Ozzie Osbourn was my tennis coach.
Yes, seriously.
This particular Ozzie Osbourn had spent his professional career in the Army, though his only reference to his military days was a hat that he occasionally wore to the tennis court. He spent his days there, playing doubles in the morning with friends and offering lessons to the neighborhood kids in the afternoon. His primary doubles partner was his girlfriend, Bonnie, a woman who was both twenty years younger than Ozzie and had the appearance of someone who spent all of her days exercising in the Florida sun. In a related story, Ozzie seemed to have a perpetual smile on his face.
For six bucks – one-fifth the price of most tennis coaches in the area – Ozzie offered tennis lessons for an hour per week. He would stand on one side of the net, always sporting white shoes, white socks, white shorts, a white shirt, sunglasses, and a baseball cap. The sunglasses sat over a bushy white mustache; the cap covered a head full of white hair. A racket was always in his right hand; a tennis ball always in his left. He smelled like he used sunscreen more often than soap. Like most good things in life, there were elements of Ozzie that were completely reliable and, therefore, comfortable.
Also like most good things in life, Ozzie offered the unexpected. Since he was still playing tennis in his mid-60s, his game relied on misdirection. He knew every shot and every spin and he displayed endless patience in trying to equip the neighborhood kids with his tennis tools. But more importantly, somewhere between drop shots and topspin lobs, he introduced little lessons on life through his teachings on tennis.
One of those lessons was to battle people both above and below your talent level. You challenge those that are better than you to force you to improve your own game to compete. You accept the challenge of those that are less talented to offer them the same opportunity. On some deeper level, there are lessons about individual ambition and the development of society in that simple teaching. The individual can only develop when he is willing to challenge himself, risk failure, and – occasionally – endure profound embarrassment. The community can only evolve when people are committed to both the improvement of themselves and others.
Twenty years later, this lesson was part of the reason that I’d be playing against teenagers in games of one-on-one by the light of the moon. At the time, it simply meant absorbing an ass-whuppin’ from Bonnie. Ozzie approached her after one my lessons and asked her to play me. She agreed, though I expect that her assent was based on her loss of either a lovers’ quarrel or a substantial wager. She gave me a single game out of pity and a solid beating out of anger in a set that took less time than a sitcom. 6-1. I don’t know if I shook her hand after the “match” or if I just caught her before she smacked me upside my boyish little head.
Nonetheless, the lesson was learned. I took it back to the tennis court, to the classroom, and to the middle school gymnasium. During those years, it wasn’t difficult for me to pick out someone who was better than me on a basketball court. I had many options. But as long as I was going to do it, I figured I might as well pick out the best. His name was B.P.
****
B.P. stood for Brian Paul. He was an adolescent superstar in our area, though you wouldn't know it to look at him. He was tall, but not exceptionally so – early in a game, before sweat matted his military base crewcut, he probably just cleared six feet tall. His torso was little more than an axle, spewing four narrow limbs that seemed to travel like spokes without a wheel. If he ever ate a big meal, it was clear that it ran directly to his feet and hands, which were the only aspects of his physique that showed any real size. Every angle of his body was sharp, from his elbows to his knees to his eyebrows. He was just another goofy, gangly boy on the edge of his teenage years – and then he'd start to play.
He understood the game differently. He didn’t just see where the other players were; he saw where they would be. Perhaps more impressive, he knew how to move them without them realizing it. It was an intricate dance with a defense in the dull gym light – a dribble in one direction, a fake in another – with opposing players as unknowing partners, shifting as he wished until the opening appeared before him. He didn’t have devastating quickness, but he knew what a defender was thinking and how to use it against him. He wasn’t a great shooter, but he knew how to get the shot he wanted. He lacked overpowering strength, but he knew every trick in the book and a few that the book didn’t mention.
At that point in my development, I wasn’t even aware that there was a book. Standing nearly a ruler below B.P., I lacked size, strength, speed, and explosiveness, so I was forced to rely on my talent and understanding of the game. Unfortunately for me, those characteristics were similarly underdeveloped. My shooting ability had largely deserted me, not to return until I consistently wore contact lenses for the first time at the age of 22. I could dribble through any defense, to any place on the court, but I couldn’t do much once I got there.
