![]() ![]() It was, to say the least, an odd-no, that’s wrong, familiar, or at least familiarish-intense feeling, fantasy maybe it’s called, picturing throwing this dude through the plate-glass window at the front of the Fitness Club on Grant Street in Northeast Philadelphia where I was in a very good league with a very solid team in my mid-twenties, a team on which I was the baby, but also the brawn. Hendricks/Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York The refs kept getting on him, and getting on us to get on him, for all this jawing, this flamboyant chatter, but he couldn’t stop, I remember watching and giggling and thinking, He can’t stop, he just can’t stop, for he was elated, and his elation was elating, and Lord let me best as I can never be the asshole rips the wings off an elated kid.īarkley L. I don’t know what he was saying-I mean, I can guess, ballpark-but his shit-talk reached its embodied zenith when he ripped their point guard at the top of the key and, sailing to the other basket and taking his last dribble, looked back at the kid chasing him and held the ball on a platter, like You looking for this, like, Not today, before laying it in. At least twice he shot and started trotting the other way before the ball went through the hoop. He was feeding our big guys no-looks, and rifling one-handed three-quarter-court bounce passes to the streaker. ![]() He had a nice midrange game, and he wasn’t missing. ![]() The ball was glued to his hand as he danced through a collapsed zone to the rack. That day he would’ve been better on the court than Dajuan Wagner he would’ve been better than Kyrie Irving. Duh.īut it didn’t matter that day against Rahway, or Elizabeth, or Irvington, one of the nearby schools whose kids he would’ve grown up around, maybe he went to middle school over here, maybe some AAU stuff, some little fires smoldering already in the layup lines, some jawing and puffed-up laughter and Yeah we’ll see that made the refs take notice, Easy now, easy, before the ball was even tossed up. Like the rest of us, he mostly knew and didn’t feel great about when he made a mistake, and mostly he liked being told when he did good. Good practice, too, for being a human being. Which, in retrospect, this is a revelation, maybe a reach, maybe beside the point, but it might have been good practice for poems, trying to figure how to communicate You’re overdribbling or Go to the basket or Box out without wounding this kid’s fragile ego: best words best order, etc. Dude was sensitive, goddamn, a hothouse flower, we put in hours, annoying though it could be. He was nearly uncoachable-a hothead, bristly, pouty, so sensitive that my partner Stephanie reminds me I spent hours on the phone with Loco (the head coach, I was Robin) trying to figure out how to communicate with him, how to coach him without him feeling picked on or criticized or demeaned or diminished or dismissed or dogged or chided or chastised or clowned or condescended to or shit on or put down or put upon or humiliated or, you know, feelings hurt. And you know, at the same time, grain of salt. Why I am so inclined to tell you the finest bit of high school ball playing I have ever seen I’m not exactly sure, though I am, and given as I have seen in my days a lot of ball (funny, that sounded like an old man talking, which I am not, and I have enough old friends and relatives who have earned the designation so let me not diminish their designation by claiming it), you might listen up. ![]()
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