Continue reading
If you happen to be an Idaho sports history junkie with a penchant for stories of big-name athletes who have competed in the Gem State, or if you’re just in the mood for some charmingly obscure sports anecdotes, Myron Finkbeiner’s The Cornerstones of Idaho Sports (Resilient Publishing, 2014) should make your must-read list.
Finkbeiner, a longtime coach and founder of the Boise-based World Sports Humanitarian Hall of Fame, did his research. I found myself chuckling quietly while reading Chapter 26, “Outlaw Basketball, City Basketball in the 1940s.” As the author notes, it isn’t about prison basketball leagues, but about an oddity of small Idaho towns that happened well before my time. I began a local sports-writing career in Nampa in 1979, but I’d never heard of outlaw basketball. I won’t spoil that story for you, though. Continue reading
What in the world am I doing? Am I crazy? Did you hear that smack? Am I hurt? Is this a midlife crisis? Such questions crash through my mind as I lie loose-limbed on my back looking at the metal-beamed ceiling above me through a metal-barred cage across my face.
The cage is the front of my hockey helmet. The ceiling is the cover over the ice rink in Idaho Falls. I’m back-bound because a new skater who doesn’t know how to stop just took me out from behind. I dropped as quickly as an icicle unhinged from a roof’s raingutter.
It’s week one of hockey season for the Idaho Falls Youth Hockey Association. Dozens of chilly-faced children are at the city rink for their first hockey lesson. They pile through the gate onto the ice like chips poured out of a bag. They sort themselves into a single layer and try to stand. They scramble for footing on finely-ground skate blades, find no steady stance, and pinwheel their limbs until they’re laid out on the ice again. Continue reading
On September 30, 1950, I was an eight-year-old University of Idaho football junkie, living in Lewiston, bleeding, bleeding Vandal silver and gold. September 30 was to be my day. There would be no bleeding whatsoever, only excitement. Five days earlier, Mom had told me I would be going with my father Stan to my first college game. Dad usually went with Bill, Curly, or Louie—sometimes all of them, sometimes only one or two—but today it was just me.
Television had not yet arrived in the Idaho Panhandle, so I listened to every Vandal game on the radio, and the next morning I read the recap in the Sunday paper. Bob Curtis was the voice of the Vandals, who I figured had announced and would announce every one of the team’s football games from the beginning of time until the end of the world. Through him I knew the Vandal colors, their fight song, their record, who coached, who played where and when. On this day, Idaho was to play Montana State University, a team we were on even terms with. Back then, the Vandals were members of the old Pacific Coast Conference. They played a full schedule in basketball, but in football they played only the teams from the Northwest, the two Washington schools and the two Oregon schools. Winning against the conference schools was tough to do, and I bled plenty, but against the Montana schools the odds were about fifty-fifty.
Mom spent most of Friday preparing food for Saturday. Southern fried chicken topped the menu, cooked the way only Mom knew, dipped in bread crumbs, flour, and egg, and then slowly fried and seasoned as the day moved along. At our house, fried chicken was always served with potato salad made of Idaho russets, free-range eggs, mayo, onion, greens, olives, pickles, and a dash of mustard. I knew this was where the phrase, “finger lickin’ good” must have originated. We ate plenty on Friday night, when the chicken was still warm. Early Saturday morning, Mom filled the cooler with ice, chicken, potato salad, beer, soft drinks, potato chips, dip, chocolate chip cookies, and some candy. And then it was nine o’clock. Continue reading
For me, nothing that summer was like the thrum of American Legion baseball. It was 1982. Fresh from college and pursuing a freelance sports journalism career on a diet of ramen noodles, store-bought pizza, and cheap beer, I spent a lot of my time at Caldwell’s Simplot Stadium, covering home games of the Silver Streaks Legion team for the Idaho Press-Tribune.
Beyond the stadium’s business-billboard fences, the summer scene was defined by railroad tracks and the Caldwell Night Rodeo. Sometimes during those lazy evening innings, trains would traverse the tracks, slipping through the season’s high desert heat, bound for somewhere in America. Baseball is America. So that was perfect. That was my backdrop for watching baseball in Caldwell.
