Basketball and Me
I’m grateful for pancakes at the diner. I’m grateful for sunny mornings. I’m grateful for what’s growing on the pirate balcony. I’m grateful for peace with myself. I’m grateful for what I had to learn. I’m grateful to be sober today.
song of the week:
I have this notion that there are relatively famous people with whom I could be really good friends—if we only knew each other. For example, President Obama and I coached fourth-grade girls basketball in the same Montgomery County youth league and while our teams never played, I think we would have gotten along.1 This has zero to do with politics, I’m talking about an old guy who still plays basketball, sneaks cigarettes and talks trash playing golf. 2
Steve Miller is also someone I feel like I would get along with. For starters, it’s possible that we lived in the same dorm room at the University of Wisconsin—separated by like two decades. This is a true thing—I know he lived in Bradley Hall and on the 4th Floor—just like me. It’s where he met Boz Scaggs and I think they only lasted a year or two before they left to pursue the whole musical career thing. Do I know it was Room 435? No, but there are only 40 rooms, so it could have been.3
I’ve always considered this kind of a theme song and it is pretty badass, if I do say so myself. There is a difference between theme music and walk-up music. Walk-up music, for the uninitiated, is the brief snippet of music that accompanies a baseball player walking to the plate to take his cuts. While that has thematic elements, it’s not the same as a theme song. To me, a theme song is the song that could play during a montage of moments from my life that would help sum everything up. Of course, it’s natural to have different theme songs at different stages of life.4 This one has been a theme song for a pretty substantial portion of my life.
Of course, this song was playing the other morning as I set forth on the basketball court. I haven’t been able to play as much lately owing to a super busy work schedule and a variety of orthopaedic bedevilments. But there I was, breaking in new shoes, my theme music blasting through the airpods and of course—there’s a dusty old penny hiding in the crud at the edge of the court. I’ve been finding a lot of pennies lately—a lot. Finding them on the basketball court is a bit of a rarity and a very significant omen for this aging veteran player.
I’ve written endlessly about basketball here, but the problem is that I really, really love playing basketball. Like many things that I love, it’s kind of super inconvenient for me. I have a pretty solid idea what it’s going to cost me in future pain and limited walking ability every time I set foot on the court and whisper “first bucket” to myself.5
I had a relatively lonely childhood, owing to something like 8 moves during my first 8 eight years. I was always the new kid at school, always starting over, and considering my natural shyness, well, it was a challenge for young me. I can recall some pretty sad days, walking home after school with no friends, watching everyone else laugh and play. For sure, this is where the sense of apartness came from; my sense that I didn’t fit in, wasn’t like the others, didn’t get the joke.
In the 4th grade, we moved into a house in Iowa City that had a backboard and hoop mounted on the garage. I got a basketball and pretty soon, that’s how I spent the after-school hours: shooting baskets in my backyard. At first, it took a lot to get the ball to the hoop. I was 10 years old and ten feet is pretty high. My shooting percentage was abysmal and I had to attempt free throws “granny-style.” I didn’t care—-I felt pretty free when I was out shooting baskets in the driveway.
I started to get better and I began to imagine myself playing in game situations. A lot of 3-2-1, “OMG, he hit that shot!” I watched what basketball that I could on tv, I saw a lot of flashy ABA basketball with the red, white and blue basketballs and the 3-point shot. I loved that and loved players like George Gervin (the Iceman), David Thompson, Artis Gilmore (the A-Train) and, of course, Dr. J. It’s possible that I attended the law school I did so as to be able to also attend Sixers games and see Dr. J.
I gained my nickname from a derisive 7th grade coach, got a reputation for being a bit of a discipline problem ( I was very good at running laps) and was becoming a pretty good shooter. After my sophomore year campaign, which mostly consisted of “Rocket Rod,” my coach and also the driver’s ed instructor, moaning, “nooooo, oh, nice shot.” I was forced to choose between the debate team and the basketball team. I know, kind of an unusual choice, but I had the good sense to realize that I was never going to get paid actual money, or receive anything of value, as a basketball player.
Thus, I began my career as a pick-up player. I was fortunate to live only a short jog from the old University of Iowa Fieldhouse. As soon as I got home from school, I’d change, grab my ball and jog down to Fieldhouse to play pick-up with the college kids. For those who don’t know, the rules of pick-up basketball are pretty much the same on Melrose Avenue in Iowa City and 6th and South in Philly. Games are played to 11 or 15, 3-point shots count as 2, the winners stay on the court and face the next team of challengers until they lose. When you arrive at a court with a game in progress, you make discreet inquiries about, “who’s got next?” Then find out if there is a spot left on their team, if not, you work your way down until you find a team or call your own game and then assemble your own team.
On the court, the games follow the same rules. You call your own fouls, but there are no free throws, you just take the ball out on top. There can be a lot of drama about the foul-calling, and I always took great pains to only call the truly obvious ones. The game is to 15 or 11 and you have to win by 2. That’s it.
