Photo by Grant McKeekin, check out his Flickr here.
Basketball runs in my family.
My uncles from my Mother's side of the family were high school standouts for the El Paso High Tigers, with my younger uncle playing semi-pro basketball in Mexico for a time. My older cousin Chris was a starter for his high school team in Albuquerque, and was quite a good one too. I remember travelling with my family to his games in Las Cruces when La Cueva would play a local team there, like Mayfield or Onate. My uncle Emilio was a local legend in El Paso, who often played pick up games against the famous 1966 Texas-El Paso team that won the NCAA championship, and even played for Don Haskins for a couple of years before a devastating knee injury derailed his hopes of turning pro. His two daughters were starters for their ladies high school team, the Hanks High School Lady Knights, before going off to college. Another cousin played for his local high school team while his father was stationed in Germany. My sister played some junior high school ball for her team, and even my brother gave a crack at trying to play hoops. He wasn't bad, but decided to do track instead.
Myself? With this amazing history in my family, and the potential for possible adequacy, and perhaps even stardom in my genes, I should have been amazing at this sport that I had an interest in. right?
But no, I sucked hard.
No, that's a bit too harsh. Despite my interest in the game (I'm a lifelong San Antonio Spurs fan), the skills weren't there. Up until high school I stood at five feet, had no rhythm or feel for the game, and barely able to control dribbling the ball. So, to put it a little kinder, I was absolutely abysmal at basketball. A vortex of suck, as the cool kids on the basketball blogs put it.
Needless to say, I tended to be on terrible teams when it came to P.E. basketball teams, especially in junior high, where coaches, out of disinterest or laziness, just allowed the kids to form their own teams. Naturally, the kids that were good, or at least competent, tended to group together, creating two or three super-teams which naturally walloped the out of the five or six squads made up of scrubs. So, for the month and a half that basketball was organized for that particular grading period, P.E. became an exercise of suiting up in our uniforms of old t-shirts and shorts that were a couple of washes away from being used to wash a car (my uncle coined the term P.L.C.'s for these clothes, which stood for Para Llavar El Carro) and getting smoked by fifty. Yes, it was every bit as fun as it sounds.
It was in the final few games that my particular band of unathletic misfits (who had the audacity to call themselves the Celtics, which may have jinxed the real life Celtics who went 32-50 that season and missed the playoffs), went against the team that had dubbed themselves the Rockets, who were sitting pretty at the top of our makeshift division, with the playoffs set to begin the next week in a winner gets absolutely nothing, round robin tournament before we switched over to Dodgeball or something along those lines.
Predictably, things started off badly. That particular team had at least two of the starters from the Slider 7th Grade A team, with at least a couple of the bench guys from the B team thrown into their mix. They could play, and had been since they were kids. My team on the other hand, could be summed up in the following statement: we weren't big, but we were slow. So it wasn't a surprise that after twenty minutes of play, my team was down by double digits. My memory is hazy, but the point differential was probably in the thirties or forties. It wasn't pretty.
Things only got worse after what consisted of our halftime, which was generally break long enough to go run to the outside water fountain, which was usually the one fountain on the school whose refreshment tasted faintly like the pipes. Still, whatever was in that faintly lead tasting hydration must have ignited some superhuman gene within our opponents, because we were getting destroyed at an even more breakneck pace than before. It was like watching the Seven Seconds or Less Suns, but with you being the guy this time, you're on the receiving end of the beating.
That's when my teammates started leaving. It should have been expected. At some point, no matter how hard you might try, there are certain things that you just aren't able to do, simply because physically, you can't. In this case, after all the losing from the past few weeks, as the schedules were far from balanced, the running up the score on others, and the current annihilation in progress, sometimes people reach their breaking points. And in this case, someone did. I don't remember the kids name, but I just remember the look of disgust on his face that preceded a quiet, cracking voice, still halfway between manhood and childhood croaking "Screw this." One moment, he was playing matador defense against the other team's point guard, the next moment, he suddenly turned and walked sullenly, dejectedly off the court. The dam had broken, as once one person leaves, it's hard to keep other people feeling the same way from doing so. In the span of minutes, I found that I was now very much alone on the basketball court.
This created a quandary, as the other team and I, were at something of an impasse. The game was still going on, and coaches were watching to make sure that we were participating. Quitting wasn't something that reflected well on one's P.E. grade, even if it was the difference from getting an A or a B on an otherwise useless class period. On the other hand, there wasn't a team on the floor anymore, so technically, how could the game still be continue? Realistically, I could leave the game, walk away, and no one would have blamed me for doing so.
Except I couldn't do that. Call it stubbornness, call it pride, or maybe some uncrushable part of my sense of self that I had yet to discover, but I couldn't walk away. The idea was unacceptable to me. Time was ticking, and a decision needed to be made. I had the ball in my hands, and five other people were standing, wondering just what I was going to do next.
I had no one to inbound the ball to me, I just bounced it once and charged in, five on one, myself against the world.
If this were an episode of Saved By The Bell, or at the very least an episode of ABC's After School Special, I suppose this would be the moment where i discovered some sort of hidden ability, an Allen Iverson-esque ability of basketball in which I could play in isolation, dominate the game, and somehow lead myself to a comeback. Or that my teammates, inspired by my stubborn determination, would come roaring back to my side, and through some mixture of grit, luck, and determination, we would have emerged victorious.
But no, I got destroyed, 70-something to 4. And I was extremely lucky to get the four. The score would have probably been higher if the whistles not eventually sounded the final whistle for all of the games on the playground courts. I have to admit, I was slightly embarrassed. I hadn't expected to do well, although I didn't expect a trouncing along those lines. However, I do remember feeling oddly proud of myself that I had at least played the entire period, and played my hardest, even though it wasn't very well.
The next day, after suiting up, I passed by the dot-matrixed printed standings of our divisions, which usually told us which playground court to go to, along with where we stood in our divisions. Out of curiosity I looked at my team's record, and was surprised to see that we had somehow picked up a win. Well, I wasn't surprised, my mind was blown. I asked the couch if he had made a typo, and he said, no, you guys picked up a win yesterday.
I immediately sought out one of the guys from the other team the day before. I asked him, what happened?
"You won the game." He said simply.
"How?" I asked, confused more than ever. "You kicked my teams ass, and then my ass right after that."
"You didn't give up." He said simply, looking at me like I was a complete idiot. "Everyone left, but you stayed and you still played. So we went to coach after the game and forfeited. You earned that win." And then he walked off, leaving me staring as he walked out into the school grounds as my band of misfits slowly dragged their sneaks to today's latest trouncing (we lost hard, breaking our one game win streak.)
Despite the rather unbelievable circumstances of this story, it is a true one, and I've told it as closely to the truth as a can, for it did happen almost 19 years ago. And it has taught me quite a bit as I've reflected over time. That being persistent and confident in one's self can help lead you to where you need to go. That people will respect the effort that you place in a cause, even if it at times may be a hopeless one. And that at times, even though something may seem hopeless or dire, perhaps it is better to
Maybe I do have something to add to my family's basketball history after all. A story about a guy that took on the world, got beaten up in the process, and yet still came out with a victory, in his own way. This is not going to be a story that will be held in esteem, nor will be told in the nostalgic, sepia tones that the tales of my uncles' hoop dreams are told then and now. It's a story that will likely die with me, and will likely be forgotten. But the important thing is that it happened. And for that brief moment, as I stood in the hallway of the middle school, with the rest of my gym classmates filing past me, I might have, for that brief moment, felt like they did, when their stories were the moment, when they were young, and they were writing their stories on the hardwood.
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