HOME AND AWAY

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When the basketball season ended this year, I experienced legitimate grief. I am currently a high school boys basketball coach who used to be a girls high school basketball coach. I coach in the summers doing camps. I coach privately. Coaching has become more being than doing. But this year I lost my entire team when season ended because every single guy is a senior who graduates this June.

But here’s the dynamic I inherited as a result. Every Monday and Wednesday I open the gym up to any kid in our school’s population who is interested in basketball. At first the idea was more or less the “Open Tryout” model used in the 1970s at one point by the hapless Philadelphia Eagles of the National Football League. There was a movie starring Mark Wahlberg called “Invincible” that featured that story. At any rate, what has materialized are two distinctive groups: #1 The Junior Varsity players who were already in the program (hosts) and #2 The International students who hail mostly from China (Guests). Altogether, there’s something like 18 guys who show up and what we’re doing is unprecedented…I think.

The hosts are the incumbents with the best chance of making the team because they know the system, the coaches and the goals, at least in part. The hosts also know the hill they have to climb given the vacuum created by the departure of 12 very skilled players. Normally you hope for a gradual progression and promotion and prefer it to trial by fire. But fire is what these hosts will get and as they move into a position where they now have to own the program, they have to decide who they need as allies, what they themselves need as character traits and what skills their mission will require.

The guests are glad the gym opens twice-a-week at 3 p.m. They bring a change of clothes in a department store bag and head to the restroom immediately following school. They then jump right into the drills ready to learn by sight and movement. They listen, watch and do what they can and I assume they’re having fun. Today was a day that I thought, “At what point do I separate, make cuts, hone down this 18 to ????” And then I was like, “Are you kidding? Why would you eliminate dudes who just want to play, are playing hard and are thousands of miles from home looking for a place to belong?” It dawned on me that these wealthy temporary immigrants are still young men trying to make sense of their own practical aspirations juxtaposed with an excitement about something as basic as basketball.

Maybe in a larger pond, the guests would be lost or seen as expendable. But today I saw an opportunity. What if I can get the hosts and the guests to affect one another via basketball for the strength of the program better yet for the betterment of their own development. Across any divide lies prejudices of all sorts. But I have two worlds on my doorstep represented by young guys who don’t pay rent or a mortgage. They ain’t got no reason to hate each other. And furthermore, if ever there was a workshop for the guests to practice their proclaimed commitments to Christian Faith this is it. The guests are curious and honest. Getting the two groups to interact would be impossible any other way except on a basketball court so now the challenge is to see if the hosts will do their roles justice. Will they view the guests as friends, threats, assets, etc. and will the guests view the hosts as intimidating, territorial, arrogant, etc.? I’m not sure about the existing perceptions but I think we’re on to something if I can get past basketball. There’s more here than figuring out how to replace my shooters, defenders and play makers. There’s some real shaping that can take place if I use Mondays and Wednesdays to cultivate and not simply eliminate.

PLAYING HURT

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We all do it sometimes. Kobe Bryant sprained his ankle on Saturday, March 12, 2011 against the Dallas Mavericks in a game that mattered. Lakers needed the win against a team they just happen to be chasing in the Western Conference standings. And you knew the injury was significant because Bryant left the bench and went to the locker room. He never does that. He then returned like Paul Pierce (Boston Celtics) does all the time and was a key contributor in the win. Fast forward to Monday and the Orlando Magic featuring Dwight Howard, Hedo Turkoglu and Jameer Nelson. It’s another one of those types of games that dares you to sit it out and since #24 wasn’t interested in the dare, he chose the truth and laced ’em up.

Truth is, he was still hurt. The softball sized swelling had been reduced but a sprain is a sprain and playoffs are not far off. Why risk it? Let’s get into that in a moment. What we need to recount is that he ended the game with only 16 points on 7-19 shooting. He scored 12 of his 16 all in the 3rd quarter on mostly contested shots. The counterargument would elementarily challenge the necessity of Bryant’s involvement on Monday night. After all, 16 points from the guy who scored 81 is pittance. Couldn’t Shannon Brown and other reserves have  joined forces to muster 16 points? Possibly, but what does it mean to you when your leader plays hurt and doesn’t make excuses? What does it mean when your franchise player takes a charge while gimpin’? It would mean a lot to me.

I always figure that a guy like Kobe Bryant has upwards of $50 million in reasons to treat himself like fine China. But he operates more like Dixie Disposal ware. He’s like the treasure ship captain in the joke ‘Bring me my brown pants’. At the start of that joke, the captain asked for his red shirt when combat was unavoidable  because he didn’t want his subordinates to see him bleeding. “If I am wounded, the blood does not show, and the crew continues to fight without fear,” the ship’s captain said. Later on, that same captain asked for his brown pants for a similar reason. Playing on a bum ankle pales in comparison to war but the logic seems solid. The more prominent the leader, the greater the sacrifices which must be made to remain engaged in the battle for the sake of morale among the troops. And this is why Mark Jackson and Chris Mullin kept saying last night that the Lakers are still the team to beat.

