The Climb at The Summit

Our victories often shine the brightest, but the missed moments often cast the longest shadows.

Long before he became a polished voice behind the studio desk, Kenny Smith had a dream as simple as it was iconic. Not an NBA title. Not All-Star appearances. Just a ladder, a pair of scissors, and loose nylon draped in his hand.

Cutting down the nets.

It’s a sacred college basketball ritual. When the final buzzer sounds and your team stands alone, ladder steps become holy ground. One by one, teammates climb, slice off a piece of victory, and pass the scissors. It’s not just about the win—it’s about the journey, the memory, the moment.

But Kenny never got his.

At North Carolina from 1983 to 1987, Smith played on loaded Tar Heel teams. He made two Elite Eights and a Sweet Sixteen, but the nets stayed tied. No championship. No climb. No scissors. No swing of the net in celebration.

So when the Houston Rockets won the NBA Championship in 1994—and again in 1995—while teammates doused themselves in champagne and basked in the chaos of victory, Kenny Smith quietly slipped back onto the court.

And then he did what no NBA player had done before.

“So, when we won the NBA championship, we were in the locker room, I went out with the ladder and I cut the championship nets down, both of them,” Smith recalled during this year’s March Madness on CBS. “They don’t do it in the NBA, but I have all four nets.”

Many of the 16,611 who packed The Summit had already left, funneled into the Houston streets, celebrating. The confetti was gone. The noise had faded.

But Kenny Smith wasn’t ready for the party. He had somewhere else to be.

He brought out a ladder, alone.

“No other teammate, no one came out,” he said. “They were doing the champagne in the back. I was out there cutting those nets. I was like, ‘I’ve never done this.’”

The little rituals that make the journey real.

Two championships. Four nets.

It’s not a stat. It’s not a headline. It’s a ritual that defines college basketball, not the NBA. In the pros, they hand you a trophy and pour the bubbly. Nobody brings out ladders. Nobody brings out scissors.

Except Kenny.

Tucked away, he still has all four nets.

They’ll always remember Hakeem’s footwork. Clyde’s redemption. The back-to-back banners. But this? This is the kind of story that slips past the headlines—just before the lights go out, when the crowd is nearly gone, and a man stands halfway up a ladder, holding history in his hands.

Kenny Smith didn’t just win a ring.

He cut down a piece of his dream.

And in that moment—far from the champagne—he finally found his own One Shining Moment.

Even if very few saw it.

An Assist From the Heartland

If you're ever flying low over the town of Carroll, in western Iowa, look down.

You might catch a flash of purple and gold - painted across an outdoor basketball court trimmed in powder blue. To most, it’s just a pop of unexpected color in a small Midwest town. But to those who know the story, that court marks the site of one of the most remarkable near misses in sports history.

On January 17, 1960, the Minneapolis Lakers—then led by future Hall of Famer Elgin Baylor—were flying home after a Sunday night loss to the St. Louis Hawks. The team had boarded a Douglas DC-3 plane, a model built in the 1930s and purchased by then Lakers owner Bob Short in a budget-saving move to keep the struggling franchise alive.

Soon after take-off from Lambert Field in St. Louis, something went wrong. The plane lost all electrical power—no instruments, no communication, and no way to navigate through the thickening winter storm. Snow had swept across the sky. Ice began forming on the wings. Snow swallowed the windows. The storm intensified quickly. The skies over Iowa became a blind man’s maze.

At the controls was 36-year-old Harold Gifford, a World War II veteran of the U.S. Army Air Forces whose calm-under-pressure demeanor would prove lifesaving. With no ability to gauge altitude or weather, and unsure of their location, Gifford made a bold decision: he would descend, hoping to spot the ground through the snow and fog.

As chronicled in the Westward podcast series in 2021, the players in the cabin knew things were bad. Some began writing messages to their families—notes they folded into signed life insurance forms and pushed through cracks in the windows, hoping someone below might find them if the worst happened. According to Gifford’s recollections shared in interviews over the years, the silence on board was deafening.

Meanwhile, the town of Carroll was sound asleep. That is, until the sound of low-flying engines woke residents from their beds. People stepped outside and looked up into the stormy dark, hearing what sounded like a plane circling overhead, again and again.