These days, I play in fewer actual games and spend more time shooting around, running up and down the empty court imagining game situations, shooting from where I rebound the ball. It’s a relatively fluid and thorough work-out. I listen to music and can really lose myself when I get going.
Given my build and lack of real speed, I was always destined to be a shooter, and that’s what I still practice. I chastise myself for missed shots, for poor shooting form, letting that left elbow creep out, not making sure my footwork is solid, making sure I’m balanced. Above all, making sure the only thing I’m thinking about is the back of the rim.
What I loved about basketball was what it did to the hamster wheel. There simply is not time to brood about the future or seethe in resentment when you’re running the court and playing Stevie Wonder’s “Do I Do” or “I Wish” in your head.6 When things got dark for me about 15 years ago, when my marriage had collapsed and I was struggling to put together 30 or 60 days of white-knuckled sobriety at a time, I moved into a house that was close to a basketball court. I hadn’t been playing much, but a modest investment in a ball and some new sneakers had me out there in all kinds of weather shooting away until the darkest clouds had passed.
The level of physical exhaustion helped, too. It’s hard to muster much of a fight with all of the forces arrayed before you, when you can barely move your legs owing to fatigue and stiffness. When I went to rehab, I played a lot of basketball. On my second go-round, I convinced the director to let me have extra time at the gym as part of the therapeutic regimen.
Basketball was a place where I couldn’t lie to myself. Shots go in or they don’t, you win a game and keep the court, or you don’t. “Bullshit walks” is the phrase you hear on pick-up basketball courts; meaning, the talk is unimportant, what actually happens is the significant thing and the losers do have to leave. There’s a good lesson there. I’ve actually learned a lot of lessons out there:
When things are off, when my shots keep clanging off the same spot on the rim, well, the problem is usually me. There’s something I need to fix about me if I want things to change.
Nothing good happens without balance.
Grand gestures are selfish, consistency, hustle and teamwork win games.
If you think you are going to miss, you probably will.
Sometimes, no matter how hard you play, you still lose.
Playing good basketball is an exercise in harmony and connection.
Talking trash every now and then is pretty good for the soul.
I have lots of superstitions and rules. As a youth, I wouldn’t call my personal practice sessions quits until I had hit seven out of ten free throws and then completed my four-point play fantasy. This made for some very dark nights on the old driveway. I still adhere to the four-point play rule for ending my shoot-around sessions: I have to make a three-point shot from somewhere on the court and then, while huffing and puffing, step to the line and calmly nail the foul shot. Things can get kind of grim if I’m missing free throws. I sigh dejectedly, try to diagnose the shooting flaw, go retrieve the miss and start the whole process again.
I guess it’s pretty similar to what happened after relapses. Knowing that I had to through that first 30 days again, knowing that I had to start everything over, and I was still so tired and dejected from the last round of failures. But rules are rules, and I keep firing 3-pointers until I make the free throw. I think that’s how I got sober, if we’re going to be honest.
I just didn’t let myself quit until I made the free throw. No matter how dark it got.
What’s the point of all this? I’m not sure. I know recovery and sobriety were, for me, an exercise in finding myself. Drinking and the crazy thinking patterns took me a long, long ways way from the person I was meant to be and from the life I was meant to lead. Maybe my recovery was a bit of a Humpty-Dumpty exercise; gathering all of the broken pieces and trying to put things back together. For me, I found, and still find, a big piece of myself on that basketball court. It turns out that basketball was one of the things that made me feel less lonely, less apart, more like everyone else. I maybe don’t have mad hops anymore, and a lot of those shots end up as pretty bad misses these days, but there still aren’t many places where I feel as free or as much myself.
If you happen to see an older guy out on the basketball court some early morning, shaggy hair bouncing as he maintains a fairly erratic handle, smiling to himself when he misses outlandish shot attempts (like falling out of bounds over the top of the backboard), secretly bopping to the airpod soundtrack and maybe celebrating too outlandishly the incomparable beauty of a basketball spinning as it kisses the back of the rim and falls through the place where the net should be (it’s the city), cut him some slack. He’s been out there a long time. He’s happy.
Happy Friday.
This is true. The secret service would just whisk into the gym at the last minute, he’d take his spot on the sidelines and coach the girl’s game.
Just to show it’s not about politics, George W. and I would also get along. Anyone who steps up and says, “Now, watch this drive,” is my kind of guy.
There was only one bathroom/shower room on the floor, so we definitely shared that.
It’s why I moved on from AC-DC’s “Dynamite.”
I’m very superstitious and believe that making that first shot sets the stage for everything else. So, I whisper '“first bucket” to myself when I take that first shot.
We didn’t have personal audio devices back then.
Are those adidas Top Tens?!