Basketbe-all

In Wellesley the other day, I shot around a bit in the driveway with my nephew Daniel. He’s a tall, lean kid, coping with what they’ve diagnosed as Asperger’s, which in my day would have been termed introversion or shyness. Ball is not his #1 sport, but he’s got a good quality goal out there and his instinct is to shoot. So he dribbles a little and shoots, like most kids, concentrating on shots long and flashy. Takes me back.

Sometimes I think PhD in Russian is the best evidence of my contrarianism, but in some ways it’s even odder that I drove myself so hard to become good in basketball, for no good reason, and never quite got there. Sometime in junior high school, back in the days of Worthy-Perkins-and-Jordan (chronologically), I decided that being a skinny white soccer boy just didn’t cut it. It being North Carolina, I needed to get some respect on the basketball court. So time and again and again I forced my way onto the court at lunch, sometimes the only white guy, almost always the worst person on the court. I usually got the ball when I rebounded it or stole it. “Pass the ball over here, soccer boy,” I would hear, but I payed them as little mind as I could, just concentrated on the basics: box out, set picks, play D, slap backboard on layups.

On Friday nights, I often went to the gym and shot free throws, which is ridiculous, because nobody shoots free throws in pick-up and I knew I wasn’t ever gonna play organized ball. I think it was straight purism: I just wanted to shoot them well.

Not that it ever did much good. I was fast, I could jump, but poor fine motor skills made me a bad shot, and not having dribbled for hours a day during childhood left me without a good handle. So why did I do it? Why did I care so much about developing a skill of value to none and gain the validation of a quasi-literate underclass? Most of the soccer team didn’t bother. None of the cross-country team did.

Clearly I was driven by a general insecurity, a need to curry favor far and wide, of which I’ve written elsewhere on the Grouse. But also a general desire to fuck with peoples’ heads, to be the validectorian who could dunk and do bong hits. The latter, at least, I mastered.