Editor’s note: This is the next chapter of a book I’m writing this summer. You can read the previous chapters here: The Preface. Chapter 1. Chapter 2.

As always, I will keep the site updated with Celtics news. But since it’s the offseason (damn it) and news is slower than Michael Sweetney’s metabolism, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to share some of my personal story.

– Jay

*****

When you’re beginning the first day of second grade, you worry about the important things: do my New Balance sneakers look good with my Umbro shorts? Did any girls get cuter over the summer, even if I don’t have the courage to talk to them no matter what? My mom packed string cheese and Hi-C Ecto Cooler for snack, right? Is my desk near any of my friends? Do I have any food stuck in my teeth?

So when I saw James Chen for the first time, wearing a backpack with Chinese symbols on it, donning some strange combination of clothes that was more Samurai warrior than suburban Massachusetts second grader, head and shoulders taller than every other second grader and even the third and fourth graders, being walked into class by his parents, who seemed tall enough that they could reach up and burn their fingers on the sun, I was too preoccupied to understand that I had just caught a glimpse of my first best friend.

If I had met James later in life, we never would have become friends. Not because I became less open-minded in the coming years, but because later in life, you become content with your own group of friends, your own life. James moved to Longmeadow without knowing a single word of English. The seven-year old me saw that as something intriguing, something new and exciting, something that made me eager to invite James to my house and to help him develop his English skills and to embrace him as my friend. The current me would have seen James’s choppy (at best) English and seen it as a barrier keeping us from becoming friends, then went back to my own familiar group of friends to drink a few beers and play a round of golf.

But I was seven years old then, and James, with his Chinese speech, Chinese snacks and Chinese clothes, was the most interesting person I had ever met. It took less than a week for me to invite him over my house. He still couldn’t speak but he could write fluently, and my mom brought a chalk easel for him to spell his thoughts. On that easel, I learned that James and I had more in common than I thought. At the risk of making James sound like a stereotype, he excelled at math and was more driven to succeed than any student in my class. I would later grow into a teacher’s worst nightmare – a lazy underachiever always prepared with a wise-ass quip (one teacher used to make me stand in a chalk circle at the back of the classroom, with my back facing the class and my nose at the wall) – but in second grade, I was like James, smart and driven, the type of student who made a teacher’s job simple. More importantly to our friendship, of course, James shared my love of basketball. His father had played for the Chinese National Basketball Team and James loved the sound of ball snapping through net, that beautiful symphony, as much as I did. So we put the easel aside and brought a couple basketballs out of the garage to shoot around.

Not to sound corny, but, well, I’m about to sound corny: when we shot around that day, the first time I shared a basketball court with my new best friend James Chen, we both spoke the same language. I’ve heard people say you can learn more about someone while shooting around for half an hour than you can by speaking to them for an entire day. Maybe that’s true, maybe not, but shooting does offer a window into a person’s personality. If both rebounds bounce in the same spot, does the person rebound his own first and let you get yours? Or does he rebound your ball first, pass it to you, then chase after his own? Does he say thanks when you rebound his misses? Chide himself after missing shots? The answers to those questions might not define a person’s character. But they mean something.

James was tall, a Sequoia tree compared to me, but his jump shot floated toward the rim like a feather dropped from above. He did not say thanks after I rebounded his misses, but that’s because he still did not speak a word of English. When my rebounds dropped anywhere in his vicinity, James chased them down. His passes hit me right in the fingertips, the seams already lined up for my shots. James was well-schooled by his basketball-playing father, I could tell instantly. He could also shoot. A center by height, a point guard by desire, James let fly with outside shots that did not even wake the net as they fell through. When James missed, he muttered to himself. I could not understand what he was saying, since it was in Chinese, but from the tone I knew he hated missing shots. This interesting kid, this new Chinese boy, my first best friend, my team’s next starting center, was a fierce competitor.

