Here’s the instruction manual for the most astonishing 13 minutes of individual, offensive basketball that I have ever seen:
Step 1: For an appetizer, drive to your left past Richard Hamilton and finish with a double-pump, left-handed lay-up over Jason Maxiell. Draw a foul. Make the free throw.
Step 2: Drill a twenty-five-foot three-pointer over Rasheed Wallace from the top of the key.
Step 3: Blow past Maxiell with a cross-over dribble at the free throw line, then throw down a one-handed tomahawk dunk so ferocious that it leaves Tayshaun Prince scurrying from beneath you like a frightened rat.
Step 4: Follow that up by sprinting past Prince (who was formerly known as a defender) and exploding towards the basket so quickly that he attempts to shove you out-of-bounds – and succeeds – and you still nearly effortlessly throw the ball through the hoop on your way past the rim.
Step 5: Take a break, maybe have a glass of lemonade, make two free throws.
Step 6: Jab step to the left, and when Prince leans in that direction and turns his head, execute a perfect backdoor cut, take the quick pass in stride and complete the play with another man-among-boys slam – or perhaps, more accurately, man-over-boys slam. If you have to duck to avoid introducing your forehead to the backboard, all the better.
Step 7: Catch your breath for the stretch run. Make three free throws. Throw in a missed free throw – maybe even an airball, too – just to show you’re human. Keep ‘em guessing.
Step 8: I don’t think you’ve looked into the teeth of a triple team yet, have you? You’re due for one. Try this – dribble hard to your right, rise over Chauncey Billups, Maxiell and Wallace and shoot a twisting, fading twenty-two footer.
Step 9: One sharp dribble to the left to a quick step-back twenty footer over Prince. Strut backwards past the other team’s head coach and suggest he might want to try something else to stop you. Like the Marines, perhaps. Not one of them – all of them.
Step 10: Mix it up a little for the finishing stretch – start with a dribble to the left, switch back to the right with a behind-the-back dribble and leap straight into a pull-up twenty-two footer over Billups. Retreat down the court while motioning both palms downward, as if patting small children on the head and saying, “That’s okay, kids – someday you’ll be big boys, too.”
Step 11: Dribble to the left and launch a twenty-four-foot, three-point jumper over Chris Webber and Billups.
Step 12: Finish with a drive down the heart of the lane past – count ‘em off: one, two, three, four, five – all five defenders, and complete your sprint with a double-pump, right-handed layup.
Step 13: And you’ll be a man, my son.
It looked like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1Px-jPm_TU
There’s nothing that sequence doesn’t have. Well, I guess it didn’t have any passing, but it had everything else. He did it inside and outside. He did it to a point guard, shooting guard, two small forwards, two power forwards, and a center. He did it one-on-one, over a double-team, past a triple-team, and finally through the whole team. He did it going left and he did it going right. He did it with explosive power and speed. He did it with a magician’s sleight-of-hand. He did it going forwards, backwards, and sideways. He did it going through, over, and under. He did the ridiculous, he did the absurd, he did the insane. He did anything he wanted. He did it all. He did it all by himself.
Those of you that aren’t basketball fans got bored halfway through reading that for the same reason that it’s so ridiculous. It just didn’t end. It wasn’t one absurd play, it was ten absurd plays, one after another, with a few free throws tossed in for flavor. You couldn’t do that on a video game. I actually tried #10, except that there was nobody on me, no one watching, and nothing riding on it. I tried four times. I hit the rim once. Give me that old Fisher-Price hoop, five teddy bears, and a very active imagination and it would still take me a few hours to accomplish the whole list. To score 29 of your team’s last 30 points, including the last 25 in a row? In the NBA Playoffs? In Game 5? Against the top seed in the conference? On their home floor? In the fourth quarter and through two overtimes?
This was Lebron James announcing to the Detroit Pistons and the world, “My name is Lebron James – and I am better than you.”
Lebron forced the basketball world to believe, at least for a night. We were all witnesses.
A few days later, I called my father and asked if he’d seen James’ performance. He had not. I described it in slightly less detail than I did above and concluded by saying, “Twenty-five straight points. I have never seen anything like that in my life. Have you?”
“Yeah,” he answered without hesitation.
“Who?” I asked, stunned that he had a command of sports history superior to mine.
“You.”
Oh, yeah, I did do that once….
****
Men tend to forget. It is a standard principle of the human experience, constantly replayed in television sitcoms and beer commercials. Men forget anniversaries. Men forget their obligations. Men forget names. Cue the laugh track.
So I was a little surprised that my childhood stat sheet rose more immediately in my father’s mind than in my own. With the exception of song lyrics and sporting events, he does not possess an exceptional memory. There are numerous gaps in his recall, including considerable gaps in his recollection of his childhood. But there is one person he remembers from his elementary school days. I suspect that most men remember this particular person. I know that I do.
We remember the girl who developed first.
