Submitted by Joey Trum
My dad didn’t like baseball while I was growing up. It being the 80’s and him being a very 80’s type of businessman (Porsche driving, polo wearing, Reagan-loving Houstonian), he was more attuned to the growing white-collar hipness of the NBA than the old-fashioned nuance offered by MLB. Sure, he was an Astro bandwagon jumper in ’86 like everybody else, but overall he had a certain disdain for the sport that I’ve never understood. And the result of this disdain that is most relevant to this story is that I grew up playing basketball. Not just playing basketball, but absorbing everything about it. I was one of those kids who routinely stayed up late to watch random Big West teams complete ESPN’s Big Monday college basketball triple header, who went to the half-full Summit at every opportunity to watch the parade of lackluster complements to Akeem the Dream. I went to Pat Foster’s Cougar basketball camp 4 years in a row, and even went to the one at Rice a couple of times (Tommy Suitts?).
My dad was always the head coach when I played Spring Klein Basketball, and I was his starting point guard. In retrospect, this perhaps wasn’t the best idea from a team standpoint, as I was a horrendous ballhog, and though I was quick and played good defense, I was dubbed “the man who never met a shot he didn’t like.” The signature moment that sticks out to me was when I was maybe in fourth grade, and my Spring-Klein team was in the second or third round of the regional tournament. We were up by probably four or so points with only a minute or two left in the game, and my schoolmate Matt dribbling out the clock as my dad had instructed. I, however, was oblivious to pretty much everything except getting the ball and shooting the ball, and I hovered around Matt, yelling repeatedly to him to pass me the ball. “Matt! Matt! Matt!” Finally, he did pass me the ball, and I immediately dribbled in and took a crazy shot, which the other team rebounded and quickly brought back the other way for a score. We called timeout, and my dad reiterated the clock-killing strategy to me, which I probably said I understood, but in reality I just wanted the ball so I could shoot again. The next posession: “Matt! Matt! Matt!” but Matt wisely did not pass me the ball (I still remember the looks on his face as he was ignoring me), and we won the game. A round or two later, we lost to the ubiquitous bigger team from the unknown neighborhood, but I don’t remember much about that game except that I scored two of our only points of the game: a layup over two guys who seemed to be ten feet tall.
Seventh grade rolled around, the first year of official middle school ball, and I finally got to play basketball ‘for real.’ I was the smallest kid on the middle school team, and considering this, my mom always used to ask the coach why I made the team at all. My coach would always respond with “I wanted someone who could walk and chew gum at the same time.” I never told my mom, and would have been mostly unable to if I wanted, but I knew that it was because of a game that my sixth grade Spring-Klein team played at the middle school gym the previous year. It was on a school night, and I don’t remember anything else about the game except that my P.E. teacher showed up halfway through to clean up some equipment or something. Knowing that this man would be the coach of the seventh grade team, and in general wanting to impress him in the same way that kids generally want to impress familiar grownups, I abruptly turned up my game to Fennis Dembo levels and had what must have been the best ten minutes of basketball of my life. I remember pulling up to the left of the free throw line (my spot on the floor) on two consecutive possessions, and swishing two jumpers in a row. I remember completing the old sneak-up-behind-the-guy-dribbling-and-steal-the-ball-away trick, which I followed with a coast to coast layup. But most of all, I remember looking over after one of those baskets and seeing that my P.E. teacher was watching, seeing the casual expression he held, knowing deep down that I had made an impression. And the next year, after tryouts were over, I was somehow not nervous when I went to check the final posted roster, and I was not surprised when I found that I was on the team.
Now, my seventh grade team turned out to be something very special. Our starting point guard had moved to Northwest Houston just in time for the season, and I will never forget the looks of amazement when he pulled off his first TJ Ford-esque bounce pass during tryouts. Our starting center was the tallest kid in the school, but that rare tallest kid in the school who was actually coordinated and skilled. The rest of the team was filled out mostly with linemen from the football team, but coordinated linemen and, like good football players, willing to take instruction on rebounding and basic offensive moves. The coach was that classic Rick Pitino/Larry Brown late 80’s basketball coach, prowling the outer perimeter of the coaches box throughout the games, willfully borrowing from Nolan Richardson’s 40 minutes of Hell defenses and Dean Smith’s man-to-man-crippling motion offenses. Our season, too, took on an archetypal quality. We started out with a few big wins, then lost the proverbial ‘game we shouldn’t have lost’ on a miracle, last-second half court shot that shouldn’t have even mattered anyway. Then we gained confidence after winning a tournament we didn’t think we’d win, after which we named the point guard the captain of the team (to the chagrin of the tallest kid in the school). A month and a big winning streak later, we won the district title by handily defeating the school with the ubiquitous bigger kids from the unknown neighborhood, and had one helluva pizza party at Mr. Gatti’s on FM 1960 and Champions Forest Drive.
