The Older I Get, The Better I Was: One Man's Quest to Dunk

I am 99% (well, maybe like 76%...)

2012-01-18T19:58:00.001-08:00

Yesterday was my first physical therapy appointment in a month and a half, and I was initially surprised by the physical therapist's surprise. It took me a moment to remember that there had been such a gap in time since she'd seen me. You don't notice a pot boiling until it's boiling--did I just make up this metaphor? Do you understand it, Dear Reader?
Perhaps some subconscious part of me dressed up for the occasion, as much as a new, fresh Puma tracksuit (red with silver trim, if you're scoring at home) with new brick red Filas can be called "dressing up." As I marched into her examination room with an almost imperceptible hitch in my gait, I remembered the first time I even took one step on that same starkly white floor, and how tried to look at the floor's lines to see if my left foot scraped forward an inch even.
I guess I'm at 75% percent now. 75ish...I have been cleared by my PT to jog. Her go-ahead was tempered with a "Make sure you work on long walks first, then progress maybe in a week or two to jogging." This seems reasonable, a dipping of a toe into the pool.
I have, in some ways, had a sort of plateau in the last few weeks. I walk strongly, with a limp that even those who know my recent history don't notice or barely notice. I have been working out steadily, four or times a week, getting that invigorating before-work workout, doing at least 3/4 of my assigned stretches and exercises.
Now, what? The little things. Balance exercises (standing on my left leg for thirty seconds, doing ten reps). A reverse Fat Joe exercise designed to loosen up the crease in front of the ankle (I lean forward, putting pressure on my left foot until the foot almost comes up off the ground).
My PT ended the appointment by telling me exactly how these stretches and exercises would help me to cut to the hoop, stop on the dead run after chasing down the offensive player, and explode up on a jump shot ("explode" being relative for a guy who is trying to dunk).
Me? Basketball. Playing, not watching. Running the lane and not sitting on the bench, coaching while trying to keep my left side turned away from anyone chasing down a loose ball?
Music to this coach's (and reborn baller's) ears...

Tough Love from My Physical Therapist

2011-11-05T14:57:00.000-07:00

"No more wheelchair," she said firmly. "It's not helping. It's hurting."
I couldn't protest too much, as I was ten weeks out from surgery, still unable to walk or even hobble. In a counterintuitive way, what I needed to do was put more pressure on my ailing back leg. In my amateur medical opinion, this extra pressure on the left foot would be analogous to taking off the Band-Aid and letting the cut get some fresh air.
"You have to put your foot down," she said, to which I nodded casually.
"No," she said, her intensity causing me to make eye contact, "You have to put your foot down, give it some exercise, let it readjust to being flat on the ground."
With the foot now having been made into its own pronoun, its own being, I looked at it, wondering if it was an avowed ally or a contrarian enemy.
It started in little ways, I was told--the foot on the ground when I was seated, putting helpful pressure on the long-dormant nerves. And, my physical therapist assured me, I must ditch the wheelchair.
A month into my recovery, I returned to teaching, deciding to jump right back into the school year, not missing any time, not getting a substitute. The four-day week and a teacher's assistant made the teaching manageable, but I was so tired at the end of each trip to the teacher's lounge, to the bathroom, and to the copy room that I decided to ditch the crutches at work. Anyone seeing my reddened, sweating face and hearing my heavy breathing at the end of each "trip" could not have blamed me for calling to claim the wheelchair prescribed by my surgeon.
For another four or five weeks, then, school was navigated by wheelchair, my crutches claimed at the end of each day and used around the house. The relative ease with which I could navigate the school, thanks to eagerly helpful students and colleagues, allowed my armpits to recover and my heart rate to slow down considerably. The burgeoning triceps from all the wheeling were another benefit for the erstwhile-sedentary Jaime.
A day before my physical therapist gave me this tough love and insisted on more crutch-walking, I received a similar talking-to from a friend who told me that the wheelchair was itself a crutch, keeping me from giving more ground exposure to the nerves and muscles of the foot.
"Thanks, Doc," I said sarcastically, but maybe my resistance to losing the wheelchair was more of a mental hangup than a physical one.
A few days later, my wheelchair sits idle, in the school's parking garage in case it's needed again. Though the going is slow, the crutch steps sometimes more like slides than strides, the foot is getting a bit more strength, a bit more feeling.
Thanks, Doc--and I direct this to two people and with no sarcasm--for the tough love.

Taking My Turn on the Karmic Wheel

2011-11-05T13:52:00.000-07:00

I usually put the authors of dream interpretation books up there (or down there) with the authors of horoscope books and psychics. This is to say that these people do not take much of a risk in giving generic predictions and information, in that it is nearly impossible to prove them wrong. The Aquarius who is advised in his horoscope that "his high energy may rub others the wrong way" --we can convince ourselves that this is true for everyone, right?--and the psychic visitor both assure themselves that the predictions come from someone who is in some way "trained."