It is a constant in generation after generation. Somebody always develops first. For me – and the other lucky fifth-grade boys at a seaside elementary school in Florida – it was Danielle. The wand of puberty waved across our little world and christened Danielle as the first girl to enlarge our eyes and hearken to our hormones. I’m not sure if we even realized why we found her so mesmerizing. I’m not sure if we even understood why we liked those curves so much. Come to think of it, I still don’t know exactly why. But we did then and we do now.
She controlled every eye in the room, drawing adoring drool from the tongues of boys and jealous darts from the eyes of girls. Perhaps there was some initial revelry in her newfound attention, but from what I’ve been told, it doesn’t last. I’ve spoken to a few women who had this experience and they have not described it as pleasant in their memory. They describe the confusion of experiencing adolescence before their friends and the misery of being unable to escape the glare.
Still, I could be wrong, but I imagine that there were some of them that did enjoy the attention that their bodies brought to them. I imagine that some part of them, however briefly, enjoyed the adoration and attention. I also imagine that they may have felt some small disappointment when puberty came to their classmates. I imagine that no matter what it is that makes a person feel special, some part of them hates to see it go.
****
While other boys were flirting with Danielle, I was flirting with basketball greatness, spending multiple hours each day with my backyard basketball hoop. My favorite thing to do in those years was shoot in the driveway while listening to a Top 40 radio station, which partly explains my enduring affection for both basketball and cheesy 80s songs. Somewhere in those sessions on the cement, I discovered the two basketball branches of the Christopher Columbus tree – namely that the ball was round and the floor was flat.
It sounds pretty basic, doesn’t it? Throw a round, inflated ball against a flat surface and some basic knowledge of the physical world should lead you to accurately predict where it will go. A few iterations of the experiment should be sufficient to reach a conclusion. But much as Bugs Bunny never studied law, fifth graders haven’t studied physics, and every one of the other boys in the parks and recreation league was still withholding judgment. They’d stare at the ball as it left their hand and watch it patiently until it returned. Then they’d watch it again. And again.
This singular focus on the dribbling experiment prevented them from looking at their teammates, defenders, or the basket while they were dribbling the ball. My awareness of each of these things gave me an immense advantage. Imagine standing on a court with nine other players. Everyone else is playing with blinders, except that instead of being unable to look right or left, they can’t look up whenever they have the ball. Do you think you could take advantage of it?
My season of taking advantage of it was fifth grade, never more so than in one midweek game when we were missing one of our three best players. The second, our shooting guard, scored our opening basket of the game. I had the rest in a 27-21 victory – twenty-five straight points. There’s no signature shot or sequence of offensive maneuvers that stands out in that performance. If there was anything exceptional about that game, it wasn’t a shot or even a statistic.
With a little under two minutes remaining on the clock, we held a slender lead. My instructions were to keep possession of the ball, circling through the other team’s defenses until the clock had expired – in short, to dribble until I could dribble no more. I received the in-bounds pass and started weaving my way through the opposition. The small crowd cheered. The coaches screamed. The players and referees followed me around the floor. I circled back towards mid-court, leaving two defenders in my wake, as my head swiveled to take in all of my surroundings. Without picking up my dribble, without slowing down, I screamed, “Start the clock!”
No one else had noticed. The volunteer parent at the scorer’s table was apparently mesmerized, too, and had neglected his one responsibility. I was in control of the scoring, I was in control of the ball, I was in control of the outcome, and I was now even in control of time. Whenever that happens, it’s special. There are a million differences between James’s performance and mine. He was 6’8”, 245 pounds and could do anything that man has done on a basketball court – and a few things that no man has ever done before. I was still a victim of signs at amusement parks that said, “You must be at least 54 inches tall to ride.” He was playing on the grandest of basketball stages in front of 20,000 fans and millions watching on television. I was playing in a nearly empty junior high school gym with a few dozen parents and siblings and the face of a Scottish terrier stamped on the center circle. Fans will talk about his performance for generations. Even when prompted, I didn’t remember mine.
I don’t care.
Twenty-five straight is twenty-five straight.
Those parents and siblings didn’t know it then and they certainly don’t know it now, but on one winter day in 1986, they were all witnesses.
****
I had a few distinct advantages in that game. I could dribble without watching the floor. I had good vision. I had confidence in my ability. I was coordinated. I was also, undoubtedly, lucky. Within the next few years, all of those advantages would be somewhat muted by the improvement in skills of other boys. But there was a bigger obstacle.
Danielle and I were both about to be destroyed by the same kryptonite – the sweeping tidal wave of puberty that was going to realign the landscape of our peers as we moved into junior high school. Danielle would soon be just another girl fighting her way upstream toward adulthood. I was destined for a parallel fate. As other boys grew taller, faster, and stronger, my physical limitations would become glaring deficiencies in the game that I loved. I faced years of struggling to find an equalizer.
In retrospect, it is apparent that I was merely the basketball player who developed first. I had a few gifts, which provided me with a fleeting ability to control basketball games, just as Danielle had a momentary capacity to captivate her classmates. With the general onset of adolescence, Danielle and I both lost our control and our confidence. We lost the one thing that made us special.
I don’t know if Danielle ever recovered. It took me almost twenty years.
****