He was also a smart competitor. In second grade, I still played in-town basketball, the same league my team had won the season before. The league had a rule about coaches: if two or more parents decided to coach together, their sons would all be on the same team. Naturally, since winning and losing is supposed to mean nothing at that age, assistant coaches almost always had All-Star sons. The rule was only one of the league’s odd ones, another being that there were no traveling violation calls. Because his services were a package deal with his son, there was almost a full-fledged steel-caged match to recruit Mr. Chen as an assistant coach. He couldn’t commit any time whatsoever to coaching and probably wouldn’t even be able to attend any games, but his son was a 5’6 second grader with range to the three-point arc  – thus, Mr. Chen became the most prized recruit in town. Eventually, he chose to coach my team. I think Mr. Chen decided to coach my team (and I say the term coach in its loosest fashion) because I was his son’s best friend in town. Or maybe it was the fully-loaded Lexus and mysterious duffle bag filled with $30,000 that changed his mind. One way or the other, James became my teammate.

Our team (the blue team) advanced to the semifinals, and we were the clear favorites. But everything fell apart on a Saturday morning. My whole family attended the semifinals, most of them sipping Dunkin Donuts coffee – when they weren’t screaming at the refs, at least. In my second year, I had stopped shaking like a massage chair every time I scored a bucket. I had grown too cool for that. Instead, after every make, I grinned like I had just met Santa Claus. But that day, I didn’t do much grinning and neither did my teammates.

We were a star-studded team, the cream of the crop, the Larry Bird-Kevin McHale-Robert Parish Boston Celtics playing against a bunch of teams that were more like the Beno Udrih-Omri Casspi-Tyreke Evans Sacramento Kings. But some days, the ball just doesn’t fall, and that Saturday was one of those days. The game went back and forth, brick after brick, turnover after turnover, like a “Tony Allen’s Greatest Bloopers” clip. Eventually my team fell behind by one point. I don’t remember the exact score, but it couldn’t have been much more than 16-15. We fouled the other team with five seconds left, and we needed a miss. It came, and James corralled the rebound. In a flash of brilliance, perhaps the most intelligent play a seven-year old ever made, James remembered the “no traveling violations” rule.

In five seconds or less, James needed to drain a shot to win the game and send us to the finals, where we would have been favorites again. When he calculated the fastest route to the other hoop, he realized dribbling would have only wasted time. The refs didn’t call traveling anyway, so James cradled the ball in his right arm and took off as quickly as he could. He sprinted for the other hoop, all 5’6 of him, his jet black hair standing at attention, opponents trying to keep up, their heads at his shoulders, necks craned up watching this Asian blur pass them by. I watched, stunned, as James carried the ball like a football player, high-stepping his way to the other end. His decision to forego dribbling wasn’t just wise, it was brilliant. In less than five seconds he sprinted downcourt, made a layup, and then celebrated like only a child could, jumping up and down and waving his arms in the air, like a pogo stick flagging down a cab. A few years later, James would learn the Walker Wiggle while rooting for the Celtics and his celebrations would become more choreographed.  But then, Walker was still at Kentucky and when James celebrated, he just looked like a man in extreme distress. Not that it mattered. The blue team had won, James and I had prevailed.

But in that moment while James celebrated, while the other team started wailing, while my aunts, uncles, mom and dad all stood and cheered on the sideline, spilling only a little bit of their Dunkin Donuts coffee, the two referees convened at mid-court.

“Traveling,” one of them said after a few moments.

“There’s no such thing as traveling in this league!” shouted my coach. “We won! We won!”

Winning didn’t matter at that age, remember?

“The traveling rule was made for kids who can’t dribble,” replied one of the refs. “Not for the most skilled player in the league. The basket doesn’t count.”

And with that, two referees wiped away the most intelligent play a second-grader ever made. James cried. He could have dribbled if he wanted to. He could have still made the shot. I walked over and gave my best friend a hug.

A few years later, James and I began our own business. We sold basketball cards online at a website called Courtside Cards. James created the website himself. He was 11 years old.

We were positive the website would make us millions, and two months after we created it, I received my very first pay check. It was for 31 cents. The check came in the mail. James’s father had gotten a job as a professor at Towson State, and the Chens had moved to Baltimore.

It was time to find a new best friend.

