Coppini Remembers...and More Livingston

Anonymous Coppini said...

LOL! That is great! LOL! I can remember that. WOW. Thanks for the memory.
Was that before or after he tore down our, "$.B. SEE YOU NEXT YEAR?" sign at the SB/FE basketball game? 35 years later, thankfully they are still here. Love that rivalry. Ferndale sports would not be the same without SB. COPPINI
----------
So, Mark Livingston was right.

Right after he shouted out the window at the group of Ferndale guys who dared show up at the Fresh Freeze, within walking distance of St. Bernard's campus, I told him there was no way that anyone could've heard him shout, "Coppini ... bite my wienie!" The car was going 30 mph, I said, they couldn't have heard him, but ... hey, I did and it made me laugh.

As the comment above makes clear, um, Coppini actually was at the Fresh Freeze and did hear Mark suggest what he could bite. And, Coppini took it all as part of the St. Bernard-Ferndale rivalry.

That's Humboldt County stuff I can never take for granted.

Mark Livingston, no matter what he's doing now, was an original.

The thing that made him telling an arch rival to bite his "wienie" so funny is that he never missed a chance to curse creatively, pointedly and in a wickedly funny way. He and I drove with my mom to Crescent City for a baseball tournament. We were just getting to know each other and my mom didn't know him at all.

From the time he got in the car, Livingston talked to me as though my mom wasn't even there. He dropped profanity into every story, casually, and probably to see how much he could get away with before aggravating my mom. I was mortified, naturally, because my mom hadn't heard one of my friends curse. My mom didn't give a shit. She cursed like a sailor herself under the provision that her son, "Do what I say, not what I do." So, Mark only stopped short of throwing f-bombs because of some sense of decency, not because my stopped him.

These days, professional athletes are constantly reacting to fans in the crowd. That leads high school athletes to do anything and everything to try to attract attention that they think makes them seem cool. Livingston was ahead of his time.

When I was a junior in high school, my basketball days were done. (Unless I'd transferred to St. Bernard where 3 guys who got cut from my Eureka High JV team were still on the varsity basketball team...every Humboldt guy has some inherent feeling that his school was best and, hey, if you could get cut at EHS and make the team at St. Bernard...)

Livingston was a star at St. Bernard and was involved in what were incredibly heated St. Bernard-Eureka games. I was sitting behind Eureka High's bench in 1973. I had 2, 3 really good buddies on the Eureka club. But, I had no real rooting interest. If Livingston's team won, OK by me ... they had 3 guys who history proved weren't as good as I was and ... oh, you get the point ... it was all part of the St. B-Eureka rivalry that I allowed to become self-serving, no matter who won...I won.

There was no pretense that fans were good sports back then. Those pre-game announcements about how to treat the officials and other fans would've been booed mercilessly. So, Crusaders were catching hell from Loggers fans. Loggers were catching hell from Crusaders fans. And, that's how it should be.

Late in a really, really close game, Livingston got fouled in front the Eureka rooting section and went to the free throw line. He was just one of those guys everybody knew and liked, unless they despised him for having the prettiest girlfriends or tearing down a sign at Ferndale. Fans were just raging loud as he went to the stripe and took the ball from the official. I smiled because, I imagined, Mark likely loved the attention.

His first free throw swished through the hoop and gave St. Bernard a lead. He turned to the Eureka crowd...looked right up into the bleachers...put his right index finger to his mouth and offered nothing but a "Shhhhh!" to the screaming fans. Then he made the second free throw.

You see that type stuff all the time now. But, in 1972, I thought it was about the funniest, coolest thing I'd ever seen at a high school basketball game.