My brother Jim (aka Juice or Baby Hook on the court) and I are both from Lexington, Kentucky. Being from Kentucky, we are basketball addicts. Even though we both grew up railing against the mainstream and taking pride in being freaks, we still could not avoid the hoops. Many a Saturday was spent counting backwards from 10 and throwing up last second circus shots to win imaginary crowns. And the crowd goes wild...

In KY basketball is a religion. No...seriously, it is a bona fide religion. And if it came down to Sunday service or the 'Cats vs. the Cards (or Carolina, or Florida, or Indiana, or K-State Tech A&M, or whoever), you can bet that the churches would be empty. Sorry God, but unless Jesus is a 6'8" power forward wearing a blue jersey and dropping 3s from NBA range, he must wait.

Lately Jim and I have become even more entrenched in the hoop action. We got a ping pong table at JC last year to help folks blow off steam, but I can't really do it. Not only am I not very good, I am not going to take time out of my work day to stand semi-immobile on the opposite side of a table and hit a ball back and forth. To me, this is not exercise. To remedy this I took a collection and bought a mobile basketball goal for the co-op. It has been a big hit. If you want a good chuckle, please come down to the shop in the late afternoon (after 4pm when UPS has come and gone) and watch as a gaggle of thirty-somethings throw various styles of brickage at the backboard and squeal like wild boars.

Mike Miller (aka The Drilluh) and I (aka Little Big Hawk) are undefeated thus far in 2 on 2, we are 5-0. We are studying up on our trash talking by watching re-runs of the Fat Albert and learning how to feign arrogant and reckless cockiness by looking at pictures of George W. in his flight suit. We almost got taken by Baby Hook and Eva Schulte (Smoove E.) the other night, but we won 12-10 in OT. Now Baby Hook is saying that he is bringing in a ringer-- one Sandy (Wild Man) Weilander who apparently played competitive ball until 8th or 9th grade. I may go ahead and sprain an ankle just before he comes around.

All of this is leading to the JC Fair Trade Hoops Tour. What we envision is putting together a traveling B-Ball team (equipped with FT basketballs from Fair Trade Sports) that will first go around to the towns in the midwest where we sell coffee and play local teams consisting of employees of various coffee shops and food co-ops. During this barnstorming tour we will try to raise money (no, not by wagering!) to take to our producer partners during the second part of the project.

After we garner some attention and some cash, we will take a team to play teams from the grower co-ops that we work with. A vast number of co-ops have hoops on their coffee drying patios so that the youth can use them during the "off season". We hope to play games and leave the donation money that we have raised in the communities for education and pediatric health initiatives. The tour will (hopefully) culminate in a game against Zapatista teams at the Chiapas Highland Center of Oventic. I have played in a few tournaments there over the years on international teams and I have never been on a winning team. Those dudes are fast.

At any rate, all of this madness will be captured and photographed with a live blog and a documentary film. The movie we will then show all over the place in an effort to raise more money for the kids in the communities. We also hope to use this as a vehicle to get folks who don't normally think about some of these issues to connect with coffee growing families on a very basic level.

So what do you think? Want to get involved? Are you a baller? Do you want to put together a team to play team JC? Drop me a line or a comment and let me know. At this point, spring of '08 might be our target for getting this going.

Thanks for listening,

Little Big Hawk

matt(at)justcoffee.net