Editor’s note: Even though I have not been posting my book lately, I have been writing it. Due to popular demand—err, due to an NBA lockout that means there is almost nothing else to write about, I will start to post more of my chapters. This is the book’s preface, a look into why I miss the national anthem more than I reasonably should.

To read the other published chapters, click here (Chapter One) or here (Chapter Two).

– Jay

*****

Despite all the things I miss about playing organized basketball—the competition, the camaraderie, the memorable wins, the long days spent with all my best friends shooting the shit and trying to improve—I always feel the largest dose of nostalgia while listening to the national anthem.

My deep adoration for our country’s song has nothing to do with patriotism. Actually, my hallowed respect for the national anthem has nothing to do with our country—like so many other things in my life, my bond with America’s ballad was forged by basketball and basketball alone.

Other aspects of the world’s greatest game should elicit stronger emotion. Hell, through most of my hoops career, I thought the anthem’s biggest function was to delay the opening tip. Living in the bubble of youth, I didn’t much care at the time that it also pays homage to our country and its freedom. I just wanted the game to start. Even now, with a better realization of what the song stands for, I don’t think I should miss the anthem so desperately. I should miss throwing no-look passes and I should miss the precious days when I could not miss a three-pointer. I should miss the few times I starred during high school and I should miss the few game-winning shots I was lucky enough to drain. I should miss locker room banter and team dinners to local pizza restaurants and team poker games that would last twelve hours straight. And I do. But the national anthem carries my heart back to the past, back to my so-called glory days of youth, like nothing else can.

I will prepare to watch a basketball game these days, either sitting in the stands, laying on my couch or coaching on the bench, and instantly Francis Scott Key’s words remind me of the way I once felt as a player.

The song still begins the same—“Oh say can you see”—but when I listen to it now, my mind vacates the present and immediately remembers the dreams of an adolescent boy whose hopes extended far beyond his grasp. In anticipation of my games back then, my body would sway like an oak tree in the wind, and I would begin dreaming of all the ways I would help my team.  Never mind that I only averaged a few points per game; I would score 30 on this night. Never mind that I played only 10 minutes per game; I would make my presence felt. Never mind that my coach once told me never to dribble again; my ball-handling maneuvers would make the crowd buzz with comparisons to Allen Iverson. Never mind that I could barely stop a paraplegic from scoring; no opponent would free himself from me this game. During the national anthem I felt like I could lasso the impossible, fly through the rafters and dunk the entire stadium through the hoop on my way down. Nobody could stop me, or at least nobody could stop the dream version of myself I concocted, fed and cared for during national anthems.

The game would ultimately arrive and pop that dream boy, that All-American I created in my head, with a thumb tack. But for those few precious minutes when everyone stood addressing the flag, my goals felt both large and accomplishable. Before one playoff game in my sophomore year of high school, I closed my eyes, swayed back and forth to the anthem, and envisioned canning seven three-pointers to lead my outmatched team to victory. After the fictional game I played out in my head, this dream character who bore an uncanny resemblance to me interviewed for the local newspapers and television stations. Beautiful girls ran to him and professed their love and adoration. His high school coach awarded him a starting role. College coaches patted him on the back and promised to stay in touch. Young children wanted autographs.

But fiction harshly morphed into reality as soon as the anthem ended. My real self, pimpled and gangly, finally entered the real game eight minutes in and promptly fired his first three-point shot. It headed directly toward the net and my pre-game visions of grandeur were coming true. But the guided missile malfunctioned and clanged off the back rim, close but not quite. I missed both shots I took that day, a far cry from the success I dreamed of during the anthem. I did not lead my team to victory, I did not score a single point and we lost on a controversial buzzer-beater that was actually released a full second after the horn sounded. I can still remember my teammates’ reaction to our loss, the tears and the anguish and the quivering lips, the hugs, the promises that we would do better next season, and the faraway look in the seniors who knew there would be no next season. But I also remember the excitement of standing for the national anthem, the beauty of those two minutes when I thought I could score 30 points, lead my team to a championship, and then walk off the court with college recruiters chasing me and my arms draped around two swimsuit models. For two minutes, anything seemed within reach.

