4. Wipe it off

Bobby Cremins was beaming. He was entering his first season as head coach of the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets, whose record in Atlantic Coast Conference play over the previous two years had been 1-27. There wasn’t much optimism floating around the athletic department office in those early days, but Cremins had just looked up from his desk to witness the rarest of occurrences during his first year – someone was in the office looking for tickets. The visitor returned his warm smile. He didn’t have the heart to tell Cremins that he was an alumnus of the Yellow Jackets’ opponent.

My father was purchasing tickets for the first sporting event I ever attended. The chilly winter weather, the Yellow Jackets’ meager prospects, and the location of the off-campus arena combined to limit the audience for the home team and allow us some terrific seats. My father recalls a play directly in front of us when a scrawny, 18-year-old freshman elevated for a turnaround jumper. He marveled at how the youngster simply kept rising and rising. I remember flipping to the freshman’s page near the back of the media guide. It listed him at 6’5” and 189 pounds. It noted that he was a graduate of Laney High School. It further revealed that “Mike” liked video games and ping pong. That media guide was the last place I ever saw him referred to as “Mike”.

Two months later, he was doing this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-suuy_tgOjo

Two years later, in a possible coincidence that boded well for Nike, I had a video game system and a ping-pong table. But I was about to imitate my hero in a much more memorable way. The only difference was that Michael Jordan was a young Michelangelo offering the first strokes of the Sistine Chapel. I was a child with crayons in a dark room and no ladder. The only means of reaching the ceiling was just to throw the box of crayons as hard as I could and hope to get very, very lucky.

****

I was playing in the first championship game of my life. March 3, 1984. Yeah, that’s right, I remember the date.

There were a number of unusual circumstances to this game. My father was out of town on a business trip, so my mother had borrowed a neighbor’s video camera to make this the first game of my career recorded on film. My best friend, Seth, was playing for the opposition. From the “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” department, the miniature locomotive named J.J. was now my teammate. It was also the conclusion of the only basketball season that I was coached by a woman. As a result of a connection she had to New Mexico, our team also carried the most obscure nickname of my childhood squads – the Lobos. Based on the improbable sequence of events that unfolded, it would have been appropriate to have found a wolf outside the rec center howling at a full moon.

While J.J. and I were both capable of contributing, our best player that year was our starting center, Carl. He played his best game of the season in the title tilt, scoring twenty-three points. By himself, Carl was trailing by two points in the last minute of the contest. Unfortunately, the rest of our team had only offered three points to the cause, so we held a slender 26-25 lead with seconds to play. As the last ticks slipped from the scoreboard, a tiny but lightning-quick point guard named Deon penetrated down the lane and gently floated a shot through the net. Three seconds remained.

They started dancing. We hung our heads in despair. With the amount of time on the clock and the level of talent on the floor, the game was effectively over. We called a timeout more out of reflex than hope. In a great credit to our coach, she huddled us together and gave us a plan. She reminded us of one of the rule modifications for our league of third graders: no defense was permitted in the backcourt. As a result, our coach instructed one of the players to roll the ball from beneath our opponent’s basket to near mid-court. I was to pick up the ball, dribble it once, and then heave it in the direction of our basket.

While the rims in this league were lowered from the standard ten feet to a more accommodating eight feet, the likelihood of me throwing in a half-court shot at this stage of my career was about the same as Michael Jordan walking through the door to attempt the shot for me. Even Jordan’s odds of hitting this shot would have been extremely poor. But it was the best we could do. The ball was bowled to mid-court. I picked it up, took a single dribble, and flung the ball as hard as I could. It angrily crashed into the backboard like sumo wrestler with a grudge and bounded back towards me like a faithful boomerang. If I had thrown a baseball instead of a basketball, the glass would have shattered and the backboard on the other end of the floor might have cracked out of sympathy.

Shockingly, the next sound wasn’t glass breaking or a buzzer. It was a whistle. In an act of colossal stupidity, Deon had leapt towards me as I released the ball and grazed my forearm. In an act of colossal sympathy, the referee called a foul.

One second on the clock. Down by one. Two shots – make one to tie, drill two for the title.

