21: A Basketball Love Story

I have played basketball more than any other sport I have played in my life. I have loved it, and it has loved me back.

There was a period between the second half of high school and the time I spent serving in the Army 10 years later where racquetball threatened to overtake basketball as "my sport." I can thank a cool girl for the high school intro to racquetball. I must blame myself for joining the Army, though I can say it worked out better than I had any right to expect. In any event, racquetball takes more planning and gear, and is largely a niche sport played by old guys with elbow bands, knee braces, and gym bags that would be good for smuggling contraband or zipping up dead bodies to dump into rivers. Perhaps not coincidentally, it is a sport with an ever dwindling following.

Basketball, on the other hand, is evergreen.

I played incessantly as a kid, mostly on a 9' 7" goal my dad hung across the gutter over the carport of our house in Jacksonville. Our driveway offered a decent court, big enough for 3 on 3 if you could find enough kids to play. And my house ended up being the spot where the neighborhood kids would all come to play. There would be a rolling pickup game during every daylight hour on the weekends in the summertime, with musty water from the hose or, if we were luck, original Gatorade at the ready as the hot and muggy north Florida sun hovered over the court like a fog. The game would only relent for the inevitable afternoon thunderstorm, or when Mom and Dad came home from work and walked through the court after parking their cars on the street fronting our yard so we could keep playing and they could keep their cars dent free. Pulling cars into and backing them out of the driveway before and after basketball was a major part of my driver's education.

The court did have some...idiosyncrasies. For one, it had an infamous cinderblock planter that stood about two and a half feet high and extended maybe three feet out from the enclosed wall of the garage to the left of the otherwise open carport in the center of our house. The planter patiently posted up in its inconvenient spot, happy to slice a lick of skin from any young knees that scraped by too close on the way to the rim. Amazingly, it was largely left hungry, a threat more Lamarcus than Hakeem. Compounding this insult to its bad reputation, the planter was also an ideal launching point for us to cheat our landbound leaping ability and short stature to dunk with all of the ferocity of Dr. J, though none of the grace.

My court also featured a backboard that had a bit of a swivel and give to it, likely due to it being the only basketball goal my dad ever installed. If you used the backboard, you'd have to hit high and wide of the square so the ball would kind of slide down into the hoop. It was a true home court advantage that my modified Kevin McHale/Mark Aguire post-up game...with lots of pump fakes, spins, ball english, and a pivot foot I swear I never lifted...took full advantage of, especially when my buddies who played for their high school teams came over to shoot.

Sometimes my dad would come out to the driveway to play. He was much more of a tennis guy and was never great, but it was a chance to be with him. When I did coax him out, he was known for wearing the green surgical scrub tops he wore to work as an x-ray tech, weird little hook shots that went in more than they looked like they should, and using his always impressive girth to bounce me out of the way if I tried to drive to the basket. This aggressive sumo bump, usually accompanied with a rhythmic, gapped tooth chuckle that Count Sesame would appreciate, frustrated me to tears when I was younger and made me laugh when I got good enough to dust it.

After a game or two, Dad would head inside to make dinner or lick his wounds and I'd be left on the court alone. I loved him being out there with me, for me. It just wasn't his thing, and he was never in great shape physically so it was actually pretty rough on him some days even though he was a relatively young dad (he was 40 when I was 14).

Still, I wanted more. I made a pact. When I had kids, I'd play basketball...not shoot, not just play HORSE...but play with and against them for as long and often as I could. This was my dream, the definition of success and happiness as a father.

Time ticked. YMCA games at 8 am on chilly Saturday mornings where the final score might end in single digits for both teams. A junior high game where we once won a game 99-29 (pre-three point shot era) and were mad that a missed buzzer beater didn't let us “break the clock” (hit a hundred). Six hour long "21" marathons with my friends. A three-on-three tournament where the coin flipped to decide who got opening possession ended with the coin spinning and coming to a stop on its edge. Wonders, each and every one.

Then, the clock ticked harder, and the tidal march toward adulthood began in earnest. High school, then college graduation. The military. Marriage. And a more pragmatic and varied set of priorities adventures and less time for hoops. But I still loved the game and still remembered the dream.

Finally, my son Jack was born in 2000. He was almost two feet long when he was delivered from the surreal physical impossibility of my wife's c-section. I left the delivery room with Jack so the doctors could reassemble my wife and looked into his alert eyes for the first time, amazed and wondering what to do next. Jack made it obvious by taking his first shot, a perfect rainbow of pee arcing up off the table. I grabbed a hospital towel and called the nurse for help defense.

Jack, not content with his solid start as a taller human baby, grew. His first basketball goal was one of those pudgy plastic ones that was adjustable to three feet and comes with a sponge ball. He attacked it while wearing a full Buzz Lightyear costume, wings and all. "To infinity...and dee (not bee) yond!" he'd cry as he jacked up foam rubber one handers from the couch and around the living room. I'd lay on my back on the carpet and rebound, bouncing the ball back off his hands and head, both of us laughing.

We moved from the Atlanta suburbs to Omaha in 2005, as you will occasionally do. Jack played and I coached church-sponsored youth league basketball. He was always the tallest kid, and often the best player. Our Omaha teams were interesting. One year, our squad of six year olds had one kid who was a complete beginner who wore a turban when he played, another who had one hand (not figuratively, but literally) and a bit of an anger issue, and a third who drooled a lot. We were not "all airport." But we definitely held our own because Jack was dominant, at least as far as first graders go. And the moments when we'd get unexpectedly positive results from less likely quarters? Gold.

