The game of basketball through one's eyes - SBartlett's Blog

SBartlett's Blog

The game of basketball through one's eyes

Posted on December 29, 2010 at 02:35 PM.

"And I could play basketball, with a consuming passion that would always exceed my limited talent...and I had watched the players in warm-ups, still boys themselves but to me poised and confident warriors...casually flipping layups or tossing high-arching jumpers until the whistle blew and the centers jumped and the players joined in furious battle.

I decided to become part of that world, and began going down to a playground near my grandparents' apartment after school. Toot would watch me on the court untill well after dark as I threw the ball with two hands at first, then developed an awkward jump shot, a crossover dribble, absorbed in the same solitary moves hour after hour.

...gym rats and has-beens, would teach me an attitude that didn't just have to do with the sport. That respect came from what you did and not who your daddy was. That you could talk stuff to rattle an oppononent, but that you should shut the hell up if you couldn't back it up. That you didn't let anyone sneak up behind you to see emotions- like hurt or fear- you didn't want them to see.

And something else, too, something nobody talked about: a way of being together when the game was tight and the sweat broke and the best players stopped worrying about their points and the worst players got swept up in the moment and the score only mattered because that's how you sustained the trance. In the middle of which you might make a move or a pass that surprised even you, so that even the guy guarding you had to smile, as if to say, "Damn..."

...I was living out a caricature of a male adolescence, itself a caricature of swaggering American manhood. Yet at a time when boys aren't supposed to want to follow their fathers' tired footsteps, when the imperatives of harvest or work in the factory aren't supposed to dictate identity, so that how to live is bought off the rack or found in magazines, the principal difference between me and the most of the man-boys around me -- the surfers, the football players, the would-be rock-and-roll guitarists -- resided in the limited number of options at my disposal.

Each of us chose a costume, armor against uncertainty."

- President Obama
Dreams from My Father