Jon was the winner of this week’s fabulous contest, which earned him the fabulous prize of getting to tell all of you about where he grew up. But seriously, if this isn’t a talker, we don’t know what is. Jon?

I was the first to correctly identify Ricky Davis as the former Timberwolf who called for the ball when he noticed he was being guarded by a white guy; to be fair, this was in no way a guess, given that a) Davis was the logical candidate to make any statement that stupid and b) he called for the ball no matter who was guarding him. So here we go with the guest post:

Lately, it seems like writing about rural Minnesota is the trendy thing to do with a RandBall guest post. Those of us with small-town backgrounds seem quite proud of our simple roots, and I’m no different: last week at the state football semifinals, I spent a good five minutes explaining to Rand everything there was to know about Clinton-Graceville-Beardsley. For example: there’s only one stoplight in Big Stone County, a blinking yellow light at the intersection of US-75 and MN-28 in Graceville. (This fact usually doesn’t fail to draw a laugh from urbanites, even from those who, like Rand, are from a distinctly un-urban big town.)

Here’s what I want to know, though: why do I do this? I live in a first-ring suburb. I haven’t lived in western Minnesota for almost 10 years now, and yet I can’t wait to spew stories about, say, the high school gyms at Clinton-Graceville-Beardsley and Chokio-Alberta. (They’re both classic small-school gyms: pull-out bleachers on only one side of the court, plus a stage / band room at one end. If I remember right, there’s even a tile floor at Chokio-Alberta, and you can pretty much put one foot on the three-point line and the other in the center circle - they’re that close together.)

It’s not like I’m exactly unique; there must be hundreds of thousands of metro-area residents with stories similar to mine. Yet somehow, I feel myself filled with an absurd pride when the discussion turns to hometowns - and a similarly strange connection with others who grew up in rural areas, especially if they went to consolidated high schools with great names, such as the now-sadly-defunct Belview-Danube-Renville-Sacred Heart, or BDRSH (pronounced “ba-dersh” to the great consternation of all BDRSH-related personnel.)

So, RandBall readers - and especially those of you from so-called Greater Minnesota - here’s your discussion topic: what’s with the rural pride?

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