Hoop Screams

"I’d reach for the ball, and it just…wouldn’t be there. I’d stumble sideways, eyes wide, arms flailing, shoes squeaking like a disoriented children’s party clown"

“Father God, we ask you to bless these men that have gathered here today to have fellowship in your name. We ask that you instill in them a sense of sportsmanship and fair play and that your sheltering hand protect them on the court today. Amen.”

“Amen,” said the ten young-to-middle-aged men surrounding the praying referee. And with that, the group dissolved into a panting, sweating, cursing, elbow-throwing scrum of doughy flesh wrestling over a basketball at center court of a church gymnasium while wives and girlfriends pretended to watch from the bleachers.

I was one of these erstwhile suburban warriors — at 24, blessed with an absolutely astounding lack of understanding of what I’d just gotten myself into.

Let’s call it a combination of naiveté, an only recently developed pre-frontal cortex, the desire to impress a relatively new girlfriend, and the generic fact that there is perhaps no creature on this earth more terminally stupid than a 24-year-old human man.

Just lately, I was pondering my entire life while staring at the tiles in my shower, as one does. Suddenly the entire experience came crashing back to me. My knees weakened. I let out an audible moan of horror. My wife popped her head in to ask what was wrong.

“I just remembered when I played adult rec league basketball,” I said, banging my forehead gently against the cool tiles, trying to let the water hit the knots that had suddenly materialized in my neck. 

“Oh yeah, that was fun!” said my wife, and left the room.

Marriage.

Double Downs 

Consider three facts as they were in the sweet summer year of 2009, the year I decided to play adult rec league men’s basketball:

1) I was then —and am now, of course — 5’6’’ on Earth and maybe 5’6’’-and-a-half in space after my spine has had time to decompress.

2) I’d never before in my life played any basketball other than the occasional game of HORSE in the driveway.

3) I’d lost all the games of HORSE I ever played, including against my friends, my siblings, assorted neighborhood children, elderly grandparents, and inebriated extended relatives.

So when my friend Bryan suggested that we join a rec league basketball team for some fun and light exercise, I had some reservations.

“I’ve never played basketball before, Bryan,” I said.

We were eating Double Downs on our lunch break because we’d each successfully lost ten pounds on a recent health kick, and we were treating ourselves by attempting to gain it all back in one meal. 

A Double Down is a kind of sandwich that, in that unholy time, appeared briefly on the Kentucky Fried Chicken menu. It was a fried chicken sandwich where the “bread” on either side of the fried chicken is also fried chicken. I think there was cheese on it also, and possibly gravy. 

Probably gravy. Ten years later, a cardiologist would look at my triglycerides and do a triple take.

“It’s okay; basketball isn’t that hard,” said Bryan, a man who’d played basketball in middle school, high school, and college and who regularly shot hoops in his driveway as a stress reliever. “Just dribble and shoot. You can do that. You were an athlete in high school, right?”

“Yeah! Yeah, for sure!” I said around a mouthful of cholesterol. I’d run cross-country in high school — not an activity known for preparing you to do anything other than jogging around while grimacing in very short shorts. In the photo that appears of me in the sports section of my high school yearbook, I am crossing the finish line of a race looking like I’m passing a kidney stone.

As it happens, that particular race remains my fastest ever 5K, at around 19 minutes. It is one of my proudest physical achievements. It took every last drop of gas I had in my tank to make that time. My friend Jeff is an ultrarunner and FKT holder, and he sometimes runs 18-minute 5Ks in Crocs when he’s bored and doesn’t feel like putting in a real effort. I guess my point here is don’t be friends with ultrarunners if you can possibly help it.

Whiffing Swiffles 

So the adult rec league basketball season was six weeks long, one game per week. By week three, I was considering faking an injury to get out of it. By week five, I pondered just leaving town and forming a new identity, ideally as a public speaker at middle schools. My message, which I would scream hoarsely through cheap PA systems and directly into impressionable young minds, would be this: you absolutely cannot do everything you put your mind to.