But I was tenacious. My primary responsibility – other than to dribble – was to guard the opposing team’s best player. He might be able to slip me, but never for long. If he relaxed, if he underestimated me for a moment, he’d be relieved of the ball and find himself chasing me in the other direction. The relentless pressure would wear on him, serving as a constant reminder that he’d get nothing easily and that, sooner or later, I’d get him.
In retrospect, I suppose my drive could be attributed to chasing my fledgling greatness as it raced away. The game was the one of the few things that gave me comfort, that gave me an identity, and I was rapidly losing something that made me special. It was my first teaching in a lifelong seminar on the illusion of control. I had won those early games. I assumed I would win more. But puberty had left me with a bicycle in a race against cars. If I expected to win even the occasional battle, I didn’t have much choice other than to pedal fast.
****
Some of the worst beatings my teams ever absorbed were B.P.’s work. I have one specific memory from those debacles, which still amuses me primarily for the Cold War punch line that reveals more than a little brainwashing of a young mind. After yet another B.P. bucket, I received the in-bounds pass and momentarily paused, holding the ball between my right wrist and right hip. The clock was ticking through the final minutes of the contest. B.P.’s team had 53. My team had 19. I stared at the score, chuckled and sarcastically mumbled, “Welcome to Russia.” Then I dribbled up the court again for another round.
Most of the games were more competitive, but B.P. won them all. Most of the time I’d make him earn every point he scored, but they piled up all the same. All of my sweat, all of my effort dedicated to stopping him; all seemingly without effect.
All until the last game we ever played against each other.
It was dramatic game, or at least as dramatic as a recreation league game could be. B.P. was brilliant; he was always brilliant. But on this day, I forced him to be brilliant. Every shot he took was challenged, and he missed many of them. I was so focused on him that I don’t remember how my team scored. I may have been involved in the offense; I don’t know. I know that we did score because the game required two overtime periods. I know that we scored a little more because we had a one-point lead in the second overtime when B.P. came dribbling up the right side of the floor. I’m sure he was pondering how he was going to win the game for his team. So was I.
He was angling to his right, toward the sideline closest to the single set of bleachers in the junior high school gym, a few feet from the face of the Scottish terrier in the center circle. I stared at him intently, sliding to my left, matching his steps. As he approached the sideline, his back straightened.
A dribbler should never straighten his back while being defended. Dribbling is, in itself, a form of defense – defending the ball from others that desire to possess it. A dribbler must always be poised to move quickly. If he’s sprinting with the ball, he’s leaning forward, pushing the ball ahead and following after, like a greyhound chasing a rabbit. Otherwise, he should be crouching, always able to change direction, poised for sprinting, poised for jumping, poised for anything.
I spent entire games waiting for B.P. to make this mistake. I sprang forward, reaching my right hand towards the ball. His eyes widened, recognizing a moment too late what he’d done. As the ball bounded from the floor towards his hand, he tried to guide it behind his back to safety on his left side. But he was too late. My hand was already on the ball, pushing it away from him and towards my team’s basket. I was moving at full speed before he could turn around to chase me.
My only remaining obstacle was adrenaline. My natural impulse was to celebrate my individual victory – I got him! I finally got him! – which would usually involve a joyous and uncoordinated dance, full of leaping and spinning, unbound by any rules, like, say, traveling violations. But the team’s game was not over. There was still work to be done. Still, I was so excited by the steal that I took only two dribbles between mid-court and the basket. If I was Kevin Garnett, this would’ve been normal, as the loping strides of a seven-footer can cover that kind of territory with only a few footfalls upon the ground. I ran as if required to follow in such footsteps, springing from one shoe to the other with a stride far longer than my stubby legs would typically allow. When my last dribble touched the floor, the basket still stood nearly twenty feet from me. My leap towards a “lay-up” commenced ten feet from the bucket. The attempt ended without grace, still five feet away. But the ball went found its home anyway, awkwardly caroming off the base of the rim, rudely bumping against the backboard, then – with the blessing of the basketball gods – falling through the net.