As word of the circling plane spread, local radio stations alerted the community. Residents turned on their porch lights to help the pilots see the town. Others jumped into their cars and rushed toward the edge of town. They lined up along the snow-covered fields, pointing their headlights skyward, hoping to give the pilot a guiding glow through the blizzard.

Gifford spotted a small town below—he didn’t know it was Carroll—but saw porch lights and rooftops. He scanned the outskirts and found what looked like a clearing. A cornfield. It was the only chance they had.

With barely enough fuel and no clear runway, Gifford brought the plane down. It slammed through the frozen field, the corn acting as a cushion. When the wheels finally stopped, there was a moment of stunned silence.

Then the sound of car horns. Shouts. Cheers.

There was no playbook for what happened that night. No buzzer-beater or game plan. Just instinct and kindness. 

A tragedy had been averted. And unknowingly, so had perhaps the fate of the NBA itself.

Elgin Baylor was already the face of the league. Jerry West, who would join the Lakers the following season, wasn’t on the flight that night—but if the plane had gone down, the loss of the Lakers could have sunk a league that had not yet found its financial footing. There were no global television deals in 1960. No billionaire owners. Just a few franchises, some stars, and a dream.

Today, the stalks are gone, replaced by a court in shades of royalty. The Lakers franchise donated funds to the Carroll Chamber of Commerce in 2010 to help build a commemorative outdoor basketball court on the site of the emergency landing. Sneakers now echo where wheels once scraped frozen soil.

Constructed with all-weather tiles, “Laker Court” features the gold and purple of the current Lakers, bordered in sky blue as a salute to their Minneapolis-era legacy.

Although time has passed, the court still speaks.

It’s a reminder of a long January night in 1960 - the people of Carroll standing in the snow, staring upward, thinking of their heroes above. While those above, clinging to hope in the storm, looked down and saw headlights and porch lights cutting through the darkness—and thought of their heroes below, guiding them home.  

It speaks of a night when basketball came down from the sky, and small-town Iowa rose up to catch it.

Image: City of Carroll

Where Basketball Meets Verse

Basketball is a game of rhythm. Poetry is a game of rhythm. Between the beat of the dribble and the flowing lines of verse, between the backdoor cuts and the deliberate pauses, a deep connection exists - it’s all a composition in motion. 

Basketball, at its best, is poetry in motion. There’s something poetic about a well-disciplined offense zipping passes around the perimeter, or a zone defense gliding in perfect harmony, each player flowing together like verses in a well-crafted poem.

Basketball is grace, precision, and improvisation, much like poetry itself. Poetry flows with both control and creativity, as does basketball, where every movement is within the framework of a larger composition. 

Both are at the very core of human expression.

No one understood it better than John Wooden.

The legendary UCLA coach wasn’t just a teacher of basketball; he was a student of poetry. Raised on an Indiana farm, he grew up to his father, Joshua Hugh Wooden, reading to his sons at night under an oil lamp in their farmhouse. He was memorizing verses that would later shape his coaching philosophy. His words— “Make each day your masterpiece”—were poetry in their own right.

One of the poems Wooden memorized early on and quoted often was:

“No written word, no spoken plea,
Can teach our youth what they should be.
Nor all the books on all the shelves—
It’s what the teachers are themselves.”

Like the final buzzer sounding at the end of a game, time runs out for all of us. The question isn’t how much time we have—it’s how we use it. Wooden knew that. His players knew that. And deep down, we all know it too.

These verses became the foundation of his coaching. He wasn’t just molding basketball players—he was shaping character.

To Wooden, basketball was also about precision and flow. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s (then known as Lew Alcindor) skyhook wasn’t just a shot; it was a verse, graceful and unstoppable. The game itself, when played the right way, was a form of artistic expression.

Nearly two decades ago, I started reading and learning about John Wooden—not just the coach, but the man behind the wisdom—and it quietly began to reshape how I viewed both basketball and life. I too began composing poetry about sports—capturing the struggles, the determination, and the quiet battles athletes face as they overcome adversity both on and off the court.

