Obsession

The snow had been falling for nearly an hour, glittering in the dim light, and my feet were beginning to lose their grip on the slippery patches where the ball had tamped down the snow. I'd be called into the house soon for supper and probably be asked to go down to the cellar and shovel some coal into the furnace or bring up some potatoes from a fifty pound burlap sack down there. Just one more shot, one more. I wasn't going to leave until I swished it. The ball had to get through the rim without touching it. And it was oddly satisfying when the ball passed through the net, making a sound comparable to the rubbing of my cordurow pants legs as I moved around in the cold weather. Like one who buys lottery tickets (which, by the way, didn't actually exist back then), I just stayed in the game hoping for that one big payoff. I wasn't going to go back in the house till it was done. I wasn't going to mope my way through the evening, thinking what might have been.

Such was my obsession with the game. I was OCD about it. If I was going to loop a hook shot from the right side, then my next move had to be a layup from the left, and so on. I made up little mini-games in my head. You were always reaching, trying to get better. It was built into the game, with its paradigm of outstretched arms and legs, climbing the air spider-like towards an ethereal goal.

Basketball was all around me. This town danced to the beat of swishes, dribbles and rebounds and the cheers from spectators witnessing these feats. I had to be a part of this.

Basketball players in my town were treated like royalty. In the corner store, on the court at the playground, wherever people would meet, the talk would always come around to what Miller and Superka were doing in last night's game. They, along with other players on the high school team, had led the Rough Riders to state finals and semi-finals throughout the sixties, with Miller ending up on Parade magazine's top five high school hoops players in the country, and then going pro. It was the game of kings, and I was proud to be associated with it in my own small way, though I was just a knave.

Knave that I was, I was not without my signature move, a layup that confounded opponents as it was virtually unstoppable. It was one of the few tricks I had up my short sleeves. I learned it from Kevin Deutsch. It involved a bit of trickery, a fake, a delay, tucking the ball into the ribcage on the ascent to the basket only to release it at the final moment, later than you would in a conventional layup. The opposing player, expecting a traditional layup would time his jump to block accordingly, but by the time I was putting the ball up to the basket, he was already descending. It worked like a charm, and it really did become my charm, winning me some hard earned respect amongst other players my age. I'd see them shake their heads in disgust after each deployment of this secret weapon.

My obsession with basketball really kicked into high gear when Gary Bennett, whose dad owned a sporting goods store in the next town over, said he could supply a rim complete with netting if only I could provide a place to put it. I put my father on the case and had him follow some rough specs I'd drawn up to produce a backing board with some 1x's nailed together. I then instructed him to mount it regulation height of ten feet on the apex of our garage above the overhead door. The whole operation precipitated a major coup in the local sporting world, turning it on its head, and making me the man to talk to if you wanted some extra practice time away from the big courts at the playground.

The basket, hanging high, stood as a beacon for kids from all over town, drawing them in. It was my Field of Dreams moment, and I bathed in its glow. I would arrive home some days, only to find a pick up game in progress involving amateur atheletes from other parts of town, guys I didn't even know. It put our garage on the map. No grousing from neighbors, nor the uneven paving, was going to stem the tide. They came in waves, looking for basketball gold.

It was where I spent some of the high points of my youth, throwing a ball at a ring in the sky. In a sense, basketball was therapy, and a basketball was on my hypothetical desert island packing list.

The area was bounded on one side by a big old barn, the kind you'd see in the country with "Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco" painted on it, only this one was right in the middle of town, right next to my kingdom of hoops. If I could have declared eminent domain, this barn would have been razed. In executing a fade away jump shot, we'd slam ourselves backward into the side of the barn. There was a continuation of the door track overhanging the edge of the barn by about three feet, just enough to get in the way of a perfectly good shot from the far right corner.

