I couldn't make the school team so I went out and joined the city
leagues who, by law, can turn no one away. The main problem with that
was that the games and practices were four miles away and my dad
hated that my mom had to take me to go play sports and he thought
that if I wanted to go play sports I should make my own way to the
next town over at night in the dark to practice and then come back
all on my own and not inconvenience my mom and by extension him. He
had a strict no organized sports mandate until my brothers wanted to
play sorts and then he loosened the restrictions and let them both
play foot ball and even went to their games. I don't think my dad has
ever seen me compete in basketball, rock climbing, debate or
wrestling. Just not his scene. So without the support of my mom and
dad I got to go to practice when it struck her fancy and games when
it was convenient. So I would miss a practice or two during the week
because my parents were at church or busy and then on Saturday I
would show up to games and want to play but the coach would want me
to not play because I was not a dedicated practitioner. I told him
the situation and told him I was practicing on my own and because I
was about to cry he told me I could play. Play I did. I was pretty
short and not a very good shooter but I had the unbounded energy of a
spastic nerd who could foul up there with the all time greats. I was
in Junior High in the early 90's and if you know your early to
mid-nineties basketball you know it was Michael Jordan time all the
time. What that meant was that every kid on the team who had missed
the subtleties of Micheal’s greatness as a defender and rebounder
and thought the best way to emulate him was to take the ball coast to
coast and make an acrobatic shot. What happened is that on every team
there was a dude or two who would use this strategy thirty times a
game while his teammates jogged up and down the court out of the
loop. The only time there was any real conflict was when the other
ball hog on the team would get mad at the ball hog and yell at him
for never passing it to him so he could go coast to coast and make an
acrobatic layup. Selfish. Our whole strategy was to identify the
coast to coast man and the other guard and I would full-court press
and trap him. This coupled with his constitutional inability to pass
the ball lead to lots of turnovers. In conjunction with our secret
weapon – the other guy that stayed down at the other end for the
long-pass easy layup, sometimes derogatorily called the 'cheery
picker' – we won every single game in our season and went on to the
regional and state playoff.