STAPLES CENTER SOUTH

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That’s what they call Phillips Arena apparently, home of the Atlanta Hawks. The Lakers moved to 8-0 on the road tonight with the gold clad fan club raising an absolute raucous in a building two time zones away from Downtown Los Angeles. And this is no phenomenon if you follow the Lake Show, though I’ve never seen it quite to the degree I beheld on this Tuesday night. Faces painted purple and gold, pom pom hair (also purple), chants of MVP for Kobe Bryant. Are you serious? Did the economic downturn drive so many Californians to the the ATL that the “trues” flood the once-a-year meeting between the Hawks and the Lakers? Or are all these people front running like Usain Bolt in a junior high Olympics? I’m baffled.

What I do know is that success attracts people because we seem to love a winner. If you can’t beat ’em, definitely, by all means, for the love of James Naismith, at least don the colors of them. It’s practically a mantra that he who roots for a loser is bound to become one himself. Can there really be Lakers fans everywhere because myriad residents esteem the legacy of a Minnesota moniker turned left coast icon? The Lakers are certainly a brand cultivated in the second largest market in professional basketball (New York is #1). But I’d like to believe that if I lived in Milwaukee, I’d bleed Bucks. Am I the one who’s trippin’? Maybe it has something to do with basketball specifically. I can’t imagine Green Bay residents, not even one, cheering on the New England Patriots because Tom Brady is a pocket perfectionist. Or could you envision Baltimore Orioles fan lovin’ them some Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim formerly known as the baseball team closest to Disneyland.

I’ve always known die hard fans who root for also-rans win or lose and fans who seem to like every team except the one they could actually watch play if given a ticket with 30 minutes to tip-off. It’s a strange allegiance that we have to teams and to watch the Lakers inspire the road team because of fan betrayal is nothing short of comedic. But it’s sad to be sure and it just seems treasonable to bellow “D-Fish” when you should be crying, “DEFENSE.”

SORT IT OUT

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Jay-Z once said, “So you changed ya attitude before they asked what happened to you.” The longer I live the more I observe. And the more I observe young people the more I think that decisions hold crazy weight. In other words, I’m starting to grasp the gravity implicit in every one of our choices. From moving away to becoming a parent before the 20th birthday to treating drugs as an auxiliary, it is clear that the most recent version of adolescent/young adult is smack dab in the middle of a crucible. I have one person in mind.

This person became a parent before his senior year in high school. This person is an athlete. This person gets high on the endorphins related to sport. This person also gets high on marijuana. And I have a hunch the earth resident birthed to this person is in the nebulous of grandparent surrogacy and early infant estrangement to parents who still need a bit of rearing themselves. How’s your addition? The summation of these elements makes for a conundrum worth sorting out. And to think that attitude could be the only thing that needs altering so that a child knows his parent, so that marijuana is an impediment removed, so that endorphins are not limited to physical exercise but expanded to include potential realized. “You never know,” said the sage. Truth is, perhaps we always know. We always know the difference between destructive and constructive, between detrimental and enlivening. But attitude, perspective, paradigm may very well be what stands between people saying, “I wonder what ever happened to him” and “Man….what happened to him.”

WILL YOU BE BETTER?

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When my wife asked the seven year-old girl in her intervention class today who killed her aunt, the girl responded, “The Niggers.” My wife asked her twice to be sure she had heard her correctly. The little girl’s aunt had been the victim of a drive-by shooting in Pomona days ago and apparently had been caught in the crossfire. It’s the type of horror kids from low-income areas know all to well unfortunately. And you thought by ‘incident’ I was referring to the murder. That’s the no-brainer. What you may not consider horrific is the seven year-old being programmed to utter the epithet “Nigger” as an explanation of who took her aunt’s life.

To clarify, by “Nigger” the little girl may or may not have meant that the assailant was black. I question because when my wife, who is black, asked her if all blacks were niggers, the little girl said, “No.” Such an innocent soul she is. She’s a blank slate being vandalized with the indoctrination of racism and it’s not her fault. It was an example of how at some point your influence on young people will be realized. With all that you grew up ‘knowing,’ there may come a time to be MORE than what you’ve always known for the sake of generations to come. Can a seven year-old be a racist? I doubt it. But she can be molded into one without question.

I had a conversation the other day with someone who was surprised at the racist undertones found in schools. I assured the person that racism is alive and well so long as it is perpetuated. Perhaps the most sound relay in history is that of racist ideology. The baton is seldom dropped because the motives to exchange it are so strong. Fear, convenient scapegoating and the like make racist programming attractive. But nothing is sadder than to see a child learn to vilify entire people groups as the arbiters of evil. I remember being taught to appreciate people beyond my own racial prejudices and I emphasize that I am talking purely of bigotry associated with skin color/ethnic identity. For that little girl, she’s got enough odds stacked against her without the impediment of racism.

THE NBA’S SECOND SEASON

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The upper echelon of teams in the NBA are now poised to make that final push toward the playoffs to assert themselves or at least take their best stab at contention for the championship. There’s somewhere around 23 games remaining for the Los Angeles Lakers and amid criticisms that they’re aging as fast as Bemjamin Button grew younger, they appear to be competing afresh. The missing link that is Ron Artest showed up on Wednesday against the Portland Trailblazers in Portland, a place the Lakers have not had much success of late. At any rate, the hope of not only a second season but a third consecutive championship is some kind of carrot.

The All-Star break serves as a checkpoint for teams to evaluate their potential and retool. The break is also where players like Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan and the likes begin to see the illuminate end of the tunnel. And wouldn’t you look for that marker if you had all those miles on your legs? Until recently, I never realized the lengths one has to go to to remain a viable professional athlete what with the countless surgeries and rehabilitation. To say the least, it’s a career just to stay healthy but the motive for competition is the driver. Whether it’s the money that accompanies the longevity which spurs the athlete or not I can’t say assuredly. What I do know is that not every one will fair well in second season or in their career for that matter. I know guys who play and played in the NBA in relative obscurity. And there are greats who never amassed the success they sought which makes me wonder if there’s something more to the second half of the season than just the hope of contractual bonuses that promise more money the farther the team goes in the playoffs.

See, after the high school team I coach was eliminated from California’s sectional playoffs, I started reflecting on how we finished up and I realized that the guys performed more than admirably. However, I could feel the impure motives revealing themselves as I rehearsed what I could have done differently in the final 20 seconds of the last game. I wasn’t reflecting on the season from a panoramic perspective but rather was consumed by feelings of regret and the hindsight 20/20 vision. I got lost in how easily the team could have moved on to the quarter finals. And it wasn’t until parents, my athletic director, random spectators, etc. began to offer insights that I realized how cheap my motives can actually be. And that’s the rub. Try as you might to have pure motives, to say that what really matters is what you’re learning through any given process, the truth for me is that it took losing 10 winnable games this season to show me what the competition really entails. I hate to admit even now but losing is not in my control. There I said it. And whether it’s the second season, the playoffs or some other portion of the season, I now understand that fear is what lies under the obsession to win. I fear failure, fear ridicule and fear being a laughing stock. Consequently, I didn’t immediately value all of the character that my guys developed this year the way I should have. Now it’s starting to sink in; fear is some kind of stimulus but it makes a horrible god.

I’ll TRADE YA

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Carmelo Anthony is the buzz, likely for the rest of this week after his request to be moved from the Denver Nuggets to the New York Knicks was granted on Tuesday, February 22, 2011. He was involved in a 13 player trade between three teams. STOP RIGHT THERE! I thought a trade was when I gave you something and you gave me something that I perceive is of equal value. What’s this 13-players involved stuff? Well in the business of professional basketball, it is like me giving you a fresh pack of Big League’s Chew for a sleeve of scratch-n-sniff stickers. In the NBA, the rule of value for value still holds and unloading one player could mean a 13-player flury if the focal point of the trade is a franchise player worth 18-million per. Nevertheless, trading humans seems strange and I’ll tell you why.

I grew up trading things not people. And the only trades that seem to not offend my conscience ethically are ones like the one made on Tuesday sending Melo to the Knicks. Even this is troubling though because of the lives uprooted in the process. Twelve other guys get to hire moving trucks because one dude outgrew the team that drafted him after his one-and-done year at Syracuse. I’m not so salty about it all but the principle merits discussing. What happens…on the inside…when you get traded in? Is there something translated to us when we are traded throughout our lives? When a man or woman in a bad marriage is traded in by a spouse who decides to find love elsewhere, it would seem appropriate that the victim find solace in the riddance of the cheater. But so often there’s lots of pain, self-loathing and a host of other emotions that speak to the ill effects of the trade. See, the trade sends a message that I no longer need you but at it’s best maybe it’s a mutual decision that if we’re going to part, let’s play win-win. Either way, something seems fishy about trading people like vehicles. Loyalty, though a hackneyed virtue, has a certain something that smells of security. I find that most of my own anger usually stems from disloyalty or perceptions of such. I can’t quite put my finger on why the trade of humans is so unnatural but I know that it feels foreign no matter how many times I see it. Is it not odd to have a personal experience with someone and then send them packing? Switching teams I get. It’s the use of people like pawns that I find disconcerting. And at the end of the day, Carmelo Anthony did ask to be traded. Denver merely granted his request. But usually trades are made win-lose and the power player is the winner. I have no real conclusion. How do you feel about being traded? Has it ever happened to you? Do tell.