By the time I entered my senior year of high school, most of the teammates who stood alongside me for the anthem doubled as my best friends. There was T.J. Hollins, my surrogate brother who entered my life as a 6^th-grader. At that point his body had already begun to ripple with muscles, and my AAU basketball coach intelligently recruited him to join our team. I remember gaping at T.J. during our first practice together, eyes wide and jaw dropping. No other 12-year old I knew had such a developed physique, so the first question I ever asked my future best friend came naturally: “How many pushups can you do?”

During anthems that year, T.J. and I stood beside all our other teammates, all our other best friends. Matt Katz, the type of player who rarely made mistakes, the type of person who could lead Martin Luther King Jr. into war. Mac Sullivan, a refreshing soul, a laid-back killer, a rugged bastard who needed his next rebound like Seattle-ites need an umbrella. Dan Potito, a temperamental youth who would mellow after we graduated high school, someone who could crack a joke one second then sucker-punch the wall in fury the next, the team’s most underutilized player. Paul Kennedy, the lone junior in the starting lineup, a tattooed Irishman who treated the three-point line like a PGA player treats the ladies tees; Paul preferred to shoot from many feet behind the arc. Vilenti Tulloch, a self-described pretty boy who carried a handheld mirror at all times and could provide instant offense off the bench.

And me, a boy in love with James Naismith’s game, a boy who always realized his basketball career would peak in high school, a boy who would follow basketball wherever it would take him nonetheless, a boy who possessed an island of big-time dreams surrounded on all sides by debilitating insecurities, a boy who pretended to have everything figured out but really didn’t have a goddamn clue.

Editor’s note: This is the second chapter of a book I’m writing this summer. You can read the previous chapter here: Chapter 1.

As always, I will keep the site updated with Celtics news. But since it’s the offseason (damn it) and news is slower than Zydrunas Ilgauskas, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to share some of my personal story.

– Jay

*****

My first taste of competitive basketball came in first grade. Okay, maybe calling it “competitive” is a stretch. But there was a scoreboard and two parents who acted as referees, and, well, to a six-year old it felt like Apollo Creed vs. Ivan Drago. I played for The Yellow Team, and we played in an in-town league consisting of first- and second-graders from my town. Almost every first- and second-grader in town played; there were no tryouts, so everyone made a team. Since nobody got cut, the talent level spanned from “future college basketball player” to “that kid probably doesn’t even know what a layup is.”

One player on my team, Ben, played like a young Bob Cousy. He dribbled around his back with ease, shot floaters in the lane, and made a habit of the no-look pass. Another player, Marc, played like a young Stevie Wonder. He wasn’t really blind, but, well, watching him play basketball you would think he was. His favorite shot was the one-armed gunsling from 30 feet out. The problem was that he couldn’t have reached from 15 feet. Our coaches tried to implore Marc to pass, but he fell in love with that gunsling—which was reminiscent of a medieval catapult—no matter how many times in a row he missed it. The talent discrepancy could be similar to Lebron James sharing a court with Chris Rock.

Despite Marc’s Antoine Walker-esque shot selection (he always searched for the four-point line), our team was good. Really good. We went undefeated in the regular season and made our way to the championship game with ease.

My family, as always, showed up in droves to support me. When I or one of my cousins played in an important game (in this case, my cousin John played on my team), my aunts, uncles and cousins would all show up to watch. It didn’t matter whether the game was a first-grade in-town game or a college bout against Jameer Nelson and Delonte West (my cousin Pat played against St. Joseph’s when he attended Boston University)—my family would roll up to the gym 20 deep. Any excuse to get together. Any excuse to support each other. We aren’t just passive observers, either. I’ll put it this way: local refs are very familiar with us.

My uncle Buddy knows every ref in New England by name, or at least it seems like he does. Buddy’s one of the friendliest people I’ve ever met. If he walks into a gym, he doesn’t just know everyone there; he also knows the names of everyone’s children and wives, and always wants to know how everyone is doing. But bad calls boil his blood. After a whistle he disagrees with, Buddy doesn’t scream at refs immediately. No, he patiently waits until the gym becomes completely silent before calling out the ref by his first name. His method assures two things: 1) that the ref can hear him, and 2) that everyone else in the gym can hear him, thereby embarrassing the ref quite a bit.

