Making Boys of Men

Basketball is a sport
that makes men of boys
and boys of men.
Reginald Dwayne Betts

Back when I was in my 30s, young enough to still have a basketball future but old enough to sense its horizon, I played in a regular noon game at the local women’s college. We were an odd assemblage, boys and men attracted to a beautiful game, and we were lucky to have a wide open basketball court at our disposal. A few Smith College professors and administrators played with us, and they gave us a kind of stamp of approval, an informal permission to be there. (Today, this game would be forbidden. The private school campus is locked tight, and was made inaccessible to the public long before Covid-19 gave so many institutions, like Smith College, a public health excuse to bar the unfamiliar and those not paying.)

This was sometime in the mid-1990s, and a bunch of us were showering for our 2 p.m. return to work. Newspapering was, for me, a nice complement to basketball. The paper came off the press about 11:30 a.m. and a natural dead time ensued. I filled it with a three-day-a-week run. I was toweling off and Don Baumer was thinking out loud about retirement. Not from his Smith College teaching job, but from basketball. He was in his early 50s at the time, still fit, and outfitted with a consistent enough jump shot. I told him he was premature in his assessment; he could still play — in that slow-moving 50s kind of way. But he was thinking deep and long term. He told me: If I were to die tomorrow, no one could tell me, “Donnie, you haven’t played enough basketball.”

By the end of the semester, Don was done with the noon run.

I’ve seen Don no more than five times over the last twenty five years. Basketball made our lives collide. I’ve retold his story of deciding to quit hoop countless times. It resonates with me, because I have never managed to follow his lead. He was resolute and he made it stick. He was free of ball.

Me, I am without doubt unfree.

Poets send us swirling, pondering ideas that we bury so we don’t have worry ourselves during our daily lives. Take freedom for example.

I’m free by most definitions: not subject to anyone’s control; capable of choosing for myself; my decisions determined by me. All those instances, I realize, are subject to the context of debt and finances and the compromises of being in a marriage. My freedom is not absolute. 

But I’m behind no bars, unlike the early life of Reginald Dwayne Betts, who spent nine years in jail for a carjacking he committed at 16. Now a lawyer and poet, Betts put on a solo performance, Felon: An American Washi Tale, this week in front of hundreds of people. Front and center: freedom, how it feels to lose it, and be branded with the label of felon.

After hearing Betts, my wife bought two of his books and in tears had him sign them for a work acquaintance of hers who had again landed in jail. Betts’ story and poems about prison and the lasting effects of incarceration were tough truths for the mostly white, middle-class audience. I left thinking about my freedom, basketball, and a boy shooting hoop in the dusk of a Sunday evening.

Some background: The Boston Celtics are currently in the NBA playoffs, playing a high grade of basketball against a top-notch team with a smarmy, condescending, uber-talented villain. I have watched and played so much basketball in my life that I have no business continuing to indulge. I still fall in love with the player movement — spin moves, Euro steps, cross-overs, up-and-unders — the strategy, the mental fortitude of performing under intense hatred and pressure, the toughness, and the togetherness.

Last Sunday afternoon, the Celtics won on a last-second shot, time running out as the ball went through the hoop, and I needed to leave the house, because I was filled, not with anxiety, but an energy I couldn’t quite identify. I was twitchy and restless. It was a feeling of being unfree and restricted, not by an outside force, but somehow bound by conflicting desires. 

After countless injuries, I choose to no longer play ball. There’s a freedom in writing that. I choose not to play, rather like Calvin Coolidge choosing not to run. But that’s not real. I choose because I’m not able; I’m not free to play. I want to hoop but I’m too fat, too sore, too fragile, too fucking old.

I can walk. So that’s what I did last Sunday after the game. I told my wife that I was going to look for the rising moon, which I knew had been full two days earlier, so given that it was not quite sunset I wouldn’t see the moon since it was due to rise two hours later. This knowledge that I had no chance of seeing what I told my wife I was going out to witness also fed my restlessness, my sense that I was unfree. I was lost in time, unable to make happen what I most wanted, restricted to rules and systems and truths I wanted to shuck. I wasn’t going to hoop; I wasn’t going to see the moon.

I walked alone, greeted the happy family of four on bikes that I recently met because of my work running an after-school program. The oldest child is six and a magnetically likable boy. For a moment I had this feeling of wanting to invite them over to hang out with my family. Except that wouldn’t work. My oldest is thirty, not six, and he lives in another state. I was fitting in no where, out of step and unfree, where time and my body and my temperament did not fit. I waved good-bye to my new friends, thinking my username and password didn’t match. I wasn’t free to proceed.

I continued and at the ball field down the street, I saw my former butcher, who was tossing a ball to his springy, young golden retriever. We were looking east, the sun had nearly set at our backs, and a soon-to-be-gone glow mixed with a cloudless blue sky enveloping us. I waved and moved on, not interested in tossing a ball for a dog. I still had magical, unrealistic designs of seeing the moon.

My plan was to walk into the nearby agricultural meadows that are squeezed between the interstate and the Connecticut River, a floodplain of no trees and wide sight lines. It was going to be more open down there, no obstructions for the moonrise. 

Before I got there, I saw a portable basketball hoop. It was the same sort of hoop that I had given away two weeks prior, an admission that my days of playing ball with my own children were over, along with the days of me practicing post moves against ghost defenders as I worked on faking left, turning right, shooting softly. I had given our hoop to two families whose children are between six and twelve. I had seen two of thekids playing in their driveway, shooting against a road sign. Hit the sign for a basket. I couldn’t abide their using a sign for a hoop when I had an unused one lying on its side.

I had not gotten rid of my hoop for years because of the possibility that I might play again, that my daughter might want to shoot jump shots with me. I, and the hoop, were trapped. Unlike Professor Baumer, I could not say that I had played enough. 

When my neighbor, Peter, drove over to pick up my hoop, I helped him load the contraption: backboard, rim, net, pole, and base. I wanted to lift it up and physically give it all away; that seemed to be a step toward moving on from the sport, toward freeing myself.

Back on my walk, I saw that someone was shooting at the hoop in the yard. A boy in a black hoodie pulled up over his head against the spring chill was dribbling on dead, brown grass approximately the size of the painted lines that mark the key on a basketball court. Outside of his brown key, the April grass was green, sign of less wear from a deeper shot.

I watched him shoot at the hoop and I realized I knew this boy. I had not seen Jonathan for nearly a year, but I knew it was the boy who had walked with me as part of the local elementary school’s Walking School Bus and shared stories of Jaylen Brown, one of the best players on the Celtics. He was in middle school, with no reason to talk to the likes of me anymore.

I approached anyway, and asked a question to which I knew the answer. Did you see the game?

Of course he had. Why else was he out here alone bundled up against a night hurtling toward freezing? He had just watched the Celtics pull off a stunning win against a villain opponent so talented we all wanted to boo him from our living rooms. This middle school boy was doing what girls and boys have been doing since spectators began watching sports. He had been riveted to the game, a game in which four of the best players in the world showed off their skills and he had become enchanted by their hoop magic. He left his living room and moved to his yard, his courtyard, alone with a ball and a hoop. I could not imagine a freer child, one so able to practice what he had seen, to pretend what he might do, to dream what he might achieve. All this on a brown patch in the gloaming, that last light of the day.

I thought about asking him to pass me the ball, so I could take a shot from the green of his lawn. I didn’t, though. I didn’t need to break his rhythm, share the moment. Instead, I waved and walked on, happy to let him get caught up in a game that won’t easily let him free.