Hip Deep In Hoops

Hoopfest

At the lemonade stand near the fountain in Riverfront Park they were having to refill the enormous plexiglass vat of iced strawberry lemonade at least every hour. The people just kept coming, somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000, players and spectators. They were dribbling, or spectating, or gleaming with sweat, or reveling, or calling fouls on each other, or drinking all manner of cold fluids and searching for any corner of shade to take shelter from a sun unguarded by clouds.

Spokane’s Hoopfest is now in its nineteenth year and, with apologies to Bloomsday, it has become the quintessential community event, alive with people of all colors and ages, hoop dreamers and, as one jersey label put it, “dream crushers.” All of it compacted so tightly that to get from one place to another is to walk and slide and rub shoulders with legions of circulating fans, passing one unfolding basketball drama after another.

The preposterous sight of backboards stretching to the horizon makes you wonder if you’re hallucinating. Only it’s real, and most likely you’ll wake up Monday with the sunburn to show for it.

Notwithstanding the legions of spectators, not everything that happens at Hoopfest gets properly entered into the record books. Bt at 12:32 p.m. on Saturday, we saw our chief catalyst guy, Breean Beggs, nail a 22-footer just as his Envision Spokane team started their second game, in the winner’s bracket, no less. It was definitely a Hoopfest record for the quickest, nothing but net, street ball bonus bomb hoisted by a right handed litigator in a men’s over forty bracket. Or at least it really seemed that way at the time.

Posted June 29th