fouling out

I have always been a sports nut. So it is no surprise that I had a nutty coincidence 60 years ago that involved basketball. My high school basketball team was terrific--Weaver won the Connecticut State championship three times in the four years I was there, and the New England Championship my senior year. The star of the team was Johnny Egan, who went on to play 10 seasons in the NBA. I would go to each game, and I always kept score in a little notebook I carried around. In one particular game, Egan had gotten off to a slow start--making only 2 of his first 7 shots. He made the next one, and I turned to my friend who accompanied me and said "Egan is up to 37.5% now." He made his next shot also, and an older male--maybe 25--sitting behind me asked "What's Egan shooting now?" I answered "44.4%." He said "No, I mean to four decimal points." I said "44.4444%." He was not very happy at having asked me a question I could answer that easily. At several of the succeeding games in our small gym we ended up sitting near each other, He would ask me various questions about stats that I could always answer. It seemed that at times he was trying to catch me in an error. After 12 games our team was still undefeated. I was bored in English class one day, and my mind drifted to the game coming up that evening. Big game--played at a college field house, not our school gym. It occurred to me that part of the team's success likely came from avoiding fouling out. I thought I would check on that; I took out my little notebook, studied it game by game, and found that indeed no one had fouled out. And because I have always liked numbers, and the boring class was still droning on, I added up how many personal fouls each player had. Egan had 27. To remind us of the world in 1956, the only source of data about a team was in the newspaper. There was no list of how many fouls a given player had for the season--it was not information anyone had thought of tracking and certainly not publishing. No google, no ESPN, no advanced metrics etc. I was the only person anywhere who knew that number. So that evening I and my friend were at the game, and I found myself was sitting next to my "frenemy." Egan was called for a foul--his second of the game. My frenemy asked "How many is that on Egan?" I answered "Two." He said, "No, I mean for the SEASON." I answered "29." He stared at me in disbelief, somehow knowing that I had not just grabbed at a number--that for some reason that was the correct answer. Of course a day earlier I would have answered "I don't know' and he could finally have triumphed (in a game only he was playing--all I did was answer his questions). Or if he had asked anyone else he would have gotten a shrug. Or if he was even two seats away from me (in a crowd of 4,000) he would not have asked. Shaking his head, with his face turning purple, he stomped out of the field house. Henry