At Simplot Stadium I first met William Bryan “Pat” O’Connor, the lightly redheaded, pot-bellied, and immensely popular guru of the local baseball scene. Everyone called him Pat. A Caldwell native and seemingly omnipresent fixture at sporting events, Pat was a professional baseball scout in those days, and onetime general manager of the Chicago Cubs’ Caldwell-based minor league affiliate. He also owned a local sporting goods store.
He had graduated from The College of Idaho some five decades earlier, and he asked what my major had been in college. I told him English.
“An English major!” he exclaimed, in mock excitement. He said when he was in college, an English major had become romantically involved with his girlfriend and had replaced Pat in her affections. From then on, he called me “the English major.” I took it as his way of being friendly. Continue reading
When Jimmy Farris was in the fifth grade in the mill town of Lewiston, which has a population of about 32,000 strung along a stretch of Snake River slackwater, his teacher provided each student with a sheet of paper displaying an empty picture frame. The kids were instructed to envision and illustrate their future within it.
“I drew a stick figure of a football player,” Jimmy told me. “I believe it was Lawrence Taylor. I believed that in ten or fifteen years, I would be a linebacker for the New York Giants. So when I look back, I say, ‘Wow, this was a lifelong dream.’”
I first met Jimmy in 2000, shortly after my arrival in Missoula to begin working as a sports beat writer at a local newspaper. One of my first stories was his game-winning catch in the semi-finals of the Division I-AA national championships for the University of Montana, where he had accepted a football scholarship. His grab catapulted the Grizzlies into the national championship game, and the celebration reverberated throughout the city. I remember a group of college kids spray painted, “Who Let Jimmy Farris Out?” on the front door of one of the rentals next door to me. Jimmy went on to become a Division I-AA All-American at wide receiver.
Missoula and Lewiston are separated by one of the slowest, most decelerated four-hour driving stretches in the United States. Since the Lewiston Tribune doesn’t cover western Montana and the Grizzlies’ games aren’t televised in Idaho, the people of Lewiston were surprised when the undrafted Farris signed a free-agent contract in the National Football League. He was invited to attend the San Francisco 49er’s pre-season camp for the longest of shots of making the roster of an NFL team.
“Grizzly fans saw me play for the last five years, and they expected me to get a real legitimate shot. The people in Lewiston were more surprised that I’d made it. The reaction was, ‘Wow, really?’ A lot of people in Montana were more like, ‘Danged right he made it.’”
Nobody outside his family and closest friends in Lewiston, or his fans in Missoula, figured Jimmy had a shot at making the San Francisco 49ers’ final cut. Well, nobody except for Jimmy. His stay was brief. But being released by the 49ers turned into a stroke of good fortune. During the playoffs a few months later, he signed with the Tom Brady-led 2001 New England Patriots, and his rookie campaign ended with a Super Bowl XXXVI championship ring.
One year earlier, Jimmy had been sitting in his apartment in Missoula wondering if he was ever going to make it to the NFL.
His wildly ambitious aspirations had been nurtured early by his hardworking parents in Lewiston. “There is no question about it, I have a pair of really good parents,” said Jimmy, who is now thirty-five. “I’ve kind of lived the American Dream from the very beginning. And a lot of that is because I’ve had a strong sense of family, a strong support system, and a strong community in Lewiston.”
Sharon and Bob Farris have been married for forty years. Bob’s background is in education. He served as a teacher, principal and superintendent for three decades. Jimmy, the youngest of the couple’s five children—three boys and two girls—was born on April 13, 1978.
“My dad was always right there,” said Jimmy. “From a young age, I appreciated the influences of my teachers and coaches. And it’s amazing that growing up in a small town, I was afforded every benefit of having great people who molded and shaped me.”
One of his earliest memories is of Sharon instructing tap and jazz dance classes out of a makeshift studio in the basement level of the family home. Bob laid down a hardwood floor and Sharon tutored until she settled into a lengthy career at a large health insurance company.
Jimmy’s parents did their best to provide their tightly-knit brood with clothing, food, and, whenever possible, the extras, like cleats and basketball shoes.
“It was definitely a challenge to raise five kids on a teacher’s salary,” Jimmy told me. “There were times when Grandma would go down to the community center to pick up our cheese, peanut butter, and powdered milk. It was memorable seeing both of my parents doing everything they could do to provide what we needed. Still, there was a need for assistance.”