It was our 53rd and final point. B.P.’s team ended with 50. We got ‘em. Just once, but we finally got ‘em.
****
It was the best moment I had as a basketball player during my junior high school years. The worst moment happened a few feet from the spot of the steal. The junior high school coach stood before us, looking down a solitary sheet on a clipboard held between his left hand and his ample belly. As could be expected of a junior high school gym teacher and the coach of the schools’ male athletic teams, his fashion sense was slightly behind the times then and is comically so now. He wore a classic 1970s blue and white baseball cap – brim flat and unfolded, the forward half made of shiny polyester, the rear a mix of mesh and plastic – whose stains betrayed many sweaty days at the side of a football field. A whistle hung around the collar of his white polo shirt; a digital watch adorned his wrist. The shirt was meticulously and miraculously tucked into impossibly tight, royal blue, polyester shorts which seemed melded to his thighs. White socks were pulled up over his calves and trailed into shoes similarly devoid of color. In his right hand was a pencil, which was slowly checking the page as he shouted out the last names of the players that would compose that year’s team.
I sat in the bleachers with a few dozen boys, still sweating from the scrimmage that had concluded tryouts, still stinging from the airball that had resulted from my only shot attempt. I heard familiar names, but not my own. It was my most direct confrontation with failure in my young life. I’d handled many losses of many kinds, but it was the first time in my life when someone had informed me in clear and concise terms, “You’re not good enough.” Not a bad bounce, not a bad day, not a bad team – just me, plain, simple, and without excuse: not good enough.
****
So it was with no small amount of embarrassment that I looked up from my food to see B.P. taking a seat in front of me at a corner table during the next day’s lunch period. His ninth grade tryouts had been completed prior to the selection of the seventh- and eighth-grade team. As members of different classes at school, we rarely spoke to one another outside of our Saturday meetings on the court. But he knew that the team had been chosen. “So,” he said with hope and a smile, expecting a positive response, “how did tryouts go?”
I lowered my head, mustering only a short, mumbled reply, “I didn’t make it.”
B.P. shook his head, entirely disgusted – but the look in his eyes revealed that his disgust was not with me. In his mind, I belonged on that team. Despite my lack of size and skill, he looked at me as the victim of a terrible injustice. He slammed his hands down on the table and pushed himself to his feet. He looked at me once more, then angrily left the room without a word. But what I heard was Muhammad Ali, who said after his third fight with Joe Frazier:
"I always bring out the best in the men I fight, but Joe Frazier, I'll tell the world right now, brings out the best in me. I'm gonna tell ya, that's one helluva man, and God bless him."
B.P.’s reaction anointed me as the Frazier to his Ali. No one pushed him harder. Just as he had driven me to raise the level of my play, I forced him to be better and he knew it. Perhaps Frazier didn’t need Ali’s approval. Maybe the championship belts or the Olympic gold medal were enough. Maybe not. But I needed it. I needed the best player to say that I belonged. I needed him to say that I could play. It was the first of many points at which I could’ve (and, perhaps, should’ve) decided that there were better uses of my time. Every time that moment has come, a voice has emerged to keep me going. Sometimes that voice has been mine, but this time mine wouldn’t have been enough. I needed to hear it from someone I respected in that arena – and, at that time, there was no one that I respected more than B.P.
I don’t believe he ever spoke another word to me. Not long thereafter, in the midst of what passed for winter in Florida, he was playing a junior high school game. The ball got wedged between the backboard and the rim. B.P. volunteered to dislodge the ball, backed up a few feet, told a few steps forward and planted hard on his left foot to leap towards the ball. Maybe it was sweat on the floor, maybe it was a worn spot on his shoe, or maybe it was simple bad luck, but whatever the reason, his foot slipped awkwardly and his slender leg cracked. He was put in a cast from his hip to his toe. I left for Chicago the following spring, but from what I heard, he was never the same.
His playing days may have been effectively over, but, because of him, mine would continue for many more years.
God bless him.
