Hempstead, N.Y., February, 2, 1995—I played basketball in the Recreation Center the other night. As usual, I walked in as cocky as could be, strutting my towering 5' 8" frame and non-jumping white man's body; I look more out of place on a basketball court than 50-year-old men in Yankee uniforms. To top it off, my outfit looked like a cross between Woody Harrelson's clothes in White Men Can't Jump and what you might find in a Salvation Army bin: yellowing socks, beat-up sneakers with ripped laces, a slightly bloodstained and somewhat stretched T-shirt and a pair of stained lacrosse shorts I bought back in the '80s. I think somebody actually laughed when I walked to the main court with the best players on it and asked who had the next game.
It took me a three-game wait to get on the court that night. That's OK; some nights it takes as many as five or six. Before I finally checked the ball in to the six-foot black guy I was guarding, I turned to look at my team—one white guy of about six feet and two black guys about the same—and my opponents, my man and a few black guys over six-three or so—and I smiled. My man took the ball from me, looked at me kind of strangely, chuckled and passed the ball in.
When he laughed at me, all he saw was a grubby little white kid handing him the ball. But I knew something he couldn't tell from just looking at my outward appearance: I knew I could play. I already knew I had him beat.
I can't blame the guy for underestimating me, though; I used to think it simple enough to take people at face value, too. But then I educated myself in the classroom of a basketball court.
Why a basketball court? Because you can learn as much between the lines on the floor as you can between the lines in any book. Sometimes I think you can learn a little more.
In the grace and beauty of the game, one can find an intensely personal euphoria that is hard to match in any other area of life. When one loves the game, one lives the game. You learn to feel the heartbeat in every bounce of the ball. You recognize the sweet feeling of a jump shot rolling off your fingers—an expectant joy fulfilled by the relief of seeing the ball arc gently over the waiting rim and splash into the bottom of the net. If basketball ended there, even on that basic level, it would be enough for me to write volumes on.
But it doesn't; it grows. Basketball ceases to be wholly private when you leave the backyard hoop and enter the playground, just as your life stops being entirely your own when you enter society. And though the feeling of the personal game never leaves you, it undergoes a miraculous evolution. There is still the shooting and the dribbling, but now there is also passing and defense. There is the sensation of something more.
One realizes the potential the team game offers almost immediately. When your teammate is down, you pat him on the back and encourage him; when he is lazy, you get in his face, insult his questionable parentage, and get him to play hard. He does the same to you. If you win a lot of games, your teammates communicate a lot and you learn to rely on each other; if not, you sit on the sidelines and watch other people do it.
In that respect, basketball is a lot like life. You take care of your buddies; they take care of you. If you can't handle that concept, you either watch everyone else lead happy lives or you become a hermit and shoot jumpers in your backyard for the rest of your life.
But basketball can also teach us an apparently much more difficult lesson. On the court, it doesn't matter what race or sexual preference or religion or sex you are. Players learn that lesson sooner of later; yet, just as in life, there are a lot of punks who never do.
You see it all the time on the court; unfortunately, you also see it too much in life. People read appearances and they don't respect each other. They see a short white kid on a basketball court and they make fun of him. They see a black man as an attorney and make cruel jokes. They see a woman in a military uniform and cry "foul."
Wasn't it about 30 years ago that some genius said we should judge each other by what's inside and not by one's skin color? It's sad to see that in all this time, not too many of us bothered to listen.
If you don't believe me, just look at some of the problems that happened here last semester. From silent protests to one-sided demonstrations to suspensions, a real sense of fear developed, as administrators and students danced on eggshells to avoid any charges of racism they could be accused of (a fear that eventually fostered a racial McCarthyism on this campus). Evidently, even after 30 years, nothing has changed.
Who cares where we came from? It's one thing to be proud of your culture, and quite another thing to hate or condemn someone because they aren't a part of it. It matters what kind of person your are inside and if you can respect others based on who they are inside as well.
In basketball it's a little bit different.
My team was terrible that night; we lost by about 10 points. But when I walked off the court to get a drink, I had the respect of every man in that gym. It didn't matter that I was this stumpy little white kid with a brillo pad where his hair should be. What mattered was that I owned that court, that I made my team better and that I cared about the game. What mattered was that when I walked off the court, some big guy, a real player, grabbed me and asked me to run with him later.
It wasn't important that a couple of nobodies had just gotten spanked by a team that was unbeaten. What counted was that when that team eventually lost, quite badly as a matter of fact, it was to three skywalkers and some little white kid with a bad haircut and a mean jumper.
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