****

There are two things that I’ve done on a basketball court that I’ve never seen or heard of anyone else doing. Both were far from intentional. The second is dunking a basketball with my feet. Often when I was waiting for a game on a playground in high school, I would stand a few steps to the side of the free throw line, toss the ball up in the air so that it would hit a few feet in front of the basket and bounce near the rim. I would time my steps and my leap so that I reached the peak of the jump (a little above the rim) at the same time as the ball. It was rarely successful, but occasionally I’d actually be able to dunk the ball in this manner.

On one particular occasion, I dramatically underthrew the toss so that the ball was low and far from the basket when I went up to the rim. It was a good jump, though, so I grabbed the rim with two hands and faced back towards the ball. Realizing that it was still coming toward me, I caught it between my feet, then curled them up above the rim and dropped the ball through the hoop. I was laughing hysterically at myself by the time I returned to the ground. I’m an idiot – and an easily amused one.

As absurd as that was, it doesn’t compare to my other unique basketball experience. The only problem is that I don’t have any memory of it.

I would like to be able to tell you what was racing through my mind, or how the basketball felt in my hand, or how the shots looked from the foul line. In stark contrast to the other details I can recall from that night, I don’t remember anything about those two shots. Based on what happened next, it’s entirely possible that I blacked out after I was fouled.

I can only figure that my half-court assault had the same effect on the backboard as a good brushback pitch in baseball. It sucked all of the courage out of the glass. So when I flung two consecutive missiles directly off its heart, rather than reflect them back to me at the free throw line, the beaten backboard submissively dropped them into the basket.

I banked ‘em both. 28-27.

****

In family billiards games, whenever a lucky shot is pocketed, the victimized opponent will usually intone disdainfully, “Wipe it off!” – suggesting that the shot just struck was pulled out of the shooter’s ass and the cue needs to be cleaned. Never in the history of sports has this line been more appropriate than with respect to those two free throws. If the figurative were literal, the amount of toilet paper necessary to dispose of that much crap would have filled the state of Georgia.

In pool, a double banker can be a demonstration of skill or luck. In basketball, it can’t be anything other than the latter. No one ever aims for the backboard on a free throw. Ever. Further, it would be one thing to make one shot in this fashion. You would think that any basketball player – even a third-grader – would adjust a bit after shooting a shot about two feet longer than he intended. But the second shot crashed off the glass just as firmly as the first. It was obvious that I choked. I’d never shot a basketball with any kind of pressure on me and I had no idea how to handle it. It just so happened that there was a backboard there.

I cannot imagine losing a championship game in this way – a glorious finish ruined by an absurd foul call followed by a ridiculous and entirely unintended shooting stunt. It was sudden. It was unjust. It was cruel. Sports can be that way sometimes.

But Seth was gracious the next day in class. He and I passed a scrap of paper in class naming our MVPs for the game. I wrote down his name and objectively thought he was the best player on his team. Despite Carl’s 23-point performance, Seth wrote down my name. It wasn’t because he was my best friend.

In that document lies the magic of the game-winner.

****

3. Come to the ball

My first hoops lesson was spoken aloud by my father and mashed into my memory by a speedy seven-year-old named J.J. Several of the fundamental principles that I’ve taken from the game can be traced to a single seed that they planted a quarter century ago.

It was the end of one of the first practices of my first season of organized sports. After running an occasionally attentive group of second-graders through the most rudimentary of drills, our coach provided us a single play. This one design was to be the blueprint for our movements on the offensive end of the floor. My role was to start near the baseline, then come off of a screen to the top of the key. As I arrived, a player on the opposite wing was to pass me the ball.

I do not remember what I was supposed to do with the ball once I caught it. In retrospect, I think the play was designed to give me the ball, a little bit of space, and a running start towards the basket. I was the offense on that team. In a possibly related story, we went 0-9 that year. I specifically remember losing one game 16-2. I had the two.

(Rule #1: if I’m the best you’ve got, then what you’ve got is trouble.)

Having equipped us for competition, the coach then organized a brief scrimmage against another team for the last few minutes of practice. We had the ball. In a bold tactical decision, we ran our one play. Given the sequence of events that ensued, I imagine it wasn’t the first time our opponents – specifically J.J. – had seen it.

