Basketball and Mortality
I was excited to watch Game 4 of the NBA Finals tonight, which figured to be intensely competitive. Instead, I'm watching the Miami Heat have their hearts ripped out by the relentless San Antonio Spurs.
As it happens, basketball and death have been on my mind a lot of late. I feel like I have a weekly date with my own mortality. It’s my Wednesday night pick-up basketball game at a local high school in Brooklyn.
I get noticeably worse at basketball with almost every passing week. I also get injured on a regular basis -- over the past year or so, I have broken a finger, pulled a hamstring and torn a calf muscle. My body is sending me pretty unequivocal message: stop playing.
My ego seconds that emotion. My skills peaked more than two decades ago. Now I’m at the far right end of the bell curve in terms of my playing ability, the place where the graph flattens out to zero. Over the years, I have gone from one of the better guys in my weekly game to one of the worst.
But still I keep going back. Why? It is a question I ask myself often.
Peer pressure is not the reason -- after all, most of my closest friends have already given up the sport, some more than a decade ago.
Nor am I trying to re-live past glories. The truth is that I was never much of a player. I lacked the strength, height and grace under pressure necessary to play the game at a high level.
But despite this lack of success, I have always thought of myself as a ballplayer. And I still do.
Why should my sense of my self be tied up with a children’s game? Perhaps it is because I fell in love with the game as a child. Growing up in Washington DC in the 1980s, basketball offered me an identity, a sense of belonging to a community beyond my family, and a means of bridging the racial divide in a highly-segregated city.
Children are often encouraged to play organized sports because doing so offers important “life lessons.” From playing basketball in my formative years, I learned how to make friends with people of diverse backgrounds. I learned how to sublimate my ego for the greater good of a team. And I learned how to adapt to the whims of cruel and arbitrary authority figures (also known as “coaches”). I call upon these lessons almost every day as an adult.
But these days basketball offers me lessons not about life but about death. My diminishing skills on the court are like a dress rehearsal for the aging process that all of us eventually must face in the real world. Basketball is forcing me to wrestle with my own frailties on a weekly basis. It may not always be fun, but it does feel valuable.
