Norman High School girls kneeling during Class 6A Oklahoma State Basketball Tournament

Ian Maule/Tulsa World

Golden high school reunions can prove to be anything from fool’s gold to a minefield. A few years ago a dilemma forced me to make an uncomfortable choice that not all graduates encounter: I had to choose between two 50-year reunions. Though a good student, I did not graduate from two different high schools. It’s complicated.

Almost sixty years ago I was forced by my father’s work transfer to leave the small Oklahoma town where I had been born and reared for 16 years and move to Sacramento, California. I found myself enrolled in a super-sized high school. Mira Loma, only a year old, beautiful but intimidating, had to take me in. The students, however, did not have to open their arms and embrace the kid with an Okie twang.

They did anyway. It took time. I was hurting from leaving the only place I knew and one I had loved, not to mention the friends I loved even more. I’ve written about these feelings in my sixth book, Football, Fast Friends, and Small Towns: A Memoir Straight from a Broken Oklahoma Heart but the book wasn’t published until well after the reunions. The feelings were hard to explain and even more difficult to understand.

Karolyn Pettingell (now Ainsworth) knew me better than anyone, and even she did not fully get it until she read the book—probably one of my few Mira Loma classmates who has. She and several other Mira Loma friends contacted me before the fiftieth reunion with entreaties that I attend. They were persuasive, and I did want to see them again. They had gone to a lot of work and had an agenda planned that sounded inviting.

But I didn’t go.

Instead, I went to the fiftieth reunion of a school from which I did not graduate but that will forever own my heart—Nowata High School and its Class of 1964. My oldest friends had been inviting me, and some others who had attended Nowata schools, to every reunion beginning in 1974 and another wife ago. Sometimes, I feel like an intruder and doubt that I should attend but the draw has been lifelong, Nowata my North Star.

Karolyn helped me with part of the book. She forced me to remember when I did not always want to do so because the acclimation was at times a struggle. She and others helped me through it, even if my choices, including reunions, did not seem to show as much appreciation as I felt. She didn’t even complain about anything I wrote. “Now I understand,” she told me in an email, “how your bond to Nowata drew you to your high school reunion there instead of Mira Loma. Certainly you made friends and had engaging experiences in Sacramento but your anchor remained—and perhaps still does—in Nowata.” Karolyn always could read me, even before she read me.

“Your book,” she concluded, “is a love letter to Nowata.”

And—I would add—a love letter to all of Oklahoma, but after an infamous moment during the Oklahoma State High School Basketball Tournament that has brought national scorn, I am left to question a part of the heading on my website and blog—Steve Love: Author, Award-Winning Journalist, and Proud Oklahoman—specifically, my pride in my state.

I am, frankly, embarrassed, even as I know the incident and the reprehensible words of one man, Matt Rowan from Tahlequah, do not represent the state as a whole or its people. Rowan’s streaming service, OSPN, had been chosen by the NFHS network to stream the Class 6A first-round girls game between Norman and Midwest City. During the National Anthem before the game, Rowan, unaware his microphone was live, spat out a racist epithet at the Norman girls who had chosen to kneel.

“F-ing n——,” he said. “I hope Norman gets their ass kicked. . . . They’re going to kneel like that? Hell, no.”

Though Rowan later apologized, the response from officials of the Oklahoma Secondary Schools Activities Association to the sporting media to social media proved swift and damning. Rowan attempted to explain what came out of his mouth and, it would seem, straight from a hateful, racist heart, saying that he suffers from Type 1 Diabetes and had experienced a sugar spike. “While not excusing my remarks,” he said in a written statement the next day, “it is not unusual when my sugar spikes that I become disoriented and often say things that are not appropriate as well as hurtful. I do not believe I would have made such horrible statements absent my sugar spiking.”

And, I do not believe Mr. Rowan.

His is a lame excuse and sounds more like a symptom of Tourette syndrome than diabetes, based on my reading and understanding. Try being honest. Rowan did not even explain his actions as well as a high school freshman explained her team’s. Zya Vann told The Oklahoman’s Nuria Martinez-Keel: “I took a knee to stand against social injustice and racism. When I first read the news that our team was called the N-word, I was just in disbelief, and the broadcaster should be held accountable so something like this doesn’t happen in the future.”

Rowan won’t be broadcasting anymore OSSAA events. Even his hometown high school, Tahlequah, which used OSPN to stream its regular-season football and basketball games, has terminated Rowan’s service. Racist comments like Rowan’s were “exactly why we decided to kneel in the first place,” echoed Norman junior Myka Perry. “You don’t have to agree with us kneeling, but you do have to respect it—just how we respect people’s decisions to stay standing during the anthem.”

So Rowan was the big loser, and Norman’s girls the big winner. Undefeated going into the state tournament, they emerged proud and unbowed and with a state championship. I wish my Mama, world’s biggest sports fan and believer in racial equality even before it was a thing, had lived to witness this. She would have known what to do with Rowan.

She would have washed his mouth out with soap. And, likely kicked his butt.