I spent the summer before my senior year in high school playing as much as basketball as possible.  Having dedicated the previous two summers to shooting, building strength and endurance, and adapting to the nuances of organized basketbal, I felt that this was going to be a make or break year for me at school.  I was determined to make the varsity team that fall and knew that one of the last stumbling blocks was to improve my handle. or so I thought.

You would have been hard pressed to find me without a basketball that summer.  I dribble up the hill on Homelawn and along the winding crescents along Highland and 87th avenue that transported my friends and I to the basketball courts behind Thomas A Edison high school in Queens.  When my friend Calvin couldn't oblige, I'd marshal my brother Randy out with me in the searing afternoon heat to try stealing the ball from me.  At times is was so hot outside that the synthetic leather seemed on the verge of melting.  If I had to spend too much time calming him down once Randy became upset at being an involuntary participant in my cruel and unusual game, neither of us was able to pick up the ball that had been idling in the sun without some sort of shield on our hands. 

Sitting down to watch Martin or The Wonder Years did not proclude me from doing drills. As the trials and tribulations of Kevin and Winnie unfolded on screen, flicked my basketball from the fingertips of one hand to another, seeking for that transcendent moment that coach Thomson always spoke of when one's hands become one with the rock.   

Sad to say, after all of that work, I ended up never trying out for the team.  It's one of the few things in life that I look back on over and over.  Not necessarily with regret, in fact, I'd prefer regret, but serious concern over whether there have been other moments in life where I had put in the work, but did not go through with the tryouts?

Funny enough, I almost wrote this post two months ago after reading John Edgar Wideman's essay collection Hoop Roots where he recounts his experience with the game he loves, and the game that his body warns him he soon will no longer be able to play much less play to the exalted abilities of his youth.  Wideman lays bare the a series of connections between writing and basketball, essentially how the tap of the keyboard has become as much of a pacesetter for his life and reams as the echos of a basketball's sonic vascillation from hand to ground, and how each of these endeavors has now taken turns in keeping food revolving from hand to mouth.