As I curled around the screen, J.J. anticipated the pass and sprinted towards the point where the ball and I had planned to meet. Seeing his momentum and fearing a collision, I stopped and hoped for the ball to elude his grasp and travel safely to me. The basketball foolishly continued on its straight path (as balls in flight are known to do). As a result, J.J. easily intercepted the pass and headed to the other end of the floor for a lay-up.

My father, who had arrived to take me home from practice, yelled at me from the sideline, “You’ve got to come to the ball!”

He had seen my hesitation and recognized that I had to shorten the distance of the pass to prevent the defender from disrupting the play. The only way to do that was to continue running in the direction of the passer until I caught the ball. The play depended on that decisive action. After rattling through our rolodex of options, we ran the play again. I sprinted off the screen. The pass was thrown. Without hesitation, J.J. again flew towards the ball. I ran as hard as I could. I got to the ball first. Then came the part that I hadn’t been told.

J.J. flattened me. Like a penny on train tracks.

My father had led his little horse to the proverbial water. It just turned out that the water was a tidal wave. Like a football free safety exploding towards an exposed wide receiver, J.J. knocked me into the air – it was one of those hits where I actually had time to think, “Hey, that ground thing should have been here by n…,” before I actually became one with the floor near the center circle. After running a quick inventory of body parts, I glared up from the ground in the direction of my father. He looked back at me. He had several choices.

He could have explained the value of individual sacrifice for the good of the whole – “taking one for the team” – or perhaps the importance of doing the right thing in the face of danger, pain, and suffering. By absorbing that punishment and drawing a foul call, I retained possession of the ball for my team. In a normal game, it is possible that I would have earned free throws and the opportunity to score two uncontested points – no small matter for a team that once tallied that amount over the course of an entire game.

He also could have explained the significance of learning how to fall down and how to get back up. At this point I’ve been knocked out of the sky in more ways than I can count. I’ve been flipped forward, backward, and sideways – I even flipped over a chain-link fence once. I’ve run into steel poles, brick walls, and 300-pound kids that might as well have been brick walls. That’s only the literal falls; the figurative ones have been harder. In both categories, there’s a value in knowing how to land and how to rise again. There may be no more important ability. This was my first time. My father could’ve noted that I should get used to it.

He further could have explained the importance of the little things. In the game of basketball, as in most things, the glory is in the spectacular – the dunk, the no-look pass, the killer crossover – but the simple is both more necessary and more significant. Everything in those two plays is the same – the design of our play, the actions of my teammates, the defense, J.J. sprinting towards the ball – except for one subtle decision. On the first play, I curled a little slower off the screen and faded away from the pass. On the second play, I cut sharply and took a direct path to the ball. One choice results in two points for the opposing team; the other keeps the ball for my team. If someone that didn’t understand the game saw only one of the two plays, they probably would have thought that the version they saw was inevitable. Nothing is inevitable. The subtle decision made the difference. There are a thousand little moments like that in a game, any one of which might possibly decide the outcome.

As a result, he could have continued, there is a simple lesson in what just happened to you, son: make the play in front of you. No matter how small, no matter how subtle – if you have the ability to make a positive contribution, you do it. Don’t worry about pacing yourself. Don’t worry about getting hurt. Don’t quit. Play as hard as you can, as long as you can, then walk off the court with no regrets about the things you could have tried to do. Make the play in front of you.

In a word: hustle.

He could have said all of those things, but I wouldn’t have understood any of them. The deeper truths are a bit beyond a seven-year-old’s understanding, particularly one still not yet in full command of his senses. So he looked back at me and shrugged with a look that said, “Sorry. It happens. You’re just going to have to trust me.”

I continued to glare at my father as if he had knocked me over. It is one of the patterns of my childhood: I did what my parents told me, sometimes begrudgingly, and that trust usually led me to truth.

Some lessons take longer than others. All of them have to start somewhere. Most of them have to be repeated. Many of them you have to learn for yourself. A few of them have to be learned at the wrong end of a train. One of them I’ve held on to since that day.

Always come to the ball.

****