In early August a young guy drove the lane on me and I went up to block his shot.
Well, in truth, my intent was not to block his shot.
Even in my wildest basketball fantasies --- usually played inside my head during the moments before I fall asleep --- I could not believe in my ability to jump high enough or quickly enough to stop him from shooting.
My secret intention was to hurl in his direction a massive wall of old-man fat, so overwhelmingly sweaty and repugnant that the gross consequence of my enormity crashing with a giant slurp against his young athletic body, would repulse him so badly that he would never again think of attacking the bucket while I lurked beneath it.
It almost worked (as it has so often in the past).
And then the strange sensation in the foot. Something collapsing, without pain, but like a paper cup folding inside itself.
I’ve played basketball for 47 out of 55 years and until August, nothing had ever stopped working that really should be working. Busted fingers, smashed nose, a few dozen stitches, pulled muscles, a perpetually banged-up ego --- all those are a matter of course --- but I knew right away that the time of the game-threatening injury had finally happened.
The medical community quickly brought all of its formidable diagnostic powers to bear on the case and --- more than four months later --- concurred. Broken ankle. By that time the goddamn thing had healed. Hell, when Suzie Dimpleman left me for that fat-assed Rudy Gustafson in 8th grade it took longer than THAT to heal a broken heart!
Still --- any brush with on-court mortality is sobering. The aftermath (tendons that will never work right again) means that athletic ability that was already headed in the general direction of the crapper, just took one significant stumble closer to the Big Flush.
That presents a dilemma of the truly male variety. For months now I’ve been weighing the downside of publicly whining like a Nancy-boy --- an approach that generates a certain amount of sympathy but almost always is followed by the hushed, judgmental whisper of: “pussy.”
Conversely, to suck-it-up, man-up, tough-it-out, and play-hurt, is no bed of wild flowers either. If guys don’t know you’re hurt they just assume that you are a shitty basketball player --- an assumption that also generates exactly the same hushed, judgmental whisper of: “pussy.”
This is a Catch-22 in which “pussy” is the common denominator. A fact that sounds like it should be a good thing but ain’t. A Catch 22 within a Catch 22!
Fortunately, all of this came into perspective when our Over-50 STILL HERE team organized to compete in the 2011 Buffalo Master’s Basketball Tournament. The advance scouting report of our squad went something like:
“D-Rex thinks his heart situation is better but we’ll have to see how his stamina is. Rock is starting to get the use of his arm back but his shoulder is still dinked up. Bart has had only one usable arm for five years and god knows how long since he’s had ten fingers. J.T. has a bad quad right now. Eddie’s ass muscle is still broken from three years ago....”
Get the idea?
The fact of the matter is --- let’s accept --- that at NO time is any old man playing the game of old man basketball EVER without something wrong with him.
That doesn’t make it easier --- treachery and basketball IQ only go so far in competing against a 6 foot 7 twenty year old --- but it does create a perspective that enables one to continue despite the whispers and the head shaking and the noses turned up at the combined odor of Ben Gay and dust from the tomb.
Just the other week, a handful of us went to Johnny Malloy’s for a quick rehydrating beer after a noon pickup game. Five hours later, I bent my elbow to engage a sweet therapeutic pint of Guinness and my shoulder tweaked. My girlish squeak of discomfort attracted the attention of one of the others who asked me if I was OK. That was my open invitation to discourse about the woes of a torn rotator cuff and the agonies that no one but I had ever experienced in the long history of sports injuries. That in turn gave a few of the other drinkers an opportunity to relive their own shoulder injuries. At one point I believe X-rays were produced from someone’s gym bag and studied by the light of a neon Budweiser sign. During all of this one guy kept quietly sipping his beer. Finally, when we had exhausted our own litany of medical phenomena, someone turned to the quiet guy and asked:
“How about you --- how you feeling today?”
“Well,” he replied, “I have a little pain that’s always in this one shoulder. Got it banged playing football.”
We old guys were thinking: “Hmmmm. That’s all you have? Damn young guys --- no great stories to tell.”
“Oh,” he continued, “and my other shoulder gives me a little problem from where I took a bullet when I was with the Marines in Iraq.”
With that we old guys returned sheepishly to our beer...all our shoulders feeling just a bit better.
OK. I learned a lesson. I may try to limit my complaining about aches and pains.
But let me tell you this:
If you’re young and fast and can jump high --- and if you make the mistake of driving the lane thinking it’s going to come easy --- watch out for something that looks like 275 pounds of cosmic jelly blurping and farting through space.
You’re going to get old man fat all over you.
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