In the same way, let me take my foray into the dream interpretation arena yet again. Being that it is not possible in any way to contradict my "findings," let me begin...

I had a dream that I was coaching my basketball team. As I huddled the team during a timeout, I told the dream to put on a fullcourt press after each basket by our opponents. A player of mine (nameless and faceless while a few of the dream's players are really on this year's team) shook his head and scoffed, saying, "It won't work."

On the first defensive play, an overweight and hefty player--obscured in name and face--refused to stand where I told him to, and proceeded to go down in a heap with an unclear lower body injury upon colliding with an offensive player.

Was the message of this dream that there were conscious decisions that I made that led to my injury? Was it the shoes, an awkward position on my jump shot? Or was it more subtle and seemingly unrelated factors?

As I prepared today to return to a favored barber in an area thirty minutes-plus from my house, I was reminded that I haven't been back since the hours before my injury, twelve and a half weeks ago. Is my hairstyle, picture a slightly slicked-back version of Kevin Costner's Elliott Ness, so difficult that only this barber could have done it? Would a visit to Supercuts have eliminated the opportunity to get hurt? Maybe the universe was only prepared to injure me during that enclosed time period. Maybe a made shot earlier in the game by a teammate would have shortened the game and made it so that my gamewinning and butt-to-couch connecting shot would not have been necessary.

The importance of fate versus personal choice--the neverending debate continues...

Girlish Screams

2011-10-28T19:37:00.000-07:00

It was the most girlish scream that this (fairly) deep-voiced man could make. It was my first physical therapy appointment, and, after some rudimentary measurements of my feet in comparison to each other, I began to do some basic stretches.
The stretches consisted of "alphabets"--moving the foot in circles that supposedly mimic the letters of the alphabet--and a 12 to 6 movement. The physical therapist then used an elastic band against which I was to push and then to "pull."
Finally, she had me stand with my left slightly in back of my right, and without the warning I expected, told me, "We're going to take a step."
"Now?"
"Now."
"I don't think I can do it." (I knew I couldn't do it.)
"Yes, you can. The tendon has been repaired, it's regrown, it's ready."
With her flanking my left shoulder, I shuffled forward slowly with my left, then got ready to take the step with the right that would force me to plant on my left.
Then I got ready to take the step with the right that would force me to plant on my left.
Then I got ready...
I literally shook as I tried to reconcile the rupturing of this incredibly important tendon, its betrayal to my body, with the task she was asking/telling me to do.
After about minute of putting barely-detectable pressure on the left foot, I scraped forward, letting out a high-pitched, girlie noise as I felt that my left couldn't support me. I lunged forward, grabbing awkwardly onto a cabinet and leaning against her shoulder.
Thankfully, every step won't be this hard.
Right?

The Long Road Back

2011-10-08T12:15:00.000-07:00

"Bring a left shoe next time I see you," my orthopedist repeated, fairly cryptically, as I exited his office two weeks ago. Everything in my recovery having gone according to plan up until that time, he told me that my next appointment would allow me to walk out of his office with a real left shoe, not a boot.
His "left shoe" comment was enough to get me excited and nervous upon entering his office for yesterday's appointment. I'd told anyone who asked (and some who didn't) that the next time they'd see me, I'd be at least hobbling and wearing a left shoe for the first time since my surgery eight weeks before. I even told a few people that the wheelchair that had been helping me navigate the hallways and my classroom at school was going to be collecting dust very soon, maybe even in a few days.
Shoot, I even flirted with the idea of a "I Can Walk Again" party at my apartment that would have been tonight. The idea of me, even a hobbling me, being unable to play host in any meaningful way, put an end to the party idea, but anything was possible as I sat on the fresh sheet, waiting for Dr. Owen.
With a clinical efficiency that somehow is teamed with an incredibly-empathetic bedside manner, he retrieved the thick green Adidas shoe I'd brought ("Bring something substantial for your left shoe," he'd said last time) and loosened the laces as much as possible.
It must have taken two minutes for me to have the confidence to pull the laces and shoe tight over my foot, a bit of a surreal experience after so much buildup. The feel of the shoe was not so much uncomfortable as foreign.
With a flourish, I hopped off my chair to take my first step, felt a twinge of nerves, and followed the doctor's advice--"Use the crutches if you want."
With a stumble and a slight drag of the left foot, the foot, bootless, made contact with the earth and moved forward ever so slightly. It felt good and it felt very weird.
Telling me that my surgical wound was healing nicely and complimenting me on my progress, Doc told me that I was technically freed from the crutches, but they were to be used if needed.
They are needed. As Doc stepped out to get some paperwork and set up my first physical therapy appointment, I tried out my new gait in the office and right outside, maniacally "walking" back and forth in an area about eight feet by eight feet, pacing like an expectant father. A few tiny attempts told me that the crutches were necessary for any positive movements.
In the first few steps, and the halting and frustrating ones I've taken today, it is clear that my left foot is, at this time, not committed mentally or physically to moving forward on its own. Though I've stood lightly on both feet a few times, always with a closeby wall or grip for insurance, pushing off my left foot with its rebuilt Achilles tendon is not in the cards at this time.
Which made it all the more ironic when Doc Owen, as far as I know not a reader of this blog, told me to let the physical therapists know about my goals. "The therapists need to know if it's a matter of 'I want to just be able to walk to the store with no trouble' versus 'I wanna be able to dunk a basketball,' so they can create the right rehab program," he said.
Without replying, I thought to myself how badly I want to dunk a basketball. The thought of that first dunk, though, right now seems as alien as me giving birth.
My foot doesn't want to push off. My foot can't push off. This year's Students versus Faculty Game (something I take quite seriously) is set for February and already has been ruled out. My calf has atrophied to scary proportions. An accidental and light whack of the tip of my left shoe against a chair leg smarts for a good two minutes.
Here I am, deeply immersed in the conflict of this developing story. Everything is set for the buildup of drama.
I just don't have the happy ending in sight.

