Tom Domer, Marion High School Class of 1954

I’m watching basketball for Tom this year.

Usually the NCAA tournament has to wind down to the final eight before I become interested, but Tom used to watch every game he could. He wasn’t a big fan of most sports on TV, but he loved college basketball.

So I’m watching as many games as I can, even though I know nothing about the teams. The team I root for usually loses.

Tom had a finer sense of the game than I do.  Every year about this time, when I knew he was watching, I sent him an email with my standard complaints.

The kids dribble too much, I wrote every year. They get into too much trouble by trying to dribble when they should be passing the ball.

And when they dribble, they palm the ball, turning it over in a way that was forbidden when Tom and I played. It was a form of double-dribblingthen.

The players travel, too, all the time, when they take those two steps and then hop before shooting, a move so blatantly illegal that it would have prompted a referee’s whistle in the old days.

The 3-point line is too close to the basket, I complained. If it had been there in our time, we would have made those shots all night long.

Tom allowed me these prejudices, but he didn’t share them. He was watching the game through entirely different eyes. He saw a hundred little things that I missed. He knew why coaches made the moves they did, spotted mental lapses by players, sensed when players were too tight, or too tired, knew when a referee blew a call.

AFTER TOM AND I grew up learning basketball on the playgrounds and driveways of Marion and then played on high school teams coached by Les Hipple, I went off to college and gave up sports.

Tom stayed in Marion, managed a shoe store and played in the rough-and-tumble industrial basketball league in Cedar Rapids, getting better every season, even making some tournament all-star teams.

Later, he moved to Texas and refereed high school basketball games. He closed up his jewelry store, grabbed a Whopper or burrito and drove through the night to towns all over the northwest corner of the state calling games for many seasons until his knees betrayed him and he had to hang up his whistle.

He worked hard in those dusty old gyms. He endured the anger of howling hometown crowds that wanted his hide after his last-quarter calls cost their teams a game. More than once he was escorted to his car for his own safety. I can’t remember how much he was paid, but the amount was pitiful considering the time he spent and the abuse he took.

But he loved the game, everything about it, being in the middle of it, the great, roaring noise of a packed gym, the blaring pep bands, coaches ranting on the sidelines, the smell of popcorn from the booster club refreshment stand in the hallway, little kids running onto the court at halftime, the tension on the faces of sweat-soaked boys caught in a drum-tight contest.

He absorbed it all, and that, I think, was what he was watching and remembering when the NCAA tournament came around.

For me, the tournament is a reminder of our high school basketball days, including the freshman-sophomore team that Tom and I played on. We were undefeated, 18–0, won the conference championship and went on to two
successful years on the varsity.

We became friends as toddlers and grew up as teammates, forming a bond that spanned great distances and lasted a lifetime. Then Tom Domer died in July. So I’m watching the games for him this year.

(Dan Kellams is a 1954 Marion High School graduate and the author of “A Coach’s Life: Les Hipple and the Marion Indians”.)