Me and Mrs. (Basketball) Jones
Well, there you go. I've finally managed to cram two stupid seventies song titles into one blog title. I think I can retire happy now...unless somehow I can manage to scoop the trifecta by calling one "Knowing Me Knowing You and a Dog Named Boo on a Horse with No Name" or something.
Actually, that sort of sounds like life at my house. Except if we ever get a horse, it WILL have a name, and it will be something deeply irritating like "Groucho" or "Fluffball" or "Mr. Hoofy" or something and it will have to sleep in our bed.
Just like THE GODFATHER – but with a happy horsey ending!
Anyway, I started out here to explain this particular blog's exceedingly stupid title. You see, I have a mistress. Her name is Hoops. (Yes, it's a stupid name for a mistress, I guess, but it could be something like Making World's Largest Rubber Band Ball, so cut me some slack.)
I came to basketball late. I always played other sports like baseball and football, and had a long tennis thing in early adulthood because my ex-wife's family played. Tennis taught me humility of a sort, because my father-in-law was already about sixty-something and I was at my youthful swiftest and fastest and he used to crush the bejabbers out of me without ever moving. He'd just stand in one place and keep me running back and forth from one side of the court to the other with spins and lobs until I collapsed in a puddle of tears and imprecations.
But I learned an important lesson from that: never underestimate the cruel power of age and guile. This is what I now tell my children every morning before I untie them and release them from their beds.
Anyway, once I was about thirty I began looking around for a team sport to play regularly. I like team sports – I like the collaboration and I like the strategy – but they're hard to find for us older guys. See, there's a name for people over thirty who play tackle football – "stupid". Also "multiply fractured". At the time, though, the main alternative was softball, since I wasn't really in condition or of a skill level to play serious hardball baseball. Adult league softball, much as I love it, is not a sport to keep you in great shape. Let's face it, any sport where the pitcher usually looks like a department store Santa on his day off, and where you can play the field for at least three innings without ever having to put down your beer, is probably not going to keep your cardiovascular system cardiovasculating much.
"Soccer", I hear you say. Greatest game in the world! Loved by billions! Well, so was Britney Spears, but you don't see me with any of her albums.
See, although the world calls it "football", soccer had another name when I was growing up back in the distant sixties and seventies. We called it "punishment", because our gym teachers used to threaten to make us play soccer if we didn't behave well. They knew we regarded any game where you had to run endlessly and couldn't use your hands as a particularly painful form of Communism.
So, finding myself at an athletic crossroads at about age 30, I started hanging out down at the local gym near my house. Of such things are great sports careers and more than a few deviancy arrests made.
The game at that gym was basketball. I started to join in. And, boy, was I crap. (That's the British-English way of saying I sucked.) I was a fair athlete, but I'd never played organized basketball so I knew very little of how the game was played. Most of the people I began playing with at that gym had at least been shooting baskets all their lives, which I hadn't. Baseball, football – these things were reflexes from hours and hours of childhood play. Basketball was like learning a language.
And, as it turned out, a wonderful, complicated language. I won't wax too rhapsodic about the game itself here, although I might some other time, but it's a grand combination of team play and individual skills, of strategy and reflexes, and it happens at a faster rate of decision and play than almost any other team sport. (It may be slightly less cool than that Mayan game where the losers all got killed, but I'm not really interested in bringing that one back.) I fell in love with it. Eventually I found a regular game at my local YMCA and started playing several days a week, and I've now been doing it for pretty much the last twenty years.
As mentioned, I'm not going to go into too many details about the game itself. But one need that it really fulfills, I've noticed, is it gives me a certain amount of Guy Time. Now, contrary to what the women reading this might suspect, not all Guy Time is about farting, belching, and complaining about women. Especially at my local YMCA, which is probably one of the most liberal areas in the country. No, at our Y, we fart, belch, and talk about how much we RESPECT women. (Especially when they fart and belch.)
Okay, that's not quite true. But what Guy Time does mean is a certain pathetic remnant of boy culture that I didn't realize I was missing until I got it back again, a certain crude, rude, silliness, mock-insults, shouting, and of course, talking about pointless details of local sports interest.
Yes, you can get any of that stuff on the internet these days (as well as pictures of people having sex with farm animals or insurance professionals) but there's something much more satisfying about Guy Talk, in a very Junior High School way, if you're hanging out with someone while it's happening, doing something pointless but fun. In other cultures I'm sure pitching pennies, kickin' it at the barber shop, fixing a tractor, or making Martyrdom Videos fills the bill, but for me it's basketball and the YMCA.
I don't know why, but there's just something fulfilling about screaming "My kid and her second-grade team play better defense than you guys!" at a bunch of middle-aged male friends. Knowing that most of them get an immense amount of respect in real life makes it even better. (We have CEOs, billionaires, and founders of quite famous companies in our game. But if they have a crap jump shot or they bite on an obvious fake, they are as humbled as the lowliest of the lowly.) And getting yelled back at is just as good. I actually enjoy how much stick I'm given when I do something stupid. It means I'm one of the gang. It means I smell like everyone else. You know, Y chromosome stuff.
And that's what it comes down to, I guess. I mean, I love, love, love basketball. But I also really love the chance to be a stupid, silly, loud-mouthed guy messing around with a bunch of other guys who all enjoy playing together (most of the time, at least.) I would never have thought it was a big need for me – I never have "guys nights out", all my closest male friends live out of the area, I happily spend most of my time with just my wife and kids – but it turns out I do need it. It's a powerful, almost unconscious connection to childhood, to the good side of being male and of being young. It brings back those days when summers lasted years, when you'd play all day and then collapse into the grass and stare up at the clouds and swap gross jokes and life was all ahead and above and OUT THERE.
Not bad for the cost of a Y membership, even in these inflated times. And, yeah, my jump shot is still not going to make anyone sit up and take notice – but do you really think I care?
Posted on
May 04, 2008
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08:22 PM
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