The problem wasn’t that I was bad at basketball. The sentence “I was bad at basketball” implies that maybe I couldn’t hit a jump shot, make a rebound, or do a layup.

And, indeed, I couldn’t do any of these things. But I also couldn’t make free throws, fan dingos, shoot three-pointers, whiff swiffles, set picks, scoop lovelies, dribble, freak the chicken*, crowd the paint, or — and this is apparently a very important basketball skill — catch or throw the ball.

“But what of defense,” you say, you who know that basketball has such a thing as defense, which I did not. 

Well, I could not keep people from shooting or passing because I was seven or eight inches shorter than everyone else there. Apparently, short basketball players compensate for this by being very good at stealing the ball — a concept I was briefly excited about when Bryan mentioned it somewhere between games two and three. 

But I’d reach for the ball, and it just…wouldn’t be there. Some sort of witchcraft would happen, and I’d stumble sideways, eyes wide, arms flailing, shoes squeaking like a disoriented children’s party clown, while my opponent sailed gracefully towards the goal.

This is not a thing that comes up very often in cross-country.

The Underdog’s Lament   

In a just world, the whole thing would have worked itself out when my team just refused to pass me the ball or when the volunteer coach for the day just benched me after watching me on the court for ten seconds or so. But, much to my eternal frustration, neither of these things happened. It is, as I think we all know, not a just world. 

What happened was this — people were nice to me, those bastards. I got plenty of playing time, and very kind people on my team would routinely pass me the ball only to watch me trip over my feet and send the ball bouncing directly into the hands of the opposing Middle Jump Guard**.

I can’t tell you how depressing I found this kind of hopeless kindness. Listen, people — you don’t have to uplift every underdog. Sometimes the underdog would like to just remain under the, um, dog, I guess. 

Once Bryan and his wife invited me over for dinner, and after a casserole made mostly of cheese, we retired to the driveway hoop to see if some sort of basketball player could be made of me.

I listened as Bryan talked about rolling the ball with my fingers, fading away, stancing, fiddle hooping, and hanging ten***. I nodded with manly resolve and feigned understanding.

I then missed 100 shots in a row.

Bryan is nothing if not a stoic. He grunted in resignation, and we went back inside and had some beer.

Air Crud 

In the last moments of the last game of the season, we were down by about twenty runs and had no hope of coming back. Kelley, another friend and member of my team, yelled at the whole court to let me have the ball so I could take a few shots without interruptions. A hush fell over the gym. It was meant as a kindness, and if this were an Air Bud movie, things would have gone differently.

There’d be more golden retrievers, for one thing. But also, I would have made at least one of the five shots I took. Everyone would have cheered, and we’d have all laughed about how I finally made a field goal, and then we’d have all gone to a Pizza Hut from the early 90s and played PacMan while our personal pans roasted to perfection in that hallowed kitchen and then we would have rented Happy Gilmore from Blockbuster on the way home.

But what happened was I missed all five shots, each ball bouncing around the rim with malicious glee before skittering off into the stands to be retrieved by a seven-year-old. He gave me a little encouraging nod before passing the ball back the first few times, but by the time the whistle blew, and it was — merciful god — finally over, he had abandoned his nods and was simply staring at me with the same glum mixture of pity and awe that I think everyone else on the court and in the stands was feeling. 

My then girlfriend — new at the time, as I mentioned — seemed to genuinely enjoy watching all six games and has fond memories of the time. Whether this is reflective of her innate kindness or some kind of deeply hidden sadism is something I haven’t figured out, even after nine years of marriage.

There are lessons here. Lessons about pride, about what it takes to develop skill, about how easily men can convince other men to do deeply stupid things.

But for me, I think my biggest takeaway is this:

Don’t make important life decisions while eating a sandwich made entirely of fried chicken. That, I think, is the minimum. And if you can leave gravy out of it, even better.

FOOTNOTES:

*I didn’t do much research into basketball in preparation for this essay, but I’m pretty sure all my terminology is accurate.

**This is a real position in the sport of basketball.

***I was listening very closely, as I was still thinking about that casserole.