“Jerry, that’s one of the worst calls I’ve ever seen!” he might calmly shout. I know shouting calmly seems like an oxymoron, but there’s no better explanation for what Buddy does. He never loses his cool. He sits back with one leg folded over the other, sips on a coffee (normally from Dunkin Donuts), and calmly shouts at the refs. He’s louder than a foghorn and twice as obnoxious, but even when Buddy loses it he’s completely under control. “By my count, Andy, you owe us seven calls!” he bellows through a silent gym. After the game, of course, Buddy will go shake Andy’s hand and find out how his children are doing. But during the game, Andy and all other refs have targets on their backs.

Buddy’s not the only one in my family who harasses zebras on a daily basis, nor is he the worst. My mom, God bless her, promises me before every game that she’s done with chiding refs. “You should see me now, Jay,” she’ll tell me. “I don’t say a word anymore.” Inevitably, a missed traveling call or a bogus foul call will bring a vein popping out of her forehead and she’ll start right back in with her complaints. On multiple occasions, relatives of mine have been escorted out of gyms by police officers. We’ve started verbal fights with opposing coaches, broken up fights between eighth-graders (that was me—telling a 14-year old to “back the hell up” isn’t exactly something I’m proud of), and been ejected from gyms too many times to count. Just this past year, I complained about a ref’s bad call during my brother’s 8th-grade CYO game. The ref looked up at me and sarcastically noted, “Oh, I forgot you played Division One basketball.” As a ref, the biggest no-no you can make is responding to fans. But I laughed, then replied, “And I forgot you reffed Division One basketball.” Zing.

I’m making my family sound like something from a horror flick, but the second we get out of a gym we become the world’s most inviting family. Kind, hilarious, loving, accepting—I’m not bragging, but my family’s awesome. Once, a 25-year old man showed up to our family’s Thanksgiving party. My aunt opened the door, gave him a big hug and kiss, and ushered him inside. She got him a plate of food, filled up his glass with beer, and chatted with him for about ten minutes. At some point, he realized he’d come to the wrong house—his family was actually next door having their own get-together. But he probably wanted to stay with us instead. My aunt had had no idea who he was, but figured he was somebody’s boyfriend and thus treated him just like family. That’s the way my family works. If you’re with us, it’s like you’re one of us. Our biggest problem is that if we were a pack of werewolves, a gym floor would be our full moon.

But this was just first-grade and the referees were two volunteer parents, so my family refrained from any referee bashing. Instead they sat in the stands, about 20 of them in total, cheering their heads off, eating donuts and drinking coffee—at morning games, you could always expect my family to come equipped with Dunkin Donuts. We call my aunts “The Hyenas” because their laughs could wake somebody out of a coma, and their cheers aren’t much quieter. Whenever I scored, my aunts’ loud shrills threatened to tear down the gym’s roof. But their reaction was nothing compared to my own. I would make a bucket and instantly act like a teenage girl who just met Justin Timberlake. I would start screaming and jumping up and down, and my hand would tremor like an alcoholic taking a day off from drinking. All the while a ginormous smile would stay plastered on my face. “I’m pretty good,” I would think. Looking back, the defense could only play in the paint and I was only making my baskets on an 8-foot hoop. Even then, I wasn’t making very many baskets. Maybe I wasn’t as good as I thought. But that wasn’t the point. This was first-grade basketball. We were mostly just there to have fun. Except for one person.

