Both of my sons are playing on traveling basketball teams this winter, and even though their seasons are barely underway, I've visited a lot of gyms in western Massachusetts over the last couple of weeks. This week my younger son is playing in a CYO tournament hosted by Our Lady of the Rosary Parish in Springfield. The gym is certainly one of the, shall we say, coziest gyms I've ever been in. Spectators are restricted to folding chairs that line one wall of the gym, and anyone with a shoe size greater than about 5 will have to watch their toes. Of course, people can always sit on the stage during the game. The teams' benches are old church pews, and James Naismith would have been right at home. But while the gym is small, the competition has been spirited.
I never played much basketball when I was younger; it just wasn't my game. And I certainly never played organized basketball. I learned to appreciate the game more when in college, when I went to a basketball school, and I've grown to appreciate it even more now that my kids are playing. When I walked into that gym last night, I felt for a moment that maybe I'd missed out on something by not playing basketball when I was their age. But I think that regret may have been fueled in part by the mistaken belief that these places didn't exist anymore, that basketball had been cleaned up and homogenized and corporate-tized into something antiseptic and generic. I was able to overcome my own regret with the thought of the stories my kids will tell their kids in 30 years about the crazy places they played basketball when they were kids.
Yes, I guess I'm appreciating basketball stories as much as I'm appreciating basketball these days.
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