I Would Understand

When we were young men—out of college, but bachelors, and easily a decade before we were fathers, my childhood best friend and I sat at his father’s kitchen table some Thanksgiving or Christmas.

The old man told us about when my friend was eight, and the old man coached his community league basketball team. He talked about when my friend made his first basket.

I knew basketball meant something to the both of them. I’d watched games with them in my own youth. I knew the old man had been something of a local high school star and gotten scholarship offers, but bypassed then to go straight to work instead.

But it was the first time I’d heard this story.

“I had to turn away from the game and cover my face,” he said. It occurred to me how few people would have known this story—that even my friend wouldn’t have, at least in that moment when it happened, for concentrating on the game. “My God, I cried like a baby.”

He told me I would understand one day.

I remember playing basketball with my own father, just after I’d started getting into the sport, watching it on TV, playing it in my friend’s driveway, getting into pickup games at the court at the playground a quarter mile from our house. So it was that my father challenged me to play him on that court, perhaps energized at the idea that after his failed attempts at getting me into baseball when I was four or five, after my AYSO soccer career ended after a single season without a goal to speak of, and after I never took up playing for any other team, maybe I’d at last arrived a sport I could succeed at.

He trounced me in a game in which I was nervous, not to mention still not very good at basketball, and that was the last time we played together.

But I remember another time, another friend’s driveway. I had a tendency to play well there, and I have to suspect it had something to do with a softer, wider rim than I was used to at the playground where I played most often. I remember a birthday party where my jump shot was untouchable and the birthday boy’s cousin, who went to another school and whom I only knew cursorily, marveled when I made shot after shot. I was tickled at the idea that, having never seen me fumble my way through a gym class or seen me play on tougher courts, he might walk away think I was some sort of elite athlete.

I played the birthday boy’s uncle one-on-one that afternoon and rained long range jumpers on him immediately after each time we checked the ball, playing make it, take it, until it was game point and he didn’t have a bucket on me. Red in the face, he lunged to block another jumper, only I faked, drove past him, and put in the lay up before he had the chance to recover.

I remember playing a lot at the playground by my house and getting better. I remember taking pride in winning one on one against a visitor whose duffel bag identified him as part of a neighboring high school’s team. It was a grind it out game where we both missed a lot more shots than we made, but he lost the handle on his dribble more than once to an unexpected bump or dip in the blacktop court that I'd grown so familiar with.

I remember thinking I was as good as one could get with next-to-no natural athletic ability.

I remember choking the lone time I played in an official tournament, three-on-three, nervous and missing shots or turning over the ball on every touch.

I remember playing a pickup game for what must have been the first time in five or six years with some people my wife knew from work. My wife had talked up that I used to play basketball all the time, and they responded that they worried I’d be too good for their game. Those first plays revealed they had nothing to worry about, as I recognized how badly my basketball cardio had deteriorated since I’d last played, not to mention that my instincts for when to try and fight through a screen and when to switch had gone to hell.

I remember dribbling a mini-basketball in the house. The house we rented in Georgia, my son’s first home. One of my wife’s sisters had given him the ball, and I couldn’t resist. I’d never been much of a ball handler in a game situation, but I had spent enough time noodling with a basketball that I could maintain a dribble, and did with that little ball for several minutes, a bit for my son’s amusement as he looked on, still more baby than toddler; more so for my own entertainment, the way I imagine anyone who’d ever had a love affair with basketball like mine couldn’t help themselves from bouncing the ball.

I remember smacking the ball one extra time, hard, to send it flying higher in the air before I caught it. My son laughed. My sister-in-law, whom I hadn’t realized was watching, said, “You’re kind of good at that.”

And I remember our next house and the playroom, and the toy basketball hoop my mother-in-law bought my son for his second birthday, maybe three feet off the ground, the rim wide and inviting. I didn’t expect my toddler son, not yet initiated into any sports, not yet demonstrating any recognizable interest in them, to make much use of this toy. But then, I remember my son picking up that same ball I’d dribbled in our last house, wandering to the hoop, and dunking it in.

I don’t think he’d seen a dunk before. And yet he knew, on instinct, what to do. After all, what else would one do with a basket and a ball?

My wife clapped, so he clapped too, clumsy with glee, his typical reaction to such praise.

I choked back the beginnings of tears.

I remembered the old man telling me about watching his son make a basket. I remembered him telling me I would understand one day.