A man I’ll call Steve (I’ll leave his real name out of this for his sake) ran the youth league I played in. There were rumors that Steve pocketed a lot of the concession money that was supposed to go to the church we played in, but I don’t think there was any proof. All I knew for sure about Steve were three things: 1) he was my mother’s cousin, a scary thought, 2) he believed the gym we played in was his own personal gym (it wasn’t), and 3) he would not allow anybody to wear hats in what he called “my gym.” He became known as The Hat Nazi. It didn’t matter if you were the First Lady of the United States of America—if you wore a hat into Steve’s gym, he was going to A) scream at you, and then B) steal it right off the top of your head. Some people collect Pez dispensers or rare bottles of wine; Steve collected other people’s hats. His collection grew every weekend when we played games. After a while, most kids learned not to wear their hats to the gym. But every once in a while somebody would forget, or somebody would come to the gym for the first time, or somebody would get brave and try to test Steve—and Steve would inevitably snatch their hat right off their head, with a scowl on his face that said “This little fucker tried to put one over on me.” I think Steve would eventually give the hats back at the end of the season. Or maybe he would even give them back the same day he took them. I don’t know. In my mind, he kept them forever and still has them hidden in a back room somewhere in his house, where he occasionally looks at the collection, puts his pinky finger to his mouth, laughs an evil laugh, and reminisces about better days. In retrospect, it was a wonder nobody’s father socked him one for stealing a child’s hat.

There was no epic hat scene on the day of my championship game, at least not that I remember. All I remember, besides my family’s support, was the basketball. We went back and forth with the other team all game long. Ben would make a no-look assist and we would surge ahead. Marc would airmail a medieval catapult shot and we would fall behind. I scored something like four points, my cousin John scored something like six, and the Yellow Team became champions by a score of something like 22-18. Not even the Milwaukee Bucks could win that ugly. But we were winners, and even at that age, that mattered.

The Hyenas roared. Buddy remained in his bleacher seat, with one leg crossed over the other and a coffee in his right hand. Steve scoured the area for hats. The refs were relieved my family decided to take it easy. My hand trembled, I hopped up and down like a kangaroo, and the smile wouldn’t leave my face.

I had completed my first season of basketball, and I was a champion. If only winning always came so easy.

Read the previous chapter here: Chapter 1.

Editor’s note: Yesterday, I discussed the possibility of using this space to pimp my new book. After some mixed feedback, all of which I appreciated, I decided to give you a sneak preview. This is the first chapter of the book, which I started writing yesterday.

Let me know what you think, and also let me know whether you’d like open threads for the remaining playoff games. It might be fun to vent about the Heat, ogle about Taj Gibson’s dunk, or shed some tears while thinking about what might have been.

Thank you all, for everything. And yes, the picture above is me when I was in high school. If only Jeff Green could box out with such impeccable form.

–Jay

*****

In retrospect, I should have chosen a different sport. Basketball rewards leaping ability, quickness and height, and if genetics were any hint, I was destined to strike out in all three categories.

My dad stands 5’11 (though he’d get mad at me for calling him less than 6’0) and his jump shot looks like a rabid dog having a seizure. He played hockey when he was younger and will tell anyone who will listen about the time his firm hip check toppled the best player in his high school league. But if you wanted to pick someone to breed a world-class basketball player, my father would be near the back of the line, standing somewhere in the vicinity of Danny DeVito. This is the time he would want me to mention that he was not useless athletically; he set his city’s record in the mile run when he was only thirteen years old, and he was captain of both his hockey team and golf team in high school (he still brags about the one glorious day he shot in the 60s). That stuff is all true. But when it came to passing down height and fast-twitch muscle fibers that would help me become an NBA player one day, he failed me. Quite woefully, I might add. The man couldn’t jump over a sheet of paper.

All my athleticism, if you can call it that, came from my mother. Or at least, that’s what she tells me. A series of injuries stemming from a ruptured disc in her neck kept my mom from displaying all the athletic feats she claimed she could do. She was great at tennis, she says. She was the best water-skier ever, she tells me. She could lift entire houses with just her pinky finger, her self-proclaimed legend states. She was the most impressive synchronized swimmer Massachusetts has ever seen, she brags, the very definition of grace. But I remember more than she gives me credit for. When I was about eight years old, back before the injuries took away all my mother’s “athleticism,” I watched her play tennis. She stood in the middle of the court, refusing to move side to side, hoping her opponent would hit the ball straight back to her. Anything outside of her arm’s reach was a winner.

