Hall of memories

 Funny, sometimes, how a name will take you right back. All of a sudden you're no longer 70 years old, and you don't creak when you walk. All your joints are well-oiled. And the warranty on your various mechanics of nature has years to run yet.

Which is to say, I was looking at the list of 2025 Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame inductees the other day, and saw Jerry Bomholt's name on it.

Bunch of others, too, all of them firing little back-in-the-day synapses. Jay Edwards, who should have been in a long time ago except, apparently, for people who couldn't get past the missteps of his youth (and we all make them). Rick Fox, who went from Warsaw High to North Carolina to the NBA to Hollywood.  

And more: Cliff Hawkins, who I got to know as Luke Recker's high school coach at DeKalb. Marty Johnson, who coached rival East Noble, and who I got to know as a young coach at Pendleton Heights with a wry sense of humor and a gift for deflating the pompous -- including himself. 

And then there was Jerry Bomholt.

Who I still see, for some reason, kneeling on some sideline with his head down. His hand is on his forehead, shielding his eyes. An invisible weight seems to press down on him, and he looks  impossibly young -- even younger, perhaps, than the 26 years he was lugging around at the time.

I can't say for sure if this is a photo I'm remembering, or if such a photo even exists. I'm thinking it must, because the image is so clear in my mind. But 45 years have passed since that time, and the years are vandals and thieves, defacing what they don't outright steal.

What I do know is this: Whatever invisible weight I imagined Jerry Bomholt carrying in the late winter of 1980 was very real.

He was the assistant basketball coach at Anderson Highland High School at the time, a young kid learning his craft from one of the masters, an intensely driven  zone defense wizard named Bob Fuller. The night they rolled into tiny Lapel to take on Dally Hunter's Bulldogs, the Scots were undefeated. Fuller had been battling a heavy chest cold all week, but, being Fuller, insisted he could soldier on.

And he did. For one half.

At halftime, with the Scots leading big, his soldiering on ended in full cardiac arrest. He was rushed out of the gym by emergency personnel, and died later that night.

That left Jerry Bomholt, all of 26, to do the impossible: Soldier on.

And he did.

To this day, I don't know how he did it. Fuller's loss should have destroyed Highland's season, but somehow the kid held it together. And Highland's season was not destroyed, but merely re-defined.

The Scots, see, went on to win their first game after Fuller's death.  Then they won another. Then they won another and another, and pretty soon they were heading into the meatgrinder Anderson sectional still undefeated, and ranked No. 1 in the state.

And then they won the sectional, too.

Exhausted emotionally and physically, the Scots lost the next week at the regional. But the kid coach was on his way, having survived an inaugural stint as a head coach that almost surely was unlike any other.

And now it is all these years later, and here is Jerry Bomholt's name on the list of 2025 Indiana Hall of Fame inductees.

The accompanying bio says he retired this year after coaching 44 seasons at nine schools, compiling a 602-393 record. His teams won 20 conference championships and 13 sectionals, and, in 1998, his Southwestern (Hanover) team was the Class 2A state runnerup in the first year of class basketball in Indiana.

But that is not what I saw, of course, when I saw his name.

What I saw was a newby coach, impossibly young, kneeling with his hand over his eyes. Carrying an impossible weight. And somehow not buckling beneath it.