Basketball

On December 21, 1972, I spent 97 cents on a novelty called Puff Basketball. The ball was the size and color of a plump orange and composed of a spongy material that predated nerf and was possibly used in the manufacture of certain birth-control devices. The rim was made of hard plastic and had strings for a net. The entire production relied on the wherewithal of two suction cups. When moistened, these fickle cups were supposed to adhere to any flat surface, but it was an all-or-nothing proposition. Either they’d stick so well that a grown-up would have to be recruited to rip them free, or they’d instantly pop loose, each cup making a fart-like noise.

My dad was not happy to see it. He scowled and said “Gawd dammit.” He was in a foul mood anyway because the Oakland Raiders were beating the Pittsburgh Steelers in a playoff game, and around our house the Raiders were football’s version of Richard M. Nixon: corrupt, slimy, and quite nearly invincible. But, even more than that, he was afraid that if my brothers and I played puff basketball, we’d lose our touch for shooting a regulation ball into a regulation basket, and we’d never make it big. We laughed off such logic, but it turns out he was correct.

Of course, I was eager to set up the goal and begin playing, but the vagaries of history delayed my gratification: Franco Harris' “Immaculate Reception” occurred before I could unwrap and assemble the thing, and then I had to linger in the living room with my family and in-laws to observe the proper amount of time for expressing awe.

Later, I dampened the suction cups and affixed them to an archway that separated our kitchen from the back porch. Somehow all my brothers sniffed it out from the distant living room, the way the I.T. guys at work are always the first to sniff out the leftover bagels that get deposited in the break room. Before I could release my second shot, I was surrounded by moppy-haired Maraviches.

Our back porch was the size of a storage shed and we treated it like one. A pair of sickly orange restaurant booths occupied the north half, and piled on these booths and tabletops were the kinds of junk you’d walk past at a swap meet. Several of Mom’s sprawling house plants covered the southern quarter. Against the east wall stood a wrought-iron shelf laden with books and gimcracks. So there really wasn’t room to show off your jump shot. Which was okay, because you couldn’t shoot the ball with any sense of confidence; an uncle’s emphysematic cough might be strong enough to disrupt its trajectory, if the ceiling didn’t disrupt it first. And dribbling was out of the question. You’d have better luck trying to dribble a marshmallow.

But none of that mattered. Puff Basketball was all about the dunks.

These slams came fast and furious, and to a bystander—a delicate aunt, say—it must have been a frightening blur of bony arms, inadequate mustaches, cigarettes dangling from lips. More than one humpbacked bottle of Falstaff was upended as we mixed it up there on the yellow linoleum, not three feet from the kitchen table where the women were setting out a roast baron of beef with all the trimmings.

At first the dunks were greeted with the kinds of exclamations that greet municipal fireworks displays, but that got old pretty quick when we realized that anyone with arms could dunk the thing, and soon our cheers turned to taunts and challenges. But that got old, too. And, besides, dinner was just about ready.

Like all toys, and like too many things in life, Puff Basketball was a disappointment. But this did nothing to diminish my love for shooting baskets.

In my earliest years, we had a backboard and rim affixed to a thick-trunked tree midway up our driveway—a configuration that would have made Ralph Nader bust a gasket. To perform a layup was to risk your life. A particularly wild shot might result in an explosion of sparrow feathers.

Soon we erected a self-standing goal near the top of our driveway, and that was when shooting baskets became less of an adventure and more of an obsession for me.

I shot and shot nearly every day of the year, and most of the time alone. That’s how I liked it best. Add just one individual to the equation and you could count on that person suggesting a game of one-on-one or PIG—two of the most tedious things ever invented by modern man.

More important, the presence of another person was always a distraction from the internal storylines I’d develop each day on our paved court. I’ve never seen “Rocky,” but I bet my storylines paralleled those in the Stallone movie. In my fantasies, I was always the unassuming underdog, matched up against a glamorous team that had at least one loud mouth—the type of show-off who’d never been challenged by the likes of me. This show-off was always based, to varying degrees of looseness, on Muhammad Ali.

Looking back, I now see there wasn’t much variety in those plots. Each day I’d proceed to sink sensible jumpers from all around the perimeter while the show-off tossed up clunkers and whined to the refs and argued with his teammates and coaches. Still, these games remained close to the very end so that I could drain an historically long jumper at the buzzer and then walk away as if I’d done nothing more spectacular than mail a letter.