I was the third string point guard on this team, and over the entire season I did not enter a single game that was realistically in contention. In fact, the U.I.L. had even recently added a rule mandating a five minute, running clock, “fifth quarter” to allow scrubs like me a chance to play during district games. “How,” you might be wondering, “did a kid who had dedicated so much of his childhood to basketball, who once put on such an impressive pseudo-tryout for his coach, not get into a single game unless it was a blowout or it didn’t count?” Well, thinking about it then and thinking about it now, the reason to me is clearly that I was afraid. As I said before, I was the smallest kid on the team, and instead of this bringing out some kind of Spud Webb/Mugsy Bogues eye of the tiger, all it brought out was timidity and overcautiousness. I distinctly remember an early-season non-district game where we were beating some team by 9 or 10 points with less than a minute left, and the coach decides to put in the scrubs so we could get some playing time. Well the other team keeps its regulars in, and they maintain their desperate full-court press, and they stole the ball from me three times in a row for three straight layups before time mercifully ran out. I remember going into the locker room after the game and hearing the coach joke to his assistant that “another basket and I would have put the starters back in.”
Or take the example of a late-season practice where the 7th grade team scrimmaged against the 8th grade team, who was experimenting with some new full-court trap that they wanted to use in their big upcoming game against the district’s first place team. Not too surprisingly, the 7th grade team was pretty much dominating the 8th grade team, who was understandably getting frustrated that we were breaking their fancy press so easily, but to us it was a great source of pride in how far we had come as a team. Well, at this practice, the normal second string point guard was on a family vacation, so that left me as the only other point guard on the roster, and when our starter/captain needed a breather, the coach logically put me in the game. Holy shit was I scared! Those eighth graders were way taller and faster on the court than they appeared from the sidelines, and I was amazed that we were able to do anything against the trap they were laying on us (“Fire,” as I still remember it was called). Still, my teammates were not fazed, or at least it did not appear they were, and before I knew it we had broken the trap and were advancing the ball up court. I migrated to the middle of the court like I was supposed to, and my teammates passed the ball to the point guard like they were supposed to, ready for the inevitable, gratifying, three-on-one fast break that was to come. But the ball sailed above my left shoulder and out of bounds, my hands not responding enough to even reach up and grab for the damned ball. The coach shrugged to the starting point guard, who understood that he must forego his rest and replace me. Needless to say, what followed was more press-breaking and more domination of the eighth graders.
This was my last year of organized basketball. The next year, I tried out for the eighth grade team and didn’t make it. I was bothered enough by not making this team that I never tried again. In the years that followed, I played countless pickup games at Cypresswood Park, but I always gravitated toward the games with the smaller players. One time I do remember playing in the full-court, big-player game with some of my friends, getting thoroughly rejected by a young Gabe Muoneke, and never trying to get into that game again. I did become a pretty good high school tennis player though, finishing second one year in district doubles, but even that avocation, I think, did not become what it could have for similar reasons.
I often think back on this time in my life, and to a lesser extent on the usual social rigamaroll that accompanied it, and I wonder what could have been. It is not that I harbor any delusions of being some great athlete or anything, or that I look back and carry some great wistful regret, but rather that I wonder what my realistic potential might have been had I been able to harness my talents when it really mattered. As an adult, it is very easy for me to understand the concept of the intrinsic, unapologetic honor of trying your best and, indeed, I very much live by the idea that doing your best work on your own terms can be more rewarding than any external honor. But as a kid, I had not yet brought into focus enough of the drive, focus, and self-awareness that would have led to athletic success. I understood the game of basketball from an analytical perspective probably better than any of my seventh grade teammates, a truth illustrated by the vividly subtle memories I still carry about the intricacies of that season, and I had no problem with confidence back in the good ol’ Spring Klein days when my dad was the coach. But somehow when the pressure was on, when the kids got bigger and faster and I was on a team where others were as skilled as me, I shriveled and began to embody the little man. The irony is that as I’ve gotten older, I’ve actually grown to capture competitiveness as a strength. Whether it be a barroom game of shuffleboard, gambling on the NFL, a game of tennis, drinking, rock and roll, or any other competition I’m invested in, I seem to automatically take on a certain kind of competitive focus where I naturally begin to see clearer, and intrinsically inflate minor situations into Bjorg-McEnroe epics.
Four years ago I was working as a special education teacher at a residential facility in Austin specializing in kids with severe emotional disturbances. One of the classes I taught was a group of high schoolers, mostly from the inner city of Philadelphia, most of whom were sent to the facility as a condition of probation. Being well-experienced in the system, these kids had a lot of time to play basketball, as it is the main recreation at many such facilities, and nearly every day I would join them in their pickup games during recreation hour. Most of these kids were bigger, stronger, faster, and definitely more intense than I’ve ever been, but I always held my own. One day, I remember participating in a one-on-one game against Spencer, a 17 year-old kid who had a major problem against me because I’d just a week before gotten him in trouble for reporting some such infraction I can’t remember. We start the game, and he’s driving on me and bulling me over and he ends up taking a pretty decent early lead. I battled my way back, and toward the end of recreation hour I had gotten to within 7-8 (playing to 11) with the ball. I pump faked from the top of the key, then drove by him for an easy layup. 8-8. He then gives me space from the top of the key, verbally taunting me to take the shot. I do and swish it. 9-8. Recreation hour ends and the unit staff whistles for the group to line up, but we continue our game as everybody congregates in a loose line, now watching our game. I dribble to the right baseline, give a crossover, step back, and swish another jumper. Game point. I go back to the right baseline, right in front of the congregation, go with the same move and, swish, same result. Game over. The unit staff snickers and makes some joke about that being over fast, and Spencer, shocked, sullen, and embarrassed, lines up with the rest of the inmates.