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While pushing the stroller past the elementary school and seeing a pair of kids playing one-on-one, I got the wild idea to start playing basketball. Not, like, against anyone, but to shoot around a little bit like I did in my driveway when I was little.
The largest barrier to my new plan was the fact I didn’t actually own a basketball.
I found one at the Walgreens across the street, on a low shelf in the aisle where negligent dads find gifts for their kids on the way to their supervised custody session.
The cashers took a few minutes to figure out how to even sell it to me. There was no barcode, and a brief moment passed where we all thought maybe this ball had just been abandoned by some kid.
Finally they did find the price tag, and as I paid my $11.99, I told the clerk I might be the first person to ever buy a basketball at Walgreens.
“Probably.” He said it like he felt sorry for me.
—
I am not exaggerating when I say I missed my first 20 shots.
And I wasn’t raining threes from downtown. I’m talking layups, gimme shots you’d take at recess to look cool for the girl sitting on the sidelines. My 12 year-old son shut me out in a game of HORSE.
It didn’t bother me so much to be emasculated in front of Dominic, but as I dropped enough bricks to build a respectable patio, I became increasingly aware I had a growing audience of children and parents side-eyeing me from the playground. Dads pretending to supervise their kids on the slide suddenly had something much more entertaining to watch.
I dribbled the ball to half-court and was wheeling toward the basket when I heard the shout.
“Take it to the hole, dawg!”
The voice caused me to pull up early, stumbling over my sneakers. I shot wildly from the top of the key, the ball slicing wind and bouncing into the grass behind the basket.
“You got buckets, bruh!” the voice came again, and I looked up find its source was a boy of no more than 8, swinging from the monkey bars.
Fuck.
—
I’ve loved sports—especially football—from a young age, but I was never really athletic enough to be competitive.
As such, I spent my childhood as a backup, riding the bench while my more proficient peers squared off against their opponents in the most righteous forms of primary school battle.
It infuriated me that my teammates had so much more natural ability than I did. Some of them sensed they had the upper hand and went easy on me, slowing a step or softening their shoulders before pile-driving me into the turf.
Others seemed to relish in it. Jordan, our starting quarterback, took pleasure in asserting his dominance over me, letting me get just within reach before dancing away or tattooing me with a pass that made my hands sting for the rest of practice. Jordan was a hot dog in the truest sense of the word, making his body perform feats I couldn’t accomplish if I trained until college.
Each year, the coaches would placate me by letting me “try out” for the starting quarterback position, but I never really had a chance. Jordan beat me out every time.
Always the bridesmaid, never the bride.
—
The thing I resented most about Jordan wasn’t his god-given talents or the way he lorded them over me, but that whenever we were losing a particularly hard-fought game, he’d conveniently get injured. He’d come out of a scrum limping or nursing a wilted hand, sobbing that he couldn’t go on. The coach would look at me, riding the bench like a hobby horse, and jerk his thumb at the field.
When you’re on the B-team, there’s only three reasons you’re ever going to see action, all of which are pretty embarrassing:
1 – It’s clear your team is going to lose. This is more well-known as garbage time, when everyone is just waiting for the clock to expire so they can go home and do something else.
In my four-year stint as a backup Pop Warner quarterback, I was the king of garbage time. I orchestrated beautiful drives against my indifferent opponents, my offense methodically chipping away at that 28-point deficit with 36 seconds to go.
2 – It’s clear your team is going to win. Again you’re in garbage time, but this time at least you’re on the right side of history.
It was this scenario that netted me my one and only touchdown, when I scored on a 25-yard naked bootleg to make the final score 42-0. I distinctly remember breaking the ankles of the entire secondary with one half-assed juke and trotting into the end zone going really? My dad spent the rest of the week singing the 1950 song “Mr. Touchdown U.S.A.” to me in a way I thought even then was kind of patronizing.
3 – Somebody gets hurt. This is the most ideal situation because you get the chance to prove yourself on a field that’s actually competitive. I was Jamie Foxx in Any Given Sunday, the backup showing I had the stuff to be the star.
But it’s also the most horrifying, because it doesn’t take much mental calculation to realize if the bigger, more athletic version of you wasn’t able to withstand the physical abuse, odds were the scrawny backup didn’t have much of a chance either.
Entering a game—when you were a mere spectator moments ago—is a jarring experience.
It’s like you’re in your living room watching Saving Private Ryan and suddenly a soldier points at you and it’s your turn to land on Omaha Beach.
I’d like to say I marched out there and took control, calm and ready to prove myself, but it never worked out that way. One time I fumbled four straight snaps and trotted right back to the bench as my teammates cussed me. Another I ended up at the bottom of a pile and a defender reached under my facemask and ripped out my mouthpiece, breaking two brackets of my braces.
Best case scenario, I got the ball out of my hands as quickly as possible, minimizing damage until Jordan’s dad shamed him enough to get back out on the field.
I was Jordan’s understudy for four miserable years, no more a part of the action than a seat-filler at the Oscars.
—
As I got older, the rest of my friends went through their growth spurts, gaining muscle and adding width to their shoulders. For whatever reason, I stayed the same size. It began to hurt even when my friends went easy on me, and I started accumulating injuries. A broken finger here, a concussion there. When I was 13, I sat out of practice for five weeks with a particularly nasty neck stinger for which my doctor prescribed both Valium and Oxycontin.
When it became clear to me I no longer belonged on the same teams as my friends, I got bitter.
I hid my disappointment by saying I didn’t want to hang around with a bunch of meatheads anyway, joining marching band and falling into the tired high school dichotomy of the jocks vs. the nerds. It was a defense mechanism equivalent to taking my ball and going home.
—
“Curry with the threeeeeeeeeee!” came the call from the monkey bars.
By this point, the little fucker had abandoned all pretense of playing, as had the parents. Now I had an audience bearing witness to this basketball clinic in reverse, Michael Jordan looking up somewhere from his bowl of Wheaties with a knot in his stomach.
I knew I had to do something other than pretending I was fine with airmailing shot after shot. But what was I going to do, talk shit back to this third grader? This sweaty old man, beer titties bouncing like he’s in a Cardi B video, calling out a kid who just learned how to tie his shoes? What are the optics on that?
For all of my resentment over the splinters I accumulated watching my friends from the bench, I turned out okay. I learned I can appreciate sports—even love them—without being able to sink any shots or score any touchdowns. I still have friends from those days, the guys who took it easy on me during practice, and once in a while we wax about those Pop Warner days.
For all his athletic prowess, Jordan eventually got exposed as not having the heart of a real player, and he quit sophomore year, instead running with his own crowd of misfits who appreciated his hot dog bravado.
I decided not to say anything to my pint-sized antagonist. I did the bigger thing. I ignored him, missed a few more gimmes, and took my ball and went home.
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