Published: March 09, 2008 11:38 pm            

The Off Season: Skinny little kid does all right for himself

TERRE HAUTE — When John Olsen called me late last spring, I politely tried to end our conversation.

He wasn’t selling insurance or vinyl siding; the man wanted me to edit his book.

Keep in mind that by mid-May, an English teacher is a person teetering on the brink of mental instability.

Call it term paper exhaustion, finals fatigue, worksheet weariness, any of a series of maladies only teachers can imagine. My strongest desire was to get my pasty flesh out into the sun, not sit hunkered over a desk with a red grading pen jammed into my calloused, claw-like fingers.

I told John that the last thing I wanted to do was edit a manuscript after I’d spent most of the past nine months reading my students’ writing, which to put it tenderly, isn’t always the most carefully written material.

But John is apparently a pretty good salesman — a trait that will come in handy now that the book is in print — so I relented.

All in all, it turned out to be a pretty interesting summer in the writing department.

Dr. John Olsen, 54, lives in Terre Haute and works for Covered Bridge Special Education District. By his own admission, he’s “not much of a writer.”

But I found John to be a pretty good storyteller, and his memoir, “Just a Little Bitty Skinny Kid, And how he played in the programs of Indiana’s all-time winningest high school and college basketball coaches,” is a real labor of love. The book — self-published locally through Tabco — is selling at Pacesetter Sports, Coaches’ Corner and Baesler’s Market for $15. John will mail you one for $18; he’ll take care of the sales tax in both instances.

It is true that John’s wife, Karen, and I worked diligently with him all summer on commas and semi-colons and run-on sentences, but one thing that he needed no help with was telling an interesting story about growing up in Jack Butcher’s basketball-crazy Loogootee in the late ’60s and early ’70s, then going on to a short, but inspired career playing in Bob Knight’s program at Indiana University.

The real catch here is that “Skinny Kid” really isn’t a basketball book at all, and that’s why I’d recommend it, not just because he says I’m “multi-talented” on the acknowledgments page.

“The book is a nostalgic, inspirational, true story about teams, teammates, and the development of potential in all children,” Olsen says. “I consider myself a private person, so it was a risk to put so many of my life’s most important experiences in print for other people to judge,” he added. For instance, John managed to work stories about athletic supporters, box turtles, whiffleball, baling hay, high jumping and hairless chests into the book without breaking a sweat.

Olsen hammers home the point over and over again in the book that he wasn’t exactly considered a rising star in the Lions’ program. Pine time played a real role in John’s career — even in grade school — so much, in fact, that he skipped playing basketball in his junior year to spend a season as the team’s manager and part-time practice meat. But handling clipboards, cleaning basketballs and washing towels was every bit as important to Olsen as precious playing time. As he put it: “I have kind of lived by the saying, ‘I will work hard and prepare, and when my chance comes, I will be ready.’”

That chance came in the post-season of his senior year. As a “deep sub,” Olsen was pushed into critical playing time when illness hit his team. Ultimately, his performances helped the Lions make it all the way to the championship game of the Evansville Semi-State tournament in 1971. Remember, those were non-class basketball days, too.

“I used my high school yearbook as my source for my career point total of 44 points (in “Skinny Kid),” Olsen says. “But I have recently been told by a more credible source that I only scored 40. So, my career was 10 percent less productive than I thought.”

After high school, John headed to IU and found himself murderously running stadium bleachers to make the cut for the Hoosiers’ freshman team. Despite a sparkling highlight of seeing two of his practice shots rejected by all-American Steve Downing, Olsen eventually walked away from college basketball to concentrate on academics, and, all those years later, he’s now written a book about his experiences as a hard-working hustler who still believes that there’s a whole lot more to learn from the game than shooting and dribbling.

“It’s so much fun and gratifying to hear that people connect with the stories [in the book] in so many ways, wanting to tell their kids, and grandkids about the good-old days …” John says.

If you’re interested in meeting him, the author will be at Baesler’s this Saturday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., signing copies of “Skinny Kid.” But I’ll warn you about one thing: Whenever he brought Karen up to my place on a quick trip to hand his re-writes to me, she usually brought a book to read knowing that when John got started talking about basketball, she’d have a lot of time on her hands.

Take my word for it, reading John’s book is worth the time and money. But if you find a comma or two out of place, please, by all means, blame him.

Mike Lunsford can be reached at hickory913@aol.com, or through regular mail c/o the Tribune-Star, P.O. Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808. Email John Olsen at olsendrj@aol.com or write him at 118 Marigold Drive, Terre Haute, IN 47803.

        

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