Excerpt: "I saw some ball over there you'd never believe."
Excerpt from "I Said Bang!: A History of the Dirt Bowl, the Crown Jewel of the Most Basketball-Obsessed City in America"
Once we got to twelve teams, we saw that this was going to grow even bigger, because we started drawing crowds. The guys who were playing were telling five or six friends, and then they were telling five or six friends, and before we knew it, the park was filling up. Janis and I thought, “We got to name this thing, we got to get this thing on the road. We think this might be something we can do all summer long.” The Algonquin Park basketball court was only a slab of asphalt surrounded by dirt, so we thought, “Why don’t we just call it the Dirt Bowl?” And it started from there.
… In 1969, they sold hot dogs and hamburgers and pop at the pool. Most people would bring their beer in their cooler, and they’d bring a blanket and sandwiches. They’d let the kids run to the pool, and then sit down and watch the game. Farther on over, you had a softball game but most people were over by the basketball court. Algonquin was maybe three square blocks, and it couldn’t hold the capacity that the Dirt Bowl was bringing. It was just tremendous.
… I saw some ball over there you’d never believe. The guys played their hearts out. Pro players who had roots in Kentucky or who played on the Kentucky Colonels ABA team came down and played. Top college players from all over the state came to Algonquin Park to play in the Dirt Bowl. And then there were a lot of very talented players who were still a little raw. A lot of us hadn’t even gone to college to learn how to play organized ball. We were learning as we went. We learned from each other.
- Ben Watkins, author (pictured top right) and Janis Carter worked at Parks and Recreation and founded the Dirt Bowl basketball tournament in 1969