Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Stasco and Barb Fleek and niece Marie Matthews for a girls' weekend out in Juneau the
last week of March.
Irene, Rose and Barb went to high school together in Haines and they remember listen-
ing to the Gold Medal tournament on the radio when they were kids. Like everyone else in
Alaska in those days, everyone in Southeast was broke. “Only the teams could afford to
go to Juneau for the tournament,” Irene says, “we couldn't even send the cheerleaders.”
Believe it or not, the Gold Medal basketball tournament is in it's fifty-sixth year. Please
note, that's two years longer than the NBA championship. When I say Alaskans are seri-
ous about their b-ball, give some weight to the word “serious.”
It isn't just about the game. It's about the culture, too.
On Friday I'm at breakfast at the Goldbelt Hotel with Eric McDowell, a classmate of
Irene's from Haines and a perennial if sporadic Gold Medal player. A thickset, not very
tall man with iron gray hair joins another table. He lays a black jacket on the chair next to
him, careful to fold it so the Gold Medal Hall of Fame ensignia shows. “That's Herbie
Didrickson,” Eric says, and he can't keep the awe out of his voice, but then I don't think
he's trying that hard. Herbie Didrickson was the very first inductee into the Gold Medal
Hall of Fame, to which six more will be added on Saturday, and is one of the original
Sitka ANB players. “When I was a kid I used to go down and watch them practice, those
guys were my heroes.”
Eric struggles to explain what basketball and the Gold Medal Tournament means to
Southeast. “It gives us such a sense of community. We all belong.” Look at what's
happened over the last sixty years, he says, the discrimination, the BIA schools. “The cul-
ture has had a tremendous influence on the playing,” which, he says, “is demonstrated in
the great passing game.”
Gold Medal basketball is town team basketball, teams fielded by individual towns to
play in the tournament. Gold Medal players are characterized by a lot of male pattern
balding, although women's teams now take to the tournament court, too. “Of course,” Eric
says, “there are different requirements for the different-size towns.” To compete on a Jun-
eau team, the players have to actually live in Juneau and have played on the team for the
full year. To compete on the Klawock team, anyone who's ever lived there is eligible, in-
cluding the six-foot-six guy who taught kindergarten there twenty years ago.