As you can probably tell, reaching the NBA was outside the realm of possibility from the day I was conceived. Not that I let that keep me from dreaming. When I was young, I believed my path to the NBA was already blazed; I just had to follow it. I was going to play for Coach K at Duke, then get drafted by the Celtics during the first round, probably in the lottery. I would become the hometown hero. Women would want me. Men would want to be me. Children would want my autograph. Somebody would probably make a movie out of my life. Of course, those dreams never materialized. If they ever do make a movie about my basketball career, it will be called “His Airless.” When you’re destined to be a short, slow white boy for your entire life, the NBA probably isn’t for you.

I did dabble in other sports. I tried soccer, like most suburban children do, and I was phenomenal. No, really, I was—I once scored 41 goals in a single game. Of course, I was seven years old at the time, played in a league that did not allow goalies, and my opponents were probably blind. But I scored 41 freaking goals in one game. You can never take that away from me. Nonetheless, I hated soccer. There was something about it that bored me to death (probably the fact that World Cup games could actually end in scoreless ties). So I quit on top, before my town’s league allowed goalies.

Baseball didn’t bore me as much as soccer did. Some people might hate baseball’s lack of action, but I found a way around it: play pitcher and catcher, and only pitcher and catcher. I was involved in every play and boredom didn’t set in nearly as often; I never had to pick my wedgies during long innings in the outfield. I was actually pretty good at baseball. I batted something like .700 in Little League, pitched a few no-hitters and became the most-feared baserunner in the league. We weren’t allowed to lead off the base once the pitcher toed the rubber. But by waiting until the perfect time (when the catcher started to put his mask back on and the pitcher’s back was facing the plate), I managed to steal home more than ten times in my final year. What I’m not mentioning is that I was in 7th grade and almost 13 years old, playing against a lot of nine- and ten-year old opponents. I was kind of like Danny Almonte, except at least in my case being the proverbial man among boys was actually legal. When I finally could have graduated to a full-sized diamond, in 8th grade, I stopped playing baseball. Not because I was afraid of playing against kids my own age (how dare you accuse me of being a coward?), but because AAU basketball was played in the spring and I didn’t have time to play two sports. It’s worth noting that I did make a brief return to baseball during my freshman year of high school. Playing for my school’s freshman team, I pitched only one inning, striking out four players. No, that’s not a typo, and yes, I am tooting my own horn. One inning, four strikeouts, and my high school baseball career was finished forever. I’d chosen basketball instead.

Actually, saying I chose basketball isn’t right. It chose me. I was born with older cousins and I looked up to them. In fact, saying I worshiped them might be more accurate. When I was young, I would have jumped into a school of jellyfish if my older cousins told me to. Once, I really did.

We had created something we called “The Man’s Club.” Basically, my older cousins came up with dares for the rest of us. If we completed the dares, we gained entrance to The Man’s Club. If we failed to complete them, we were scorned for a day or two, until the next dare came along and we had another chance at admission to the honorable club. Our places in The Man’s Club were very tenous—as soon as my older cousins thought of the next dare, our previous accomplishments were forgotten and we needed to prove our manhood all over again.

Once, we dared my cousin Mike to enter “The Torture Chamber,” which actually meant he had to lay down under some couch cushions so the rest of us could jump on him. Not our brightest idea; Mike broke his arm. Later, on a family vacation at the beach, we dared one of my cousins to take a shit in his pants (I’ll leave his name out of this in an attempt to save his reputation). He did, but, needless to say, Nameless Cousin’s father wasn’t as pleased as he should have been by his son’s entrance into the Man’s Club. Nameless Cousin spent the rest of the vacation grounded and confined to his bedroom, crying tears of shame.

During that same summer, we swam out to a raft in the ocean and were surrounded by a school of jellyfish. My cousins told me to jump in and swim to shore. Rather than responding with an intelligent, “No,” I simply asked, “Is there anything else you’d like me to do?” There was nothing else. Apparently, jumping into a pack of 20 or so jellyfish and getting stung dozens of times was enough to prove my manhood. Until, you know, my older cousins thought of a new dare, at which time my manhood would be entirely forgotten.

