Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball

Squeak from Shoes

197 Squeak from Shoes RICHARD NEWMAN This weekend our family will play in five basketball games. I will play in two and attend my daughter’s three select league games (plus her two soccer games), and her school’s basketball season hasn’t even started yet. One weekend we played eight games. A few years ago I started dreaming I was playing basketball nearly every single night, waking up my then-girlfriend by diving for loose balls and banking turnaround jump shots. The strange thing about these dreams was that I had barely played basketball since eighth grade, twenty-five years before. The dreams became so regular and the urge to play again so strong that I asked for, and received, from that same then-girlfriend, a basketball goal for Christmas. I began playing with friends and my daughter in our driveway . We waged small but epic battles between the slope to the alley and the battered wooden fence. Later my daughter’s school drafted me to coach her fourth-grade basketball team. I was apparently the only parent who had ever played. My next girlfriend had played basketball in high school and understood Richard Newman 198 my fascination. On one of our first “dates” we played h-o-r-s-e, and she later admitted my shot was ugly and she let me win. I married her anyway. Before we got married, though, I asked her to help me coach the fourthgrade girls team, and that’s when basketball started taking over our days and evenings as well as my dreams. My daughter fell in love with the game, too, and the three of us went to her school’s gym on nonpractice days to shoot around and work on her free throws and layups. One day a bunch of guys burst into the gym like they owned it. They had a regular Sunday afternoon pickup game and asked me to play too. Soon I was playing regularly in their Sunday and Wednesday games, comprised of teachers, doctors, stockbrokers, a house painter, a chemist, a couple lawyers, and a stained-glass window refurbisher. The principal of the school, who also played with us, approached me before a game once and said, “You play very aggressively for a poet!” and invited me to play in his Saturday morning group. That 6:30 a.m. basketball game is the only thing I’ve ever willingly gotten up early to do in my life. I have always been a night owl and would stay up until 4:00 a.m. every night and sleep until noon if I could. I still stay up late, hitting our local tavern, the Cat’s Meow, with my wife and friends on Friday or Saturday nights, but every Saturday morning I get up, often hung over, sometimes still drunk, in the black-andblue cold, to play basketball. I have since invited some of my friends to these regular games, two or three poets and a fiction writer, and no one has made any more cracks about playing aggressively for a bunch of poets. Poets are as ruthless as politicians, often because they have to be politicians, but we are all passionate about the game and bring an intensity (if not always conviction) to the court three days a week. If I had the time and could find another regular game, I would probably play four days a week, though my body would rebel—more than it does now. I’m already stiff and sore, a pathetic sight to see hobbling down stairs every morning like a heavy old man, prodding myself on with a sad refrain of “Ooh!” “Aah!” “Ouch!” and choice profanity. In addition to sore knees and ankles, my fingers are crooked from so many jams—the best is when they swell up like fat purple slugs. My back regularly hurts, especially when I sit down to write. I’ve had tendonitis of Squeak from Shoes 199 the shoulder for months at a time. I rarely have all my toenails on my right foot—and those existing toenails are often purple or black, hanging on by dried blood. I currently have a collection of exuberant bruises—one on my left bicep, courtesy of Michael’s swipe, and one in the ribs, thanks to Len’s wickedly sharp elbow. All this begs the question: Why do we do it? I have asked myself...