Basketball came back to me slowly.
Basketball never left wholly, because Basketball. Basketball is in America, in the World and the World and America are in Basketball.
People made the World to make America to make Basketball to change America and the World.
Not NBA or College or Highschool, just Basketball.
Not Olympics.
Basketball.
Basketball in America and the World will never leave.
If Basketball leaves?
No more America, no more World.
But Basketball did leave me mostly, or I it.
Basketball was not my strong suit.
Don’t think my arm was big enough then, in eighth grade when I left it.
Did not have short hoop to try on, dirt gravel court.
Those are just bad habits and excuses.
No real excuses, real reason, no real drive then.
Found it now.
Weird oblong outdoor ball on the elementary rack.
Fun habits, wacky habits, goofy habits.
Bad habits if actually you want to be good at basketball and be a player people want on their team.
The dead-end hoop at the trailer in the dead-end woods on the backside was best.
Listen to your coaches about shooting for sure but not all of them.
Meaning practice.
Also you really need to be moving more on the court.
Just like anywhere at all.
Like sprint like a wildman rather than hang in the corner.
Eventually you’ll figure out better things to do than sprint like a wildman but sprinting like a wildman is better than not moving at all.
Maybe you could bounce in place.
Seriously. Get moving, it will help.
If not your game, your body, and that’s more important. That is the point of the game.
Your body and their body working better, together, even if you aren’t on their team.
And get your hands up and all of that. You know this. You know this in your body.
What you don’t know is whether you want to be in your body or when your body will stop being weird and why you aren’t allowed to hit that person when you want to.
Everyone.
That is why America brought you Basketball. So that you can spin and bounce and slap and feel with your whole body, America, the world in a space, and give back for as long as it takes.
Like give back what you felt because court.
A court is a court and is not a court. It is your court and not your court at the same time. The court is a spaceworld and you can feel things, see things in it, read things in it that are true and not true, feel them in it.
The game does matter no matter what anyone says.
Winning the game for your home team matters no matter what anyone says.
But you will find out eventually that the home team is the home team and the guests are also the home team.
At life’s absolute best, which is what we want, that is true.
Take it from the Puerto Rican discodancing genius, Rosie Perez, playing the Puerto Rican discodancing genius, Gloria Clemente in White Men Can’t Jump (1992.)
She said it best she said it best.
She said it best to Woody Harrelson’s Billy Hoyle on the back of a bus headed to The Jungle:
Sometimes when you win, you really lose. And sometimes when you lose, you really win. And sometimes when you win or lose, you actually tie, and sometimes when you tie, you actually win or lose. Winning or losing is all one organic globule, from which one extracts what one needs.
Thank you Rosie.
This is the story of how Basketball came back to a person who would at the end of Basketball coming back to him become a high school Basketball coach by chance and luck, not skill, unless we’re talking about the skill of the art of the hustle.
Basketball mostly came back as a series of objects on roadsides in driveways, hoops, that he saw in various states of degradation while driving through Maine and New Brunswick and Other Places East for years and years. They seemed to him to be a kind of a talisman or totem, maybe, speaking a kind of dream he had either had before many times or maybe not quite yet.
The hope in a person at the bottom of a hoop off the ground is apparent to anyone.
There is the gap and so then the effort and the playing and sometimes cheating and rule making and breaking and persons invent all kinds of games with a hole up high and a something to launch and a hunger inside and will always.
[Feature Photo by MontyLov on Unsplash.]