On the opposite side, there was a pavement drop-off where the driveway met the walkway to the house. The odds were very good that the ball would hit this ledge at just the exact angle to propel it away towards the neighbor's parked car, or worse into the territory of Blackie, Blackie the terrible, Blackie the near rabid mongrel dog the color of night, the nightmare of all our basketball dreams.

Blackie's eyes pierced our souls like the magnifying glass we used to concentrate the sun's rays when frying ants. He policed his turf, held back only by a chain that glided along a wash line. He was the model for all junkyard dogs to follow, actually dogged in his pursuit of us. He'd lunge, he'd jerk, he'd feint to one side then go to another, not unlike a basketball player. We hated to see our own actions mirrored by the troublesome canine. His turf was potholed with his own diggings that were deviously just the right size in which a basketball could lodge. We had to create diversions by teasing the wretched beast on one end of the chain's length while another player would race into Blackie's domain and race out again with the ball. There were inevitably some bitings. It was a mighty distraction, and, come the think of it, could be viewed as an entirely separate game in itself. We didn't see it that way, though. We were terrified, and only the excitement of continuing our game in progress kept us from faltering and giving up.

Of course, it was a real treat to head up to the playground and shoot hoops on the level blacktop. Sometimes we'd play full-court, but mostly just half court, freeing up half for other players. And there would always be several kids, arriving late, who had to stand on the side watching. They had the hungry look of jackals, anticipating their turn to be called into action when someone on the court fell down hard, became too worn and bleary-eyed to go on, or just realized he was late for a dental appointment.

For all the glamour of playing on the playground court, there was something antiseptic and too official about it. Besides, the garage court was so much more convenient. A guitarist doesn't want to go fishing around for his guitar when the inspiration strikes. And so it was with me. I liked the idea of filling in a few extra minutes by shooting baskets without actually having to fish around for a court.

When it came time to try out for the school's CYO team, it was only natural that I give it a go. Most of our practices took place in the school basement with only an eight-foot ceiling and water pipes suspended several inches below that. We got a lot of practice passing, pivoting and crossover dribbling. Shooting? Not so much. It bothered me. I felt cooped up, not just by the basement location, but also by the regimentation and discipline of it all. I soldiered on. Before a team was even picked, I'd already stuck it through several grueling practices, and I wondered if I had what it took.

That question was answered for me subsequently when the prospective team gathered for a trip to a high school game waiting for the bus to leave. It was snowing hard. (Snowing again.) Ice had formed in places. We started a snowball fight, breaking up into two factions on either side of the street. Some of the snowballs contained ice and hardened, not even splitting apart when they hit the pavement. It was one of these that hit me in the side of my knee, and I went down, not just down, but down into a huge puddle of water. While it was painful, to be sure, it was also humiliating. The thrower, Tom Stengel, crossed the street and apologized to me, practically getting down in the water with me. We went on the trip, me sitting on the long bus ride in soaking wet pants. I overheard one of the guys saying, "I'm surprised he came along. If that was me I would have gone home." It got me to thinking, always a dangerous thing for a basketball player.

It wasn't long after that when I quit. I went home. The team hadn't been picked yet, but the scuttlebutt about my quitting was that it was premature, the coach telling the others that he thought I really had gotten game. Game or not, I'd go back to my alleyway court and shoot baskets into the night. It would have been nice to make the team, but the regimented teamwork wasn't for me anyway. In time I began to spend more and more time indoors with my other obsession, reading books, none of them about basketball. The way I drifted away from religion, I drifted away from this game. My story was that of a fading jump shot slamming the backboard, bouncing around, circling the rim but never going in.

In the years following, from time to time I'd visit my old neighborhood and drive down the alley past the old garage, but the backboard and basket weren't there anymore. The new owners just didn't get it. They sucked at trying to grasp the grandeur of the thing. They were the antithesis of the hopefuls you see on Antiques Roadshow, and they didn't realize the treasure they'd thrown away. I thought in passing that maybe I should go knock at their door, my old door, and tell them what they were missing. It was kind of complicated though, and I wouldn't want to have kept them too long in the listening.