The Basketball Field of Dreams, Eric Kesler's Farm

If you're a certain age, and you played ball growing up, you have memories of playing in some unique places. Like maybe it was a dirt basketball court where the rim was bent one way, or at a wiffleball field where the fence to right field was way shorter so everybody tried to bat left handed. Maybe it was playing football in an old sandlot where if you got tackled in one corner of the field, you came up with 100 sticker burrs all over your body.

This is a story about a place like that. The kid wearing #2 in the picture is Drake Kesler. This story is about his dad and the court he built and the hundreds and hundreds of guys that played basketball there through the years.

Up until high school, before "real practice" started, me and my friends played ball almost everyday after school. We played every weekend. My friend Blaine Bruce was like a GM. He would get on the phone and call guys up, "we're playing at such and such tomorrow." The next day everybody would show up.

One weekend it would be wiffleball. The next it was football. We got in a groove for a while playing "ragball," which was this foam wiffleball bat and some kind of sponge ball. It really didn't matter what the game was. We would just all get together and play something.

Most of the time we played basketball somewhere. Our friend Randy Ulmer had a dunk goal. The Morley Park has two courts now, but back then there was only one. It was a small court, and one day Marcus Timmons dunked one so hard that he ripped the entire goal and backboard down. That's when Doyle Canady built a second court, a much bigger, nicer court.

But our favorite place to play basketball, without a doubt, was Eric Kesler's farm.

The court was actually a large concrete pad for parking and cleaning off farm equipment. At some point in his childhood - I never asked Erich when - he talked his dad into taking some pipe, some parts of irrigation or something, and turning it into two basketball goals. He hung a couple of backboards up with some nice breakaway rims.

Those breakaway rims were important, because neither goal was 10 foot. One goal was probably 9 foot 3 inches, the other goal was a couple inches higher. So you always wanted your team to be on the lower goal, because that meant more dunks. The court might have been 50 feet long. It was just big enough to run up and down, but not big enough that you'd ever get tired.

Several of us could grab the rim or dunk it on a 10 foot goal, so this place was like Dunk Ball Heaven.

We would show up on a Sunday afternoon, and cars would start pulling up. It was literally like "if you build it, they will come." Guys would show up from Oran, Sikeston, Richland, etc. They came from everywhere. Some played for the high school team. Some didn't. Some were still in school. Some had been out of school for several years. Some weekends there might be 10 guys out there, other weekends there was a deep line waiting to play.

Some weekends there was dirt and mud on the court, because again, it was for cleaning off farm equipment. We would just spray the mud off of the court, grab the squeegees, push the water off of the court, and turn on the shop fans. This is also what we did if it rained. Looking back it's kind of amazing the lengths we would go to just to play ball.

Since the court was a little smaller the max game was 4 on 4, and that was even a little bit crowded. The rules were simple. We played to 32. There weren't any threes. Winners stay on, losers go sit down and get in the back of the line.

The great thing about Kesler's, at least to me, was getting to prove myself against those older guys. The older guys from Scott Central that played out there had been on multiple state championship teams. They loved beating up on us younger kids and letting us know about it.

We had so many hilarious things that happened out there. Like the time my best friend Scooter couldn't make a layup - not one! - for any entire day. So we kept getting beat and having to sit down. I'm still a little mad at him for that.

There was the time it was wet and we were all slipping and sliding, all of us except Chad "complete stops" Griffin. There was Blaine and "those passes." (all my buddies reading those last two sentences are rolling in the floor laughing). There was "Shaq Neal," our name for Lad Neal, who was about 10 years older than all of us, and to us he was as big and strong as Shaq.

There were so many good memories.

My favorite memory, just for me, was a time one of my best friend's older brothers (a good player) told me "I'd love to buy you for your what you're worth and sell you for what you think you're worth." He was talking smack at me, telling me I wasn't nearly as good as I thought I was, treating me like a little brother. That's just what they did to us. He would make me mad, then buy me McDonald's later LOL.

The next trip down, I was coming up the left side, and he was the only one back. Still mad at him for what he just said, I just tomahawked one on him, dunked it as hard as I could, and asked him, "how much was that one worth?" My buddies loved it, like I "got a lick in" for all of us. All of the older guys let him hear about it, because how could he let one of the high school guys dunk on him?

He smiled at me, like "Good job, kid."

When I go back to Morley to see my mom, my kids and I go back to that court that Doyle Canady built all those years ago. There are no nets on the goals. The paint is faded. The fence is down. Every time we go, we're the only ones out there shooting. Kids just don't go out and "play together" the way they did years ago, and that's kind of sad.

When I look at that picture at the top of this article, the one of Drake, I wonder if he and his friends - who won two state championships together - ever played on his dad's court? I hope they did. I know me and my friends had so much fun out there. I have so many good memories of that place and getting to hang out with my buddies there, and I thank Eric Kesler for that.

If you have any stories about a place that you played at like Kesler's, and it doesn't have to be a basketball court, I'd love to hear it. Send me a message. Those are always cool stories.

Thanks for reading. #JWT