The Ageless Wonders

2011-10-08T11:32:00.000-07:00

Many a priest was there who earned the nickname "Father What-a-Waste" from my female college classmates. The Catholic university had many priests as professors--many of them who were barely older than the students, many who just seemed that young.
The priests, highly-educated, cultured, and well-spoken, were fawned over by the girls, with a big part of the priests' appeal resting in the fact that they were untouchable and unattainable-truly "playing hard to get."
I remember my amazement that a favorite priest of mine-an important part of my formative years-was forty years old when he'd taught me a few years before in a creative writing course. I would have sworn before a jury that he was no older than 30 at that time.
The priests themselves were known to joke that it was the lack of a family and its responsibilities that made them appear so young. The vigorous eighty-something priest from Colombia who traveled there at least three times a year to visit family and take his annual trip to the family farm to help with the harvest was one shining example of this longevity.
So too was the fifty-something who had traveled to Los Angeles to participate every marathon since its inception in 1984.
The chaplain for the baseball team who regularly attended practice and shagged fly balls (albeit it not at Vince Coleman speed) when the team was short on players? Fifty-two without a noticeable gray hair.
Forget Ponce de Leon and Botox-the priests are the ones who have the answers to The Fountain of Youth.

I Almost Forgot

2011-09-28T20:34:00.000-07:00

I almost forgot that I needed to hop to the bathroom, at 3am or so last night, fresh off a dream where I was running sprints at a long-ago basketball practice that never happened.

I almost forgot that the back of my leg has been busted and crafted back together when my friend screamed at the tv after an amazing run by his team's running back. I wanted to run to find out what happened.

I almost forgot that the ten minutes it took to get ready for a date now takes thirty.

I almost forgot that food can be poured or cooked at one location and then carried to another. It does need to be eaten in the same place it was dispensed, while I'm leaning against the sink or the kitchen counter.

I almost forgot. But only for a split second.

Remember When

2011-09-24T11:43:00.000-07:00

On one of the latter episodes of "The Sopranos," Tony Soprano and his lieutenant, Paulie "Walnuts" Gualtieri, take a trip to Florida to escape police pressure in Jersey. As the two need to remain anonymous on their escape from the law,Tony continues to worry about his partner's talkativeness, as Paulie chats up bellhops, businessmen, and other strangers. When Paulie tells stories about him and Tony engaging in some not so-legal behaviors to some young women they are dining with, Tony gives Paulie the evil eye and excuses himself from the table, making the cryptic remark that " 'Remember when' is the lowest form of conversation."

If Tony is a sage, then I think that the 30s are the start of a downward spiral. You might even argue that the end of college is the beginning of this downward spiral, as the days pining for very little responsibility, very little accountability, and an astonishing amount of independence often start hours after graduation.
In an oxymoronic way, my good friends and I started missing the carefree college life before we graduated. Aware that college was but a four-year stop, a vacation of sorts in the middle of a working life, we reminded ourselves on a regular basis, especially during senior year, to savor this time. How do you do savor something? Is it possible to actively do this?
An extreme example of "Remember when" inhibiting one's adult growth is Uncle Rico of "Napoleon Dynamite." A thirtysomething groveling for work and seeming to live out of a van that would make Matt Foley proud, Rico is not above mooching steaks off Napoleon's family and hawking questionable Tupperware to naive buyers. Sneaking peeks at his flexed biceps whenever he can, Rico is stuck in 1982. While sitting outside with his nephew showing off his quarterback's arm, Rico