Did I mention that in these imaginings I also happened to be an amazing fiction writer? In fact, at halftime, after the coach was finished praising me and hollering at my teammates, I’d work on my next great novel until it was time to return to action.

Well, I’ve never published a great or even a lousy novel, but I did play organized basketball in grade school.

My fifth-grade and sixth-grade teams were utter embarrassments; we were lovable losers minus the lovability. Our Catholic school’s dwindling enrollment provided a tiny pool of talent to choose from. We were short, clumsy, funny looking, and in some cases in-bred, the kind of crew that needed a Bill Murray character to whip it into shape.

For instance, there was one fellow who assumed you could carry the ball up and down the court without dribbling, as long as you came to a complete pause between each step. There was another starter who was so afraid of having the ball that he’d heave it to the first warm body he saw, including the opponents and referees. And there was our skinny center who couldn’t remember if the three-second rule applied to the offense or the defense, so he stayed out of the paint the entire game, just to be safe.

I, too, contributed to the failure in at least one ass-backwards way. These were the days when basketball trunks were shiny and notoriously brief, like something Judy Carne might have worn on “Laugh-In.” By the fourth quarter, through the convergence of perspiration, polyesters, and what Sir Isaac Newton called “The Precepts of Concavity,” one’s trunks threatened to ride into one’s anal cavity, resulting in a “snuggy” (or, if you live east of the Mississippi River, a “wedgie”). I always called attention to any snuggy and made a lot of mean comments, which probably inspired my teammates to move about on the basketball floor with extreme caution in order to avoid the shame.

There were other factors that contributed to our badness. We had no gym to practice in, so each season on two or three Saturday mornings we’d gather at the one decent hoop on the school playground. Coach would have to brush aside Crazy Jack and some neighborhood teens and dogs so we could run our layups and bounce passes. Usually if we wanted to scrimmage we’d have to recruit Crazy Jack or the neighborhood teens in order to field two squads of five.

We lost a lot of games those two seasons—all of them, I think.

In the seventh grade I switched to a more prosperous school, where I played for an above-average team that had an above-average gym and extraordinary cheerleaders. The gym was nice, but the cheerleaders were what I liked the best.

By then I was an above-average shooter but totally uninterested in, and unsuited for, the tougher facets of the game, like rebounding and playing defense. In high school, because the coaches demanded that you rebound and play defense, I hung up my Chuck Taylor sneakers before the freshman season even began, and I never played organized basketball again.

But for some fifteen years I continued to follow the sport with a zeal that now makes me blush.

Then, suddenly, I quit watching college and pro basketball, cold turkey. I'd simply had enough of the three-point shot, noisy dunks, countless free throws, droopy shorts, high-fives, lazy officiating, sweaty faces, and the pouty coaches who stand on the fringes with their arms outstretched, as if demanding an explanation for why they’ve been treated so unjustly all their lives.

I haven’t gone back and never will, especially now that all the players’ bodies, including the whites of their eyes, are covered with tattoos.

A few years ago we moved into a suburban home with a regulation goal in the driveway, and I’ve once again taken to shooting hoops. The backboard is weathered and chipping, and with each shot taken a few shards drizzle down. My sons enjoy shooting around with me as well, and I worry a little that this backboard might collapse someday—even perhaps in the Darryl Dawkins “Chocolate Thunder-Flying, Robinzine-Crying, Teeth-Shaking, Glass-Breaking, Rump-Roasting, Bun-Toasting, Wham-Bam-I-Am-Jam” kind of way.

In any event, we’re brave and we carry on, and before long my kids and I are flinging and punting all sorts of balls at the hoop—kick balls, soccer balls, tennis balls, golf balls, and a crappy Wal Mart-branded yellow thing that’s shaped less like a basketball and more like Sam Walton’s skull. In these moments there’s too much noise and action and too many neighbors passing by and remarking about the weather or the kids’ talents (“sign ‘em up!”) for me to concentrate on any dramatic storylines where I vanquish a most villainous foe.

I suppose that’s okay. I’ve already fought a thousand such battles and won them all—in dramatic fashion, no less. It’s time to move on.