hoops
by Burt Prelutsky
I used to love basketball when I was a kid. First, my dad attached a basket to our garage, and I would spend hours at a time practicing my shooting. Then, when I was eight or nine years old, while one of my older brothers was attending UCLA, John Wooden came out from Indiana and taught fast-break basketball to the Bruins. And that clinched my devotion to the game.
Although most people remember the championship teams anchored by the likes of Lew Alcindor and Bill Walton, I recall the earlier teams I first started rooting for with players named Stanich and Sheldrake, guys who were all well under six and a half feet tall, but who could run the legs off the opposition.
When I entered junior high, all that practice paid off. In the seventh grade, I set the record for kids my age and size in the two-minute basketball test. In this phys ed event, you took your first shot from the free-throw line, recovered the ball, dribbled outside the key, took a shot, recovered the ball, dribbled outside the key, and so on and so forth for 120 seconds. I made 24 baskets, or one every five seconds. Frankly, I’m still amazed. It’s not as if I sank every shot, and some of the bounces were rather erratic. But I am also amazed that I can still remember how many baskets I made after 50-odd years, when I can barely recall what I had for lunch today.
The following year, I sank 27 shots. But by then I was older and a little bigger, so I was in a different classification. As luck would have it, some kid in that particular group held the record for the entire school. He’d made 29. Or so he claimed. Back then, I figured he’d cheated. Half a century later, I still think so.
Over the years, I found my interest in the game waning. It wasn’t just that I preferred playing tennis and watching baseball. I came to feel the game, itself, had become tacky. Players began to take more pride in their trash –talking ability than in dribbling or passing.
I came to think that the NBA should start drafting their referees from the boxing fraternity, guys experienced in warning fighters to break cleanly and not punch in the clinches. At the same time, the refs stopped calling such obvious fouls as traveling and double-dribbling -- anything, in fact, that might discourage fan-favorites from showboating to their hearts content.
I don’t blame the players or the coaches, the owners or the league. Charging the prices they do, they have to give the fans what they want, the same way as any other form of lowbrow entertainment, from soap operas to wrestling. And, clearly, what the fans want, actually demand, is a lot of scoring -- and for a lot of that to come in the form of dunking.
Fans are so excited by the sight of a player dunking the ball that at the annual all star game, they set time aside for a dunking competition. What makes it a particularly moronic activity is that nobody is even guarding the participants. They just go out there and ham it up -- like the Harlem Globetrotters, but without their class, humor or memorable theme song, “Sweet Georgia Brown.”
What, I wonder, is it about guys seven feet tall dunking a basketball in a hoop 10 feet off the floor that thrills these ninnies? All that these giants have to do is lift their arms over their heads, and the ball is already at hoop level. The basket, in fact, has remained at the same level since the day the game was invented back in the 19 th century, back when the men playing the game were about five and a half feet tall. Isn’t it time they raised the basket a tad? Heck, the day they get it up around 13 feet, even I’ll be impressed if some yutz dunks it.
A few months ago, I was in a local delicatessen. When I sat down with my friends, I noticed there were three elderly people in the next booth. One of them, I saw, was John Wooden.
When they finished their meal and were getting up to leave, I noticed that Mr. Wooden was having trouble getting out of the booth. I rose quickly and rushed over to lend him a hand.
“Thank you,” he said.
“It’s a privilege, Coach Wooden. It was thanks to you that I became a basketball fan.”
He nodded. Then he gave me a look, and he asked, “Are you still?”
What a strange question, I thought. I knew what my honest answer was. But I also knew I was speaking to a man in his 90s who had devoted his entire life to the game, both as an All American player and as a Hall of Fame coach, and I didn’t wish to offend him.
Then I figured that with his reputation for ingraining ethics and integrity in his players, I would be doing him no favor by lying. So I sucked it up, and said, “No, Coach. Not for a long time.”
Then he nodded and smiled before walking away.
It was a very sad smile.
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