Tag: Indiana

The Real “Cheese” Behind the Fictional One: Covington High School Coach and Olivet Nazarene University grad, Kent Chezem

Looks like Hoosiers Jimmy Chitwood?

In my novel Love on the Big Screen, the protagonist Zuke has a sort of love rival named “Cheese.”  It’s a name I took from real life from my friend and former teammate, Kent Chezem.  I remember that one of the coaches at Olivet Nazarene University where we were teammates used to always call Kent by the name “Jimmy,” as in Jimmy Chitwood from Hoosiers.  Kent was an excellent basketball player, the all time leader at Olivet Nazarene University in assists, and now he’s the head basketball coach at Covington High School in Indiana.  Kent has been a head coach in Indiana for seventeen years and last season he recently won his 200th game.  I asked him the following question about an event that I once witnessed when we were teammates: 

When I was on the Olivet Nazarene University basketball team, you became the all-time leader for assists.  I remember that when you broke the record, lots of students threw cheese slices onto the floor.  Was that the first time the students did that?   

Bill Torgerson Kent Chezem Love on the Big Screen Covington High School St. John's University Frankfort, Indiana Jimmy Chitwood
Looks like a young Coach Chezem?

No, I guess it actually started my freshman year before you arrived at Olivet.  As an ONU grad, you know that the best and worst part of being a freshman is living in Chapman Hall.  As much as I hated living in that old run down dorm, some of my fondest college memories originate from there.  Some of my friends in Chapman decided it would be cool to start throwing cheese when I was introduced during starting line-ups.  They stole the idea from Cleveland State whose student section did the same thing for their starting point guard:  Kenny “Mouse” McFadden.  Mouse McFadden had become famous for leading Cleveland State in an upset win over Indiana University and Bobby Knight in the NCAA tournament back in the 80’s.

What started out as a nice and simple gesture by a group of my friends (about 25 Kraft singles) grew quickly into a campus-wide fad.  Within a few games, it seemed like everyone was bringing cheese to throw during introductions.  By the end of the season, each home game started out with a “delay” prior to tipoff so that Godam Sultan (Birchard custodian) could clear the floor of cheese.  As much as I enjoyed the attention, the mess on the floor was really starting to become a problem.  At the end of the season, the conference instituted a rule declaring that a technical foul would be called at all future games where fans threw objects on the floor before or during the game.  That was the last of the cheese to be thrown in Birchard, at least that’s what I thought.

Bill Torgerson Kent Chezem Love on the Big Screen Covington High School St. John's University Frankfort, Indiana Jimmy Chitwood
Celebratory Confetti or Dangerous Projectile?

My buddies did bring back the Kraft singles one last time my senior year.   They knew that I was very close to breaking the school’s career assist record, so they came to the game armed with a “Cheese-O-Meter” to countdown the assists, and a whole bunch of Kraft singles.  After my roommate Mike Carr missed 3 consecutive chances to give me the record, David Grasse finally hit a jumper to push me over the top.  The student section let ’em fly.  As  expected, the referees did call a technical foul, but luckily we were well enough ahead that it didn’t have any bearing on the game.  I still remember having a conversation with one of the opposing players during the technical free throws about why our students were throwing cheese onto the floor during a basketball game.

Olivet was a pretty conservative place.  Am I right to remember that you got in a lot of trouble for painting a speed bump to make it look like a candy cane? 

Bill Torgerson Kent Chezem Love on the Big Screen Covington High School St. John's University Frankfort, Indiana Jimmy Chitwood
Candy Cane Speed Bump Prank?

Painting candy stripes on a speed bump would have been a funny prank, but you are giving me credit for something I didn’t do.  I am guilty of setting off fireworks in the quad, dropping water balloons out of dorm rooms, and among other things…dressing up in a gorilla costume and stealing candy from the girls’ dorms at Halloween.  I even remember a night that started with a bunch of my buddies, a few dozen water balloons, and a pickup truck.  It ended up with us getting hauled in to jail and Grover Brooks (Dean of Students) picking us up from the police station at 4 am!  That fiasco got me kicked out of the honors dorm for the remainder of the semester, but it was one of the funniest nights of my life.  Luckily nobody got hurt and nobody was formally charged with a crime.


If You’ve Moved Around A lot, How Do You Know Where You’re From?

Whether it was a house, an apartment, or a condo, the building I’ve called home in my life has changed twenty-three times in my thirty-nine years.  Last summer, for the first time in twelve years, I didn’t move.  Sometimes I moved twice in one year. Given all that, how do I know where I’m from?  What do I call my hometown?

Kayaking on the Tippy with (not pictured) Bassmaster Kevin "Herb" Larkin

For me, these questions weren’t so hard to figure out.  I just “felt” their answers, a state-of-knowing by feeling that I usually try to avoid.  For about ten years I let my feelings be the primary rudder that directed my life and they took me into some pretty treacherous waters.  “Do I feel as if I love her?”  Now I try to let my thinking tell me what to do, and I find that if I just do what I know to do, my feelings will often fill in the sails of action behind me.