Jimmy’s life has been a slugfest from the opening bell. At Lewiston High School, he lettered in football, basketball, and track. In his sophomore year, he helped to lead the Lewiston Bengals to their first Idaho High School Football State Championship. As a senior, the team again made it all the way to the state championship game, and on the basketball team, he was named most valuable player.
“I would like to make sure people have the same opportunities that I’ve had,” he said. “There are a lot of people who don’t have a ladder to climb like I did. It’s hard to pull up your bootstraps when you don’t have any boots. I was able to accomplish some really cool things, and I overcame a lot of odds. But I also had so many things go right for me. Nick Menegas influenced me more than any other person ever has. He was the one who provided me with the work ethic necessary to go to the pros.”
Menegas coached the high school football team from 1986 to 2009. “I first remember Jimmy when he was a ball boy with my son, Michael, back in 1986,” he told me. “He has always felt like an adopted son, and he has been like a son from day one. It’s been great watching him evolve through the years, athletically, spiritually, and physically. One thing about Jimmy is that he is a self-made individual, and when I coached him, he never missed a weight session. He was dedicated in his physical and mental preparation, and he was always asking, ‘How can I get better?’”
Throughout his tenure as a coach, Menegas had heard many kids tell him that one day they would play in the National Football League. When Jimmy was in the ninth grade, before he had even played a single down, the youngster told his coach he had that very same plan.
“I believed him,” said Menegas. “The difference was the look in his eyes. It was a look that told me not to count him out of anything.”
Farris said that the Patriots 20-17 victory over the St. Louis Rams in the 2002 Super Bowl happened so fast it was all a bit of a haze. On February 3 that year, he stood on the sidelines of the New Orleans Superdome field, part of a dynasty-to-be team, full of emotion as he watched the lovely Mariah Carey sing the national anthem.
“We didn’t have the two weeks off before the Super Bowl that year,” he recalled. “I remember that we won the [conference] championship game, we flew home, and the next morning, we watched some film. We then flew to New Orleans, and immediately we were into Super Bowl week. I didn’t have time to do much of anything. I changed voice mail to something like, ‘If you are calling to say congrats on the Super Bowl, and if you are not a blood relative, and are calling for tickets, they are fifteen hundred bucks.’ I barely had time to talk to my parents.”
He spent six seasons in the NFL, including three with the Atlanta Falcons and two with the Washington Redskins. His family kept close tabs on his career. His mother Sharon even once called Atlanta Falcons’ head coach Jim L. Mora and pleaded with him to give her son more playing time. Continue reading
August 10th, 2003, dawned clear and beautiful, promising to be yet another of the many memorable days of that summer when the mercury inched into the nineties or beyond. From my supreme vantage point atop Sandpoint’s picturesque Long Bridge, I could feel the restless excitement of the swimmers on the beach below as we all awaited the beginning of the ninth annual Long Bridge Swim. Soon came the deep bellow of the air horn and over three hundred eager bodies surged into the chilly, but pristine, waters of Lake Pend Oreille. Not just another race, the event has become the Northwest’s premier open water swimming event, attracting participants from all over the western United States.
What makes this 1.7 mile swim so special? Several things. First and foremost is the attraction of Sandpoint itself. Long famous for its lakes, mountains and rivers, this little town of seven thousand also has established itself in the fields of music, art, and culture. But what really makes the Long Bridge Swim unique is the Long Bridge itself—actually two bridges side by side, one for traffic and one a pedestrian/bike path—which offers unsurpassed spectator viewing. After all, how many open water swimming events are there where you can stroll along with the swimmers every step of the way? And what a stroll it is.
Bridges have been a part of Sandpoint’s history for over 120 years, since the Northern Pacific Railroad built the first railroad bridge in 1882, connecting the area to the East and establishing Sandpoint as a bustling mining and timber town. And while mining and timber no longer claim as big a piece of the economic pie, there are still plenty of bridges. In fact, no matter from which direction you approach Sandpoint, you have to cross a bridge.
Anyone who enters Sandpoint from the south on Highway 95 will cross Lake Pend Oreille on the Long Bridge. The view alone has convinced many individuals to make this beautiful North Idaho community their home. And no wonder, with the lake’s clean waters beneath you and the jagged Cabinet Mountains rising against the sky to the east, it’s a view not quickly forgotten. To the north and west, rising sharply behind the town, is the Selkirk Mountain range with backcountry wilderness stretching some sixty miles to the Canadian border. Continue reading
