The Asean Basketball League... oh sorry, The Air Asia Asean Basketball league has come onto my radar. Reyna had to work late last night, so I swung by the local pub on my way home to have a beer and dinner. Generally there are friendly folks at the bar to talk to, but last night I found myself between two French guys (they were speaking French, they could have been from someplace else) and two guys engrossed in their laptops*. This left me in front of a 46" flat screen television showing an ABL matchup between the Indonesia Warriors and the Bangkok Cobras.
*Since when is it okay to sit at a bar and work on your laptop? In a bar fine, but at the bar? I would worry that my computer would get wet...
At the time I wasn't overly excited about the game, except that the basketball was awful, which drew me in. It was comical how bad the players were. The game was fraught with missed layups, drives and kick outs that do not lead to shots, airballs and bricks. One player missed six freethrows in three consecutive trips down the court. It was an epic of incompetent basketball. I was especially intrigued by the player of the game, who's name was shown in the post game interview as Thomas Steven Demon. In an amusing quirk, because of the way they order names in SE Asia, his jersey says "Thomas" on the back. Wouldn't you love to watch an NBA game and have a guy's name shown as "Doug" on the back? On the ABL website his name is shown as Steven Demon Thomas, so I don't actually know his real name. At the end of the day, it's not surprising he was the player of the game. He's 6'-5" and everyone else in the game is Asian. Other than the occasional Guinness World Record tall Asian and Yao Ming, they're all shorter than me. Even in a professional basketball leage, I'm a good height for a forward in SE Asia. Too bad I suck at basketball. I enjoyed the hell out of it. In the end, the Warriors, behind Steven, or Thomas, Demon's 24 points and 17 rebounds won. The final stats revealed that the game had also included 35 turnovers. Amazing.
I went home, spent some time with Reyna and went to bed at a reasonable hour. During the night I dreamed I would start writing a column about the ABL, because the coverage is pretty lousy for something that is broadcast internationally on an ESPN affliate. I mean the biggest news of the last two weeks apparently is that one player couldn't play in an away game because he had the wrong number on his jersey, and that number didn't match the number listed on the roster. I guess no one in the arena had a pen. How could you not follow a league with news like that? I also noticed that my hometown Saigon Heat, an expansion team this year are 0-6 and in their closest game this month, they lost by 14 points. I still might write that column, because I like writing about sports; and when I sat down to write this post, that's exactly what I was doing, but this came out instead:
I grew up in the same country as the NBA and played three full seasons of organized, competitive basketball (3rd grade, 6th grade and 7th grade). After playing at the local Y when I was 9, it took me another three years to recover from the psychological trauma. I can't impress on you how shy I was as a kid. When I was in first grade (the first time -I had to repeat), I wet my pants three times in the same day because I was too shy to ask the teacher to use the bathroom. That is shy. And I can't believe no one said anything to me that day about it, not my classmates, not my teachers. For me, playing basketball at the YMCA was like putting a guy who lives in his parent's basement and steals movies off the internet in prison with a bunch of murderers and rapists. It was hell. To this day, whenever I smell that gymnasium "YMCA smell" I get nervous, and my stomach gets all liquid-feeling. This is probably why I prefer physical activities that occur outdoors.
You see, I went to private school from the time I was 6 until I graduated from college. There were things that happened at The Y that I just never saw. In my day to day routine kids didn't talk back to adults, or yell and scream, run around naked, play with themselves in front of other people, or not appear to know how to sit quietly. My dad taught at the school I attended (and is the reason I was able to go to private school in the first place -thanks Dad (no really, thank you)) and my mom worked part time in the library, so they were always around. Playing basketball at the Y in third grade was probably the first time I ever did anything on my own. Mom and Dad were not around.
An unfortunate side effect of having working parents and practice at the Y was that I had to ride the bus. This was a trauma of a different sort. It seemed that people in my school, who spent the day acting like normal kids would completely lose their minds as soon as they climbed onto the bus. The second they set foot on the rubbered floor, their voices tripled in volume and they would vibrate like a wind-up toy. It wasn't hard for me to sit down and shut up because I was too paralyzed by YMCA anticipation and stress to speak, let alone bounce around.
We were always the last to arrive at the Y for basketball because Mr. Wilbur, the bus driver, would have to spend at least 15 minutes getting everyone to sit down and shut up before we could leave. This was a tough task and the scene tended to devolve into him yelling incoherently at us. Mr. Wilbur's tenure as the Y-bus driver ended when one of my classmates spit on him. Mr. Wilbur snapped and smacked him. I can't say I blame him. That kid was a shit. He would eventually leave us for boarding school. He returned to our school a few years later after he was expelled from boarding school for spitting on a referee in a soccer game. He had a thing about spitting apparently, because I also remember him spitting on our 4th grade teacher the next year. He also holds the distinction of being the only person I've ever punched in the face. And this should come as a surprise to no one; he was a red head.
It is my contention that a school bus is like a can of soda. It bounces around and winds up the kids just like a shaken soda can. This occasionally results in vomiting, but usually just makes youngsters outrageously rambunctious. By the time everyone converged on the locker room, the contents were explosive. I had a dedicated locker with a combination lock where I placed my school books and clothes during practice. I'm not sure if anyone else had this problem, but operating a combination lock while surrounded by a bunch of naked and screaming future gang bangers (or so it seemed at the time) when you're 9 was intensely stressful. Sometimes I'd have to wait for the locker room to clear out before I could focus and unlock my locker. We even had the obligatory obese kid, whom everyone referred to as "Tonka." I never actually saw him play basketball, or do anything else besides sit naked in front of his locker and stare into the middle distance, but I remember him being a lot more popular than me. All the while the coaches would be on patrol, trying to keep the kids on schedule by twirling their whistles intimidatingly around their fingers and yelling. When they weren't yelling, they were blowing their whistles. In my nine year old brain it might as well have been combat.