My cousins Pat and Billy, especially, were older, taller and, in my eyes at least, the next Larry Birds. They always raved about Bird. To them, he was the perfect basketball player. He was the most talented player on the court; he knew it, his opponents knew it, and the fans knew it. If there was somebody in attendance who didn’t know it, Bird had no problem telling them himself. But he still dove after loose balls. He still did all he could to get his teammates involved. To Larry, basketball wasn’t just a game. It was something holy, something he needed to respect and something everybody else should respect, too. Watching him play, it was evident that Larry cared about winning basketball games like a groom should care about his bride. My cousins dug that. And it didn’t hurt that Bird played in Boston while we grew up in the Western part of the state. Bird was their favorite player and basketball was their favorite sport. It was only a matter of time until it was my favorite sport, too.

I can still vividly remember the night I fell in love with basketball. At least, I think I remember it vividly. I might have glorified my memory through the years, altering my recollections to make this one night seem more important than it actually was. Or maybe I remember it exactly as I saw it but still don’t get all the details right; after all, that night I was watching basketball through the lens of a five-year old. At that age, you don’t always understand everything that happens. Anyway, on to the story.

Billy was playing in a high school game against Travis Best’s high school, Central High School. I’m not sure whether Travis, who would later earn fame as an Indiana Pacer, was on the team that year. He might have already graduated high school, after which he attended Georgia Tech. Either way, I was wearing a plain white t-shirt adorned with magic marker. My mom had written “Martin” (Billy’s last name) and “33″ (Billy’s number—an homage to Bird, obviously) on the back of my plain white t-shirt. On the front, she wrote “Cathedral” (Billy’s high school team). Wearing my brand new jersey (of sorts), I cheered until my voice sounded like I had inhaled cigarette smoke for 650 straight hours.

But Billy’s team didn’t respond to my cheers, at least initially. They fell down by about 20 points. The stands were so packed that a hundred or so people sat on the floor to watch the game. At least half the crowd supported the home team, Central High School, Billy’s opponent.

“It’s all over,” they chanted. “It’s all over.”

The floor boards quivered like a man waiting to get punched in the face by Mike Tyson. Billy’s team looked just as shaken as those floor boards. That was okay by me. His team didn’t need to win for me to idolize Billy. He was 6’6 with range that extended well beyond the three-point arc. He could pass like a point guard, played varsity basketball all four years of high school, and, since I had never been to a college or NBA game, was the closest thing to Larry Bird I had ever seen in person.

Billy was good enough that one local basketball aficionado would later compare him to Vinny Del Negro. ”He would have had Vinny’s NBA career if he had just learned to follow his shot,” the aficionado said. Okay, so maybe Aficionado’s judgment wasn’t perfect; he later told me without any hint of sarcasm that a local high school player (who never even played college basketball) was better than the San Antonio Spurs’ Chris Quinn. Yeah, right. And if my cousin simply followed his shot, he would have had a 12-year NBA career. Have another brew, Aficionado. But I digress. Back to Billy’s game.

The game was all but over, a loss all but certain. Billy’s team was being drowned by an uber-athletic Central team and the chants of opposing fans. Of course, they could have lost by 100 points and I still would have returned home thinking, “Man, did you see Billy’s no-look pass? He’s the best player I’ve ever seen.” But the Cathedral Panthers didn’t lose by 100 points.

Central’s lead didn’t slowly dwindle; Cathedral flushed it down the toilet in one quick motion. Like a dead fish, the lead almost instantly disappeared to wherever flushed toilet water goes. The “It’s all over” chants washed away and the Cathedral fans seized control of that overfilled gym.

“Score-board, score-board,” sang the chorus. My cousin Billy had helped lead the comeback, and he was a star. Thousands of people chanted for him. Thousands of people paid money to watch him play a basketball game. I sat there in my de facto jersey, my eyes bouncing with excitement, falling head over heels for Billy and the game he loved. One day, I made up my mind right then and there, people would cheer for me just like that. One day, basketball would help me become a star.

I never would realize the latter goal, but the game has given me more than I ever could have hoped. My friends, my family, my education; if my life were a plain white T-shirt, basketball has always been imprinted on top of it with magic marker.

What would my life have become if I never fell in love with basketball? I don’t know. All I know is that it would have been different. Very different.