On the evening of Valentine's Day 1963, Calvert High School lost to La Plata High School by the score of 4-1. The two Southern Maryland schools weren't playing soccer, baseball or hockey; they were playing basketball. I know, because my brother, then called Bobby Manning, was a starting guard for Calvert. I was known then as Howard Manning, and I graduated from the old Calvert County High School in 1959. I didn't attend the game, but I found out about it in the strangest of ways.

I was stationed then at Greenville Air Force Base, in Mississippi. The night after the game, I was watching one of the network evening news programs - Cronkite, Huntley-Brinkley, I don't remember - in the TV lounge at my barracks. Near the end of the broadcast, the announcer said something like this:

"An unusual high school basketball game was played last night in Maryland, between La Plata and Calvert. Calvert froze the ball the whole game and almost won. Their only point came on a foul shot by Bobby Manning. And that's the way it is..."

More than four decades after the event my brother now calls "The Game," I decided that I wanted to find out what really happened. But where was I going to start? Bobby (called Bob now) was not a good source, most of the details having been purged from his memory. So I tried looking for old newspaper articles about it. The Calvert County Library tried to help but couldn't find any, so I checked out NewspaperARCHIVE.com, an online paid subscription service with over a billion articles on file. Surprisingly, I found more than a dozen about it, all various versions of a short UPI item that ended up in a number of newspapers across the country.

One of them mentioned the Calvert coach as Gordon Wright, who I remembered as a young teacher when I was a student. So I looked up his name in the Internet white pages for Maryland, knowing full well that there was little chance I would locate him. After all, he could be anywhere, if he was even still around. I found five listings for that name and called the first one. It was him.

He was stunned and excited, and eager to tell me all about the game. I interviewed him, and within two weeks, I had tracked down and interviewed the other Calvert Coach, Tim Carney, and two of the La Plata players, Dale Cornette and Larry Ringer. I also interviewed brother Bob. In the following paragraphs, you will find all you'll ever need to know about one crazy basketball game.