We moved back to Georgia in 2007, because…did I mention we lived in Omaha for two winters? Anyway, we purchased a new house with an appealingly large, mostly flat driveway. And now the clock slowed down for a second, and the tick was replaced by the sound of a bouncing ball. This was it, This was the place I'd set up shop to make my dreams come true. The father-son stage where I'd live up to my goal to play one-on-one, full out 21, with my sons.

I smiled and drove to the sporting goods store shortly after we moved in to buy a basketball goal.

The court was a big step up from the driveway court of my youth. We got a top of the line 72" inch glass backboard mounted in cement across the driveway from our three-car garage. Plenty of space on all sides, no planter lying in wait. The goal had a crank to lower the hoop when the guys were younger and couldn't get the ball to the rim. This same feature got just as much use when the kids were older but still short and wanted to dunk.

While not as quirky as my boyhood court, thankfully our new Georgia court has some interesting features. I'd later determine that the spot where we mounted the goal was actually at the top of a hill that fed down not just into our own large side yard, but into the even larger adjacent grassy utility right of way that spilled away from our property. This meant missed shots and loose balls not stopped by the low courtside bushes to the left of the goal would cascade through the trees and roll about 150 feet away from our court. I turned this annoying feature to my advantage, eventually, exercising my "dad rights" to send Jack sprinting after the ball to tire him out and get an extra blow for myself.

Our first games were delightful. I'd teach, Jack would always listen and try to take the lesson to heart. The wide eyes, the earnestness, the clumsy, but full-out effort...sometimes from me more than him, if we're being honest. My dream had come true. It was pure and wonderful…and even better, a daily event.

Our games were also occasionally enlivened by my younger son, Luke, who has never cared much for sports but can find creative ways to make anything we do more weird and fun. I'd have to coax Luke on the court, sometimes with a "get out there and play" push of solidarity from his mom. Luke's early go-to move consisted of sitting on the ball like a chicken on an egg. Eventually, Jack and I got the message and stopped inviting Luke to play out of respect for this unstoppable move. I'm pretty sure that this was Luke's objective all along, and despite my own agenda, I'm not mad about it.

When Jack was little...well, young...he was never little...I'd spot him 15 points in a game of 21.

"You want that one again, buddy? No problem."

But as he grew up and I grew older, the spot dropped and my effort level increased. The helpful tips didn't exactly stop, but they became a little more challenging, a little more laced with smack.

"You gonna let an old man beat you to ball like that?"

“50 year old dad, coming around the corner.”

Calling out "backboard" or "game time" with the ball still in the air.

Jack was a competitive kid, and he never seemed to mind the losing streaks. And when he'd breakthrough and win? Beaming from ear to ear. Both of us.

I guess I should mention here that I wasn't the kind of dad who let my kid win, even when he was young. Now, calm down. It wasn't like I was The Great Santini out there bouncing balls off of his forehead and snarling at him to "squirt 'em!" When he was a little kid, we goofed around a lot. We always laughed. We played "around the world" and "tip horse", the later incessantly (and eventually my only recourse for beating the lanky bastard). And I'd give him a chance when we played one-on-one...before I moved out to the perimeter, used the backboard or my left hand, or some other pain-in-the-ass dad move for the win. No belly bump, but somewhere my own dad is laughing that "ah-ah-ah."

Was I a jerk for consciously caring about the score against my kid? No, I don't think so. Jack never thought so. These were happy hours, and thousands of them. I don't remember any cross or frustrated words ever between us when we played. Every game ended in a real hug. Most ended with me embarrassingly telling Jack how when I was younger and thought of being a father, the game we just played was what I always dreamed of. Sometimes, after we were done, we'd both lay sweating in the driveway looking up at an impossibly blue afternoon sky and talk about his best shots or what we were having for dinner or something or nothing. The clock would stop ticking at all in those moments. It was perfect.

But, trust me, the clock neve4r stops completely and my L's would come soon enough. Eventually, the 15-point spot became 10. And then one day, it dropped away completely. I was 52 and probably shrinking from my younger height of 6' 1"; Jack was 16 and scrapping 6' 4", then a few minutes later, 6' 6".

I hung in for another year holding my own but at some point, he was too tall, too fast, too springy…and really, in the end, just too good for me to hang.

I mostly smiled when my inevitable losses started sprinkling, then showering, then flooding me out and washing me away. I didn't love learning that I was getting older, but I didn't mind my son being the one to provide the lesson.

See? Not a jerk. How could I be anything but delighted at this, at us, at him...at this dream I got to walk through wide awake?

The last time I won a game was in the summer of 2017. As had been the case for a while at the point, the win was a triumph of lung-bursting effort and unexpectedly good free throw shooting from me, and of cheery indifference and a missed bunny or two from Jack. Once I had a big lead, he came storming back with obvious concern. But I was lucky enough to squeak it out.

It had been a few weeks since my previous win. It has now been a few years since the last time I scored 21 on Jack.

Later that year, we left Georgia for California. My job was the culprit and no one was thrilled. But…that clock keeps ticking.

We left the house and the driveway and the goal and the hill. I walked across the driveway, way from the echoes of a thousand happy games. I gave one last look at the faded paint on the concrete and the ball-shaped dents in the garage doors. I remembered the sounds, and the sun on my face when I'd lie down on the ground next to my son with the sweat rolling off of me, tired and thrilled and filled with all the love a father and life-time hooper can feel. I hugged Jack on our court one last time before we got in the car and drove away.

My wife cried. She knew I didn't want to let go. I didn’t let go. Never will. But I got in the car and left the court of my dreams.

I have played basketball more than any other sport I have played in my life. I have loved it, and it has loved me back in ways I never could have hoped would happen. My day isn't completely over. There are basketball hoops in California, too. But the sun is setting now, and I am looking at it spin and slide down the backboard of the sky. I smile and know I’m lucky. And I think about hanging in to see my son run it back with his own son some day.