3-7-18 PIVOT

Never play serious basketball in a pair of suede Wallabee shoes. I speak from experience.

After school, when I should have been doing homework, I curled my elbow around my basketball and headed out the side door of the Pleasant Hills Apartment building. Across the parking lot, down the sidewalk, to the basketball hoops over by the Municipal Building. No one ever tutored me in how to shoot a basketball, and I never did seriously watch how real players shot. That ignorance, coupled with an elbow which was secretly deformed under my skin, made my jump shot a little funny looking, though at the time I thought it felt perfectly normal. Despite the lack of form, the ball eventually taught itself to find the basket, and even learned how to make that sweet little vacuum of a swoosh when it dropped straight from the heavens through the net. I was evidence of repetition paying off. I could shoot, and I could dribble, but that was about it.

My junior year at Thomas Jefferson High School they decided to start up a women's basketball team. Before 1975 it was a man's world at TJ High. So when they announced that there would be a new girls team, with try outs coming up, I started to get my game on. Well, sort of.  Problem was, I didn't have a pair of basketball shoes.  So I played in my square toed leather Wallabees, pivoting out there on the asphalt of the city building, my crepe souls grabbing the ground. I dribbled away from the basket, turned to make a hook shot, lifted my left knee up as I shot, heard the swish, and came down on the edge of the sole of my non-basketball shoe. My ankle rolled out and I ended up in a heap on the ground. I hobbled back to the apartment, took off my shoe, saw the colors of the rainbow magically appearing under my white flesh, and decided that a warm bath would probably make it feel better.

Seriously. I thought that.

So of course my ankle swelled up like a startled blowfish and the next day I could not walk. My armpits and forearms ached for the next month as I inched my way through the halls of TJ between classes. Girl's basketball tryouts came and went. But some of the boys who played on a neighboring court at the Municipal building had told the coach about my swooshy shooting, so in a moment of divine intervention Coach Mathias stopped me in the hall and told me to come join the team when my ankle was healed enough. It was one of those moments you think will never happen to a puny nobody like me. Somebody wanted ME. I didn't have to even ask. I didn't have to even try to convince them.  Wowzers.

So I joined up with the team after a few weeks. My mom bought me a pair of honest to goodness tennis shoes. I trotted out from the locker room and turned myself against my human nature, running next to my team mates, up and down the wooden floor of the gym. Starting at the outside border of the court, we ran to the first painted line, pivoted, ran back to the start, pivoted, then ran to line 2, pivoted, back to the start, pivot, line three…and so on. We called these exercises "suicides." The term was fitting.

My poor ankle did not like pivoting. Not one bit. It still does not like pivoting. For that matter, it does not like running. And though I could shoot from the uneven asphalt outside our apartment building, I was pretty bad at playing an actual game of basketball. I kept the old bench warm that year.

Still, I savor the thought of a group of cool high school boys telling the coach about Cori Hansen and her jump shot. That was worth three months of suicides.