Most of what I remember is coaches alternating between yelling and praying, and the whole thing was run by a guy we called Coach Squeaky. I never knew his real name. One time I witnessed a different coach whip a ten year old kid with the lanyard of his whistle in front of about 150 kids. That was pretty awful, but I remember other kids, bad kids, being as terrified of Coach Squeaky as I was of them. Coaches could yell and whip kids with whistle lanyards in front of all their peers, and it was still preferrable to being sent to Coach Squeaky. I don't have a recollection of anyone ever giving words to what happened when you got sent to see him, and I hate to speculate, but clearly it was bad. Kids would do horrible things, get sent away, and then sit in dazed silence for the rest of the day.
Basketball practice was broken down into three parts. Full league practice, team practice and chapel. In full league practice we focused on fundamentals, dribbling relays, passing drills, that sort of thing. This was not so bad because I could stand in line with guys from my school that were less intimidating. In team practice, we broke into our respective teams and did other stuff, like layups and whatever else you learn when you are a 9 year old learning basketball. These two things seemed to last for hours. In hindsight, it was probably less than an hour. I can't recall the name of my coach or the name of anyone else on my team, but we were called the Huskies and were forced to wear the most god-awful powder blue t-shirts as our uniform. I think we would have looked less gay if we'd played in jock straps and chaps. We won our first two games and lost the rest.
After basketball practice was chapel. This was the time that I dreaded most. Chapel took place in, and I'm not making this up, a room with cinder block walls and a padded floor. No windows and only one door that was always blocked by a large and imposing coach. With 150 kids and half a dozen coaches crammed into this room, I'm happy to report there was never a fire. Chapel meant that the coaches had to get these 150, 9 year old boys to sit quietly for a few minutes while someone, I guess, spoke about The Baby Jesus and character building. Then we would sing a song. I can't remember all the details because what I remember is coaches losing their minds on kids and kids screaming for no particular reason. There was always a 15 minute argument between kids and coaches to decide what song we would sing, or if we didn't sing loud enough. Some kids would get singled out for not singing, which was my worst fear. I sang in my quiet way, hoping to not be noticed. Logic tells me there was more than one song, but the only one I remember goes like this:
1,2,3 the devil's after me (clap, clap, clap)
4,5,6, he's always playing tricks (clap, clap, clap)
7,8,9 he misses every time (clap, clap, clap)
Hallelujah, Hallelujah Amen
9,8,7 we're on our way to heaven (clap, clap, clap)
6,5,4 to live for ever more (clap, clap, clap)
3,2,1 the devil's on the run (clap, clap, clap)
Hallelujah Hallelujah Amen
After that we would play a game. The game usually consisted of rolling around on the floor in some form of simulated hand-to-hand combat. This could be totally made up, but the way I remember one game going was as follows. The coaches would choose ten or so boys, and the rest of us would lie down on the floor. The chosen boys would try to walk from one end of the room to the other without the boys on the floor pulling them down. Doesn't that sound like fun? Lie down in a cramped room with 140 kids who just spent the last 90 minutes playing basketball and try to tackle other kids by their ankles. When they inevitably fall, where do they land? Yes, on other people. It was basically a chaperoned stampede in a concrete room. Generally I tried to get out as quickly as possible, so I could sit quietly against the wall away from the maelstrom. Then it was back to the locker room to pack up and go home. The whole thing took two hours, but felt like days.
It took the next three years for my mother to convince me this atmosphere is not directly related to learning the game of basketball. She convinced me to sign up to play a season at the County Booster Club, which played and practiced in a gym that was straight out of Hoosiers and not in a good way. There were places on the floor around the stands that were roped off because the hardwood was in danger of collapsing. In middle school, especially private middle school, perception is everything. If you're not playing in the cool city basketball league at the Y, then you're playing in the redneck county basketball league and will be judged accordingly by your peers. Overall it was a much better experience than the Y, but I was too ashamed to admit to anyone that I played in the other basketball league in town. I was the only kid from my school who played there, and I don't remember anything about my team other than we had red uniforms. Oh and one more thing. During a certain game I was charged with guarding the other team's best scorer. I guarded him like my life depended on it. I guarded him so well, that I even played defense when we had the ball. I managed to keep the kid from scoring, but I didn't do much in the way of scoring myself. As a matter of fact, I can't remember scoring a single basket ever in that gym.
The next year, I played on the school 7th grade team, and we occasionally had to practice in that same Booster Gymnasium. I was thankful that I'd never told anyone in my class that I played a full season there because all they did was talk shit about what a dump it was. That eighth grade team had 35 players on the roster, which had to be split up into teams of 7. Different combinations of teams would play in each game. When the rosters were released, I saw that I was placed on one of the crappier teams, and would play in fewer games. I pretty much gave up on basketball after that. I was already a good soccer player (which we'll save for another YMCA post) on the travel team for the city, so I said I wanted to focus on that in high school. My mom maintains to this day that I had ability in basketball, but I'm pretty sure she's just being a loving mother.
My brother was in seventh grade and played in the same basketball program. His memory is completely different from mine because they practiced in a different gym. Where I could only manage one season of torture by basketball, he played for three. As far as I know he never had to visit Coach Squeaky.
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