whatiwas

The backboards on the basketball hoops in the parking lot behind me are the flimsy, cheap aluminum kind that rattle like an aging city bus driving over a pothole unless you make every shot seamlessly. I practiced free throws this morning, clanking nearly every shot, lost fundamentals having become an intellectual process rather than the fluid action of my early youth. I shot fifty, made twenty, and decided to stop counting, just putting up shot after shot, hating every cacophonous miss and thinking of the things my father used to always say--elbow in, use your legs, smooth, pretty, follow through, follow your shot.

I'm never going to play my father in basketball again, a decision made by neither my father nor myself, but rather the doctors who removed a mess of scar tissue which once constituted the cartilage in his right knee. The official decree was that he not do anything to place undue stress on the joint, which has yet to stop him from overexerting himself with his clients at the youth shelter but, as is the case with most things relative to my father's actual self, has precluded him from any interaction with me.

Sometime in the five-year stint my family spent in Hawaii, basketball became something of a war between my father and me, measured in half-court battles to fifteen, by ones, loser out, fundamental rules. I rarely spoke with the confident bravado masculine culture demands in such instances; dad was over three hundred by then, as tall as he's ever been, dwarfing my five-and-a-half foot frame so menacingly it would have been easy not to realize his greatest asset wasn't his size, but his speed. Dad was fast in every sense of the word; once he got up to speed, he was always faster than I in a dead sprint (and, I suspect, in spite of the weight of age, arthritis, and the aforementioned ailing knee, still is), and his lateral motion skills, honed by years of playing tight end, were something I can't even describe here. In retrospect, it's a wonder he didn't simply bowl me over on every offensive possession, but I suppose he was seeking a challenge.

He was equally my most fun and most challenging opponent: larger, faster, and far more skilled, I had to rely upon my one asset: my brain. I never was much of a shooter, but when the sudden lengthening of my arms and legs which marked the beginning of my adolescence threw my balance out the window, the odds of my hitting any shots went out the window. My only hope was to get as close as I could to the basket and pray I could get the ball up and over his head before he swatted it (as was often the case). I was never much of a flashy ballhandler either, although I was far more capable of performing the inane tricks these streetballers pull nowadays than I'd ever imagined. At the time, though, I stuck with what I knew; fake, drive, fake, shoot, attempt the impossible feat of darting around dad's mammoth box-out to get the rebound, repeat.

I haven't played dad since Hawaii, I don't think; by that time, I was writing and reading and acting and thinking, and he was working or stewing. By now, I've all but lost what marginal skill I had. All that remains are my patented top-of-the-key ball fake, and the determined, suicidal recklessness with which I throw myself at the basket. I'm faster, now, and even with my diminished skills, I find myself able to throw the ball over any set of outreached hands.

I just need to follow my fucking shot.