Tuesday, May 30, 2017

Remembering the good Gus stuff

THE OLDER WE get, the longer it takes to recover from another fantastic Gus Macker weekend. I think I slept for 11 hours last night .... Geesh.

As event manager for the national staff, my job is to basically deal with 2 percent of the people who cause 99 percent of the problems. Sure, I had my hands full a few times. But that stuff doesn't bother me - people are idiots no matter where you go and you just deal with it and move on. By the way, Washington Park looked amazing Sunday night after the Quincy Notre Dame football team came through and cleaned it up, like they do every year.

I choose to remember the good times and the many people who had a blast. And I always have one memory stick out.

This year it happened on Sunday afternoon at about 2 p.m. The Quincy Notre Dame girls soccer team won a state championship the night before, so they got the traditional firetruck ride through downtown. We stopped all our games on Maine Street and let the parade go through and gave them some major Macker and Quincy love.

Photo by Lisa Smith on facebook
Caption: Gus Macker champions....... again — with Anthony Fairlee, Donovan Prost and Jirehl Brock.
On the court near Fifth and Maine, Jirehl Brock and his team were playing in the championship game. Jirehl is going to be a junior at Quincy High School this fall. He is an amazing athlete - I had to politely tell him to quit dunking so he wouldn't bend the rim. And what a great kid, him and his three teammates. Their games drew big crowds and were a joy to watch.

So the QND girls rolled by his court, and sure enough, Jirehl and his teammates stood up and gave them a standing ovation, and everybody else around the court did, too.

My daughter was a QHS Blue Devil and I experienced the QND-QHS rivalry firsthand, and it is pretty intense. So I got goosebumps when seeing athletes from one school saluting another.

There's hope in this world after all, you know?


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