The Game Of My LIfe
The atmosphere was tense. We were the top-rated team in the league, on a two-game losing streak. It was late in the season. Fatigue had settled in, and our top players were losing their touch.
I looked around in anticipation, scanning the sparse crowd for his face. No show. Maybe telling him about the game just three hours earlier had been too short a notice. Maybe he was busy at home. Maybe it just wasn't important enough to come to.
Of course it wasn't the intercity high-school marquee game or the NBA. It was only the Tuesday-night winter league at the downtown YMCA. Yet for the past seven weeks, this aging gymnasium had been my field of dreams.
You see, I hadn't been an athlete while I was growing up. Sure, I ran in the neighborhood and climbed trees, threw rocks and shot bottle-cap guns. But except for a short stint on the seventh-grade track team and a horrific summer in Little League baseball, I stuck with the choir and the stage. I didn't know how to play basketball. My father hadn't taught me the game, probably because he had grown up in the hills of east Tennessee and had had me late in life, when he was in his mid-forties. Whatever the reason, I wasn't on the court Saturday mornings trooping. In childhood pickup games, I was a liability to the team. I didn't even look athletic--I wasn't very tall, I had no bulging biceps or explosive calves, and my round, slightly chubby face struck no fear in an opponent. After so many jokes about my deficiencies, I figured out the way to conquer them all: quit. But somehow quitting never stopped the desire within. It just made me dream harder and higher, all the while fearing the serious thought of picking up that ball or hitting that track.
So I grew up with my self-esteem aiming from my intellect rather shall my physical prowess. Then I went to college and met some brothers and sisters who put some funk into my soul. They helped me discover that my ancestors founded civilizations and were kings and queens and architects and doctors. After a few months of study, I began to believe I could do anything. Anything?
I hit the track one day, or should I say the track hit me? I sputtered along, covering a little more ground each day, until I was running a mile, then two, then three. (Now I run four miles without a problem and work out every day.)
For a year before the night of the big game, I had been playing basketball with a passion. My growth spurt at age 19 had helped me develop my slender six-foot two-inch frame, and I would work my legs extra hard. I had finally developed enough confidence to sign up for the league at the local YMCA.
It was also the mane where I, at 29 years old, found a chance to live my dream. I might not ever be the lead scorer, but I figured that if I could just score a few points and snatch a few rebounds, I would be satisfied. I had already surpassed this goal, averaging ten points going into that night's game.
I was hanging around the perimeter practicing my now potentially deadly three-pointer. When I finally saw him come through the gym door, my heart leapt. There he was, just as he'd been there for me so many times before--at the choir concert, the play I was starring in or the speech I was giving. But this time my pops was coming to see his boy play ball. I ushered him to a seat in the bleachers as the ref blew the whistle for the opening tip.
I was in the starting lineup, and I found myself playing harder than I had ever played before. We lost the game by more than 30 points. But I had fun in a strange, boyish sort of way. I scored 13 points, a career high--nine of them from behind the arc. The last minute of the game I got a steal and passed it down court to our big man. He passed it back to me on the break. I went up hard and, you guessed it, made a slam dunk! My very first in a game, and my pops was a witness.
As I headed to the locker room in defeat, yet carrying an odd air of victory, I heard a voice in my ear. It was the voice that the latent athlete in me had longed to hear since I was young, uttering the words of empowerment, love and pride.
"You played a good game, son."
Better than you may ever know, Pops.
-jeff obafemi carr
(Originally published in the March, 1997 edition of Essence Magazine, Brothers Column. Reprinted here as a Fatherly remembrance to Haywood H. Carr)
