The CYO Basketball Diaries Part II

Don’t listen to Yael.

She’s going to try to tell you that St. Francis CYO Basketball is a place of warmth and acceptance. It’s a kumbaya amidst a sea of ethnic separatism and hostility.  It’s the lingua franca that unites across all other boundaries and borders blah blah blah. 

Tell that to the snarling beauty queens that used to rip the ball from my little, eight-year-old hands, and leave me mangled and mortified on the court. I cowered in their blinding glow, so golden and tawny from summer sun, blond locks laced into flawless fishbones. Imperious in Champion shorts. And vicious, so vicious.

“I thought you might like it! I thought it would get you out of the house!” So says my mother. How could so devout a woman as she not notice that in this neighborhood basketball is a religion, worshiped in the house adjoining the one that Jesus built (and on the blacktop across the street in summer time)? 

Somehow our family missed the cue.  Walk in the door of our home and you could hear the comforting white noise of the crowds at a Mets game. The punctuated ratatat of the announcer narrating jabs of pantalones negros vs. pantalones rojos on Boxeo. My mother shouting, “Dumbhead!” at whatever Jet or Giant was currently disappointing her. Or the sounds of 1,000 people in pastel polo shirts trying to be quieter than a little white ball rolling over crewcut grass. But basketball never made it to the McCarthy TV screen. How on earth was I supposed to know what to do with my arms and legs? How could I be anything other than a nuisance to the rest of my team, in a sport in which standing still too long in the wrong place forces a turnover?

By the way, don’t listen to my 6-year-old daughter either. 

Every Tuesday afternoon she runs, flying blind and jubilant, in whatever direction the coaches point her. Like her mother, she runs as fast as she can to the position she’s told and sticks to it like she’s poured cement into her shoes. She watches passes fly by her, applies Emily Post level manners to Steal the Bacon drills, obliviously travels around the court with the ball pressed firmly between her hands, wide-eyed at the outstretched arms clamoring, “Pass it to me! Pass it to me!”

         Yet unlike me, she wakes up on a Saturday wishing it were a Tuesday. “I’M SO EXCITED TO GO BACK TO BASKETBALL!!!!”

I bite my tongue. I smile. When it is Tuesday once again, I turn to the other parents on the sidelines and, pointedly out of earshot, regale them with my tales of the pathetic girl in Keds and dress socks, fed to the lions by her well-meaning mother. 

Now, I’ve found myself back in this neighborhood as an adult. My husband, who’s not from here, says it’s because my kind are like salmon, we go home to spawn. And while, on paper, I perfectly fit the demographic profile of the community, (Irish Catholic, grew up in the same house my mother did, came back to raise my own family here) my ineptitude at basketball is just one of the many ways I’ve always felt distinctly outside of its culture.

But, why did I ever let that get to me? When the freckle-faced punks riding around on bicycles used to tell me, “You’re weird,” I’d clap back, “Thank you!” Standing out in a sea of similarity was fine by me. I never cared.

But getting pounded down in basketball, I cared. Wearing the wrong footwear to basketball, I cared. Being wholly clueless on the court, when every other child seemed reared on this from birth, I cared. In that context, standing out from the pack didn’t seem to have much merit to it. I guess that’s why they call it a “team sport.”

So, now, I keep my thoughts quiet, at least when my daughter is near.  I make sure my face is expressing no trace of my own PTSD, lest it in some way infect her.  I’d hate to dampen the enthusiasm. And in good news, it doesn’t seem likely it’ll happen. Her not caring superpower seems a lot stronger than my own.