But in the case of “where I’m from,” I know the answer in my gut:  Winamac, Indiana.  Although it’s not where I was born or where I went to school through the seventh grade, it’s the place where I graduated from high school and the town where both of my parents grew up.  Winamac is a small town set up high on the bank of a horseshoe bend of the Tippecanoe River.  I remember once when I went away to college and brought a friend home for a long weekend. He asked, “When are we going to get on the interstate?”  Travelling from Kankakee, Illinois to Winamac there are only two-lane roads and lots of corn fields.  We weren’t getting on any interstate.

In 1984 I was fourteen years old and burning to see Eddie Murphy’s Beverley Hills Cop.  All my friends were going; they had permission from their parents to see the rated “R” rated flick, but my mom told me I wasn’t old enough to go.  I hatched a plan for circumventing my mother, and my first mistake was that I stopped pestering her to go.  Like my own daughter now, when I wanted something, my primary plan was to beat my mother into submission with countless repeated requests.  Letting it go to fast probably sparked her suspicion that something was up.  My buddies were going to an afternoon matinée and so when show time came around, I told my mom I was doing something like going down to the park to shoot hoops.  She said fine and I was a bit surprised.

The Isis Theater Where My Mother Cut Me Off At the Pass Twenty-Six Years Ago

I went straight to the Isis Theater, but when I got to the ticket counter—facing an attendant for all I knew I’d never seen before—I was denied admission. Although I don’t remember anything about the attendant, I do remember what he or she said:  “Your mom called and told us not to let you in.”  Mom was smart:  who cares about where Bill is; I know where he wants to go.

So Winamac—where the Pizza King is tasty, the bike paths are flat, and a nice day is best spent on the Tippy—it’s the place where I say I’m from.  As for my oldest daughter—the child of a Midwesterner and a Southerner, born in Macon, Georgia; one-time resident of Queens and now living in Connecticut—I can’t imagine from where the little girl is going to say she’s from.  Us four Torgs, we were all born in a different state.

It’s easy for me to know where I’m from.  My parents mostly kept anchored in Winamac, so no matter how old I was—nineteen or thirty-nine—when I go visit them I am returning to the same place.  I’m certain not everyone has it this easy, and I wonder if the notion of a hometown is a problematic source of stress for some, if being from no place gives a person a different sense of identity, or if everyone has some way of figuring out where they are from.

Great New Bike Path in Winamac

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Love in the Third Grade

Love at first sight?

Between the time I was in the third grade and the time I was around thirty years old, I was the sort of person who could look across a room and think I just fell in love.  I didn’t feel this emotion was something that I could control at all, and I imagine that there are many of you reading this who think love is something that just happens; it’s an emotion you don’t have any ability to steer.  Certainly there are people who think they fall in love each time they see someone who physically catches their eye, but I wasn’t like that as a boy into my teenage and twenty-something self.  There could have been a cast of fifty beautiful and interesting women, and somehow I always managed to become secretly devoted to one.

Logansport's "Felix the Cat"

Let me jump back to third grade love:  my family moved from Logansport, Indiana—home of the Berries—to a house a mile outside of a town called Twelve Mile, so named for its relative distances from several other “bigger” towns.  Even in the third grade, being the new kid brought with it some love capital that could have been (but wasn’t) cashed in.  I fell for this girl I’ll call “Ali” right away, a pseudonym I choose after Elisabeth Shue’s character in the 1984 Karate Kid.   Something rare happened between Ali and me, and because I was just getting started with the whole business of “liking” people, I didn’t realize how rare it was.  Ali started sending me a lot of notes via that special delivery system of the artfully folded note that works its way to its intended recipient desk-to-desk, hand-by-hand across the classrooms of the world.  What was so rare about that?  Let me ask you another question as an answer:  How many of you have liked/loved someone who instantly liked/love you right back?

Elisabeth Shue as Ali in The Karate Kid

I recall Ali’s notes being of the will you be my boyfriend? / check “yes” or “no” variety.  So there I sat, in third grade love with Ali, receiving a note from her asking me to be her boyfriend.  So what did I do?  Red faced with shame—at being a coward?—I threw that note, along with the ten or so that followed, right into the garbage.  Even though the notes arrived most times in front of our whole class, I pretended as if I never received them.  Eventually, Ali stopped sending me love notes, and I vaguely remember still liking her as a seventh grader.  For at least four years, I secretly “loved” her, and I barely even spoke to her.  We may have traded very small talk a couple times in our lives, and each time I was horrendously nervous.  I always wondered if she even remembered sending me the notes, and now, looking back, I feel sure that she did.  She thought I’d rejected her, and I felt in love with her.  How does that work?

Before my eighth grade year, my family moved roughly twenty miles away to Winamac, and I still remember keeping track of Ali—of seeing her at various interschool athletic events—all the while wondering if my life would have been different if I’d only checked “yes.”  Why did it take me so long to try and love someone who would love me back?

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Image from Weddingbee