Klosterman Article & Wright Poem.

The article by Klosterman tells the story of the greatest game he ever saw. This basketball game was said to be unbelievable because only so many people actually watched it because it was not televised and around 500 people saw it. It was North Dakota versus United Tribes, and the game ended up seeming to be played by  three players to five. United Tribes, the team with the three players, ended up beating North Dakota, despite being thought of as the "underdog". Klosterman says that when he was speaking to Gilliss, Gilliss said that "it didn't really matter that about ten people were upset that we lost."

The poem "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio" by James Wright depicts the setting of the first football game of the season. He tells of the crowd's appearance and demeanor in regards to the feeling they have right before kickoff. The fathers of the football players don't want to go home and this causes their wives to feel unloved, and then the excitement starts when they start playing and everyone in a sense comes together to watch the game.

The universality of these two games isn't just that they are sports; it's that these two stories end with a disappointment on some end. North Dakota's loss was disappointing to the people of their town and the football fathers being too ashamed to go home.  There is this shame in losing, but at the same time if the game is a close or good game or has an alternate purpose other than for entertainment, it doesn't matter if you win or lose.

These two articles place importance on memory because they either recall a past event or re-tell a recurring event. The Klosterman article really defines the importance of basketball or sports in general to a community because the fact that the people of North Dakota were upset that they lost. The Wright poem tells that football specifically brings people of different cultures together. So a similarity to the two stories is that sports comes before many other things and it has a real importance between either cultures or communities.