Because poetry and basketball share more than rhythm—they share struggle. The real battle isn’t against an opponent; it’s against doubt, hesitation, and fear. The strongest opponent is the one inside your head.  This is one of my poems that speaks to that very struggle:

Your Strongest Opponent 

by Heath Hunziker 

Your strongest opponent knows your every thought

And he dares you to make the wrong move

For it’s during those times that you must not quit

Because every time you’ll lose

Your strongest opponent is not your defender,

The person trying to steal the ball,

He is the one saying “You cannot succeed”

When your back is against the wall

You see, your strongest opponent can only be beaten

By your mere strength, resolve, and mind

Cause, in the end, your strongest opponent is YOURSELF

Not the opponent on the other side.

That’s the essence of both poetry and the game—the challenge to overcome, to push forward, and to make each moment meaningful. In the end, it’s not about points on a scoreboard but the legacy we leave behind.

The Time We Have Left

by Heath Hunziker 

When you think the end is near

Step back, breathe, have no fear

There is always time to make a change

And goals can constantly be rearranged

As our minutes fly by fast

Life we know will never last

So with the time we all have left

Live your life with no regrets

Cause once your body and soul are gone

It’s your life stories that live on.

But if there’s anything more poetic than the game itself, it's watching young athletes embrace the challenge—fighting through fatigue, learning from failure, and showing up for each other day after day. There’s a quiet beauty in that kind of effort. In the hustle for a loose ball, the silent encouragement in a glance, the shared joy of a game well played—not just for the win, but for one another. Each moment writes a line in a greater verse. That’s where the real poetry lives. Not on the page, but in the gym. Not in the final score, but in the character built along the way. 

That’s poetry in motion. 

Two Sides to Every Star

There are two sides to every story. Two sides to every person. And when it comes to Ron Artest—now Metta Sandiford-Artest—most people only remember one.

I recently watched Untold: The Malice at the Palace on Netflix, a documentary revisiting one of the most infamous moments in NBA history—the 2004 brawl between the Indiana Pacers and the Detroit Pistons. The film pulls back the curtain on the chaos of that night, the raw emotions, the consequences. It shows the Ron Artest that much of the world has come to know—the one who laid on the scorer’s table, who went into the stands, who sparked a melee that would define his career in ways that felt inescapable.

But there’s another Ron Artest the world rarely sees.

When I interned with Pacers Sports & Entertainment at what was then Conseco Fieldhouse during the summer of 2003, we were fortunate enough to have access to the practice and main courts during lunch and after work. It was a perk, a chance to lace up and share the floor where Reggie Miller drained threes and Jermaine O’Neal patrolled the paint. I even got to play with Chuck Person once, an experience I’ll never forget. Looking back, I wish I’d stayed after work more—stuck around for those pickup runs, built more relationships with the staff, and maybe even crossed paths with more Pacers legends. 

There was one rule, though. No matter how much fun we were having, if a current Pacer or Fever player stepped on the court, we stopped. No questions asked. It was their space. We were just borrowing it.

One afternoon, Josh, a game operations intern, was getting up some shots on the practice court using the moment for himself before heading back to the grind of his internship. Then Ron Artest walked in.

Josh knew the rule. He grabbed his basketball, ready to leave. No hesitation. That’s how it worked.

But Ron stopped him.

“You wanna work out with me?” he asked.

Josh hesitated. “I don’t think I’m supposed to.”

Ron shrugged. “I need a partner. It’ll be fine.”

And just like that, Josh wasn’t an intern anymore. He was Ron Artest’s training partner.

For the next fifteen minutes, they ran sprints together, side by side. Then, Josh rebounded as Ron took shot after shot, working on his form, his touch, his rhythm. And when Ron was done, he did something that caught Josh completely off guard. 

“Now it’s your turn,” he said.

And for the next fifteen minutes, Ron Artest, one of the toughest, most feared defenders in the NBA, rebounded for an intern.

Not because he had to. Not because cameras were rolling. But because Josh had given him his time, and I expect in Ron’s world, loyalty goes both ways.

As I watched Untold: The Malice at the Palace, I couldn’t help but think about that moment. The world remembers the Ron Artest who threw a Gatorade jug in frustration the year before. They remember the man who went into the stands, who ignited a riot that changed his life and the Pacers franchise forever.

But I remember something else.

Sometimes, the truest measure of a person isn’t found in the chaos of their lowest moment, but in the quiet acts of kindness that no one sees. And long after the world moves on from the headlines, those moments—like a star NBA player rebounding for an intern—are the ones that truly last.