Basketball Karma

After all that with Mel Lyman, I went on about my life. I didn't follow sports, I didn't play sports. I would swim and ride my bike, I'd hike. I ran, I surfed, learned to ski and ice skate. Then one of my kids turned out to be a jock. The kids in Westchester all play AYSO soccer, so all three did that. I tried to get the older ones interested in t-ball and then baseball, but it didn't take. The girls played AYSO soccer through high school. The son got interested in basketball at 11 or so. It soon became an all consuming thing. Partially, because the potential coaches would look at me and look at him and were ready to sign him up for anything because of the promise of NBA height. After a year or so, there wasn't anything I could teach him, except for playing smart. (If you are one on one with a guy that never misses a foul shot, he's going to spend a lot of time trying to make you mad, so you will lose it and give him the foul.- stuff like that.)  Anyway, we went to the park and played in their rec league, then middle school club training teams and he and his buddy got on Varsity their freshman year in High School and then when the regular HS team season was done, it was Club Team Basketball year round. For eight to ten months out of the year we were playing somewhere. I was driving him and helping with the teams and trying to find him a team that would get him in the eye for the scouts from the college teams to notice him. I filmed his Junior year in HS and the spring summer after and edited it into a DVD with all the best shots and plays and defensive tricks and made him look really good. He had a 24 point game that he ran and I sent that off to folks too. Lots of fond memories. The other dads and I bonded. Most of them had unfulfilled hoop dreams that they were acting out with their kids. I was just along for the ride to help him get where he wanted to go.  Kyle, a LAPD homicide honcho, and I had great fun acting out at their last high school game. He was as big as me and had played college ball and knew that his boy wasn't going to make it to college level, and mine was so we didn't care and made a huge intimating stink about the team we were playing putting their cheerleaders under our basket. We were going to be thrown out if we didn't settle down, we were told. Anyhow, I still miss hanging out with the dads. My kid was the only one to go play college out of all of the kids we knew. He was getting recruited from Div 3 schools, which helped his ego considerably. The coach that took him liked the cover of the DVD which was just a shot of the kid smiling in our kitchen.

Anyway, the music above is perhaps an acquired taste. But it is six years of my life that perhaps Mel Lyman, in all of his craziness, might have understood if his sons played like mine did. The cool thing about children, is they really raise your consciousness if you are willing to have it raised.