A Short Anecdote

           The gym is small and badly-lit.  All day, a gaggle of middle school basketball players has shuffled, jumped, and strutted over its court.  The sound of dribbling basketballs echoes off the walls, and the pools of dribble sweat are, sometimes, wiped off with an old white dirty towel.  Some of these players practice good personal hygiene; many do not, and the gym smells.

            Parents crowd onto the three rows of uncomfortable bleachers.  Some are red-faced and angry; others are sweaty and nervous; others are just plain hot.  The shrill twill of the referee’s whistle brings a groan.  The offending player looks confused.  We have reached the end of the tournament, and this is the Championship Game.

            Even so, the players are gangly and ungainly.  Their jump shots and bounce passes are larval—one day, they might grow into real jump shots and real bounce passes, but not yet.  One of the ungainly young men, however, is dominantly gangly.  He stands a head taller than the rest, and consequently blocks shots and scores with relative ease.  His team would be far in the lead if it weren’t for the other team’s star, a short, lithe, graceful young man for whom the ball is a natural extension of his hand.

            This player, the only real athlete on the floor, has two tan band-aids plastered to his sweating skin.  Now, with only minutes remaining in the game, he drives the lane and is fouled.

            It is a hard foul but does not appear particularly dirty.  The tallest player on the court, the other team’s star, swatted at the ball and raked his hand down the back of the shooter’s shoulder.  However, it opens up yet another cut. 

            The graceful athlete, in accordance with the rules, has to leave the game to get a third band-aid; they cut is so long that they actually need a fourth and a fifth.  When he reenters the game, he is so sweaty and bloodied that one of his band-aids falls off.  He re-exits the game and reenters moments later, only to have the same thing happen.  Over the last four minutes of the game, he has to leave four times.  His team does not score without him on the court, and the taller player’s team pulls away to win. 

            In the midst of the celebration, standing high above his team, the taller player looks ecstatically joyful.  Actually, that’s not quite accurate.  Given the context, you can tell that he’s ecstatically joyful.  Without context, if you simply looked at his face, he would just look angry.

            If you would have seen him before the tournament, he would have looked calm and focused, his face concentrating on a particularly important bit of minutia.  He was in the hotel bathroom, standing over the sink with a pair of clippers, trimming his fingernails so that each of them had three distinct, sharp, jagged points.

            Each of the five crucial band-aids was the result of those sharpened fingernails.  The cuts were made deliberately.

            These are not sour grapes.  My son was not the graceful athlete diabolically sliced up by some borderline psychopath. 

Quite the opposite: I was that taller player.  That borderline psychopath grew up to be me.