I come from the shorter side of Oxnard. While the north side of the city bore long-legged military raised Spartans, my side carried out a long legacy of producing small Latino, Asian, and white kids with stubby legs and short arms. This was the side where, growing up, I would look down to meet the buzz cut tops of my schoolmates’ heads back in elementary school. It’s the side that forced me to play the center position, against guys 200 pounds heavier than me, for our winless high school basketball team. But these events aren’t on my mind right now. Lets consider what happened between them, in the emotionally retarded middle years I knew as Junior High.
Wait a second, in reconsideration, back to high school for a moment. I remember my high school coach, after one of his rants about us being prideless eunuchs, saying something about sportsmanship; how it’s not whether you win its how you play the game. You need to be considerate and show respect to each other and ourselves and in this way we have won every game. You know, things you need tell a team that’s gone 0-11.
While a man who spent four years enduring spirit breaking Montana winters might know something about the assiduous development of moral fiber, Junior High boys usually don’t know shit about sportsmanship. The only development they generally encountered was the promotion from trading Pokemon cards in a chain link corner to bullshitting about owning condoms on the single asphalt paved basketball court. Here, older Junior High boys proved their steel and I must admit I was rarely one. As soon as I approached an ongoing game, someone would shout, “You can’t play, you’re too tall.” This was never delivered with a mocking edge to it; just an announcement of a bit of unfortunate information like that the salad dressing was left out over night and must now be thrown away. “You’re just too tall.”
This left me to scout for games over the weekend against the bigger high school kids. My dad usually took me out and we developed a mean screen and roll tactic in order to hang with whatever JV benchwarmers kicked around the neighborhood parks on Saturdays. Sometimes games got scarce with only the same crowds of Junior High boys still running around during weekend afternoons and me still a foot too tall.
I remember one weekday like this, with a pack of boys I didn’t recognize playing on the ratty court outside the Junior High school. I waited inside the car as my dad nodded at them. “Follow me,” he said, although I knew he understood the situation. While they may not be from my school, junior high boys behave more or less uniformly. They too would blandly announce that the salad dressing had been left out.
Things went completely to plan. As my dad and I approached, one kid hunched over with the ball at his waist as the other three circled around. They spoke in murmurs, discussing the simple yet delicate dynamics of giving us the cold shoulder. They looked up at us with ludicrously precocious faces, faces of real estate agents who have a client trying to grind a couple more hundred bucks out of him. Come on guys, they seemed to say, do we have to make this awkward for the both of us? We arrived at the baseline.
“Guys want to play three on three?” my dad asked.
“That guy’s too tall,” Kid With The Ball replied.
My dad turned around, looked at me, and then turned back. He was shrugging and motioning back at me with his thumb.
“That guy? Well, sure, he’s tall. But he’s a foreigner.”
In unison, the group began to exchange glances. One little guy was looking back and forth from me to the ball to the Kid With The Ball. Evidently, this piece of information changed everything and three of the boys began to nod. However, Kid With The Ball wasn’t so easily convinced.
“Well, if he’s foreign, then what country is he from?”
“He just came over from France,” my dad replied, “I brought him out here cause he’s never even seen a basketball before. You see, rubber is very rare in France so they can’t afford to make basketballs over there. It was his one wish to play in a basketball game, his one American wish. But I’ll let him know that this is a private game-“
I think I saw my dad give me a little wink when the cluster of boys disbanded, me hesitantly tiptoeing onto the court as I spoke fluent faux French.
The game was over before it even began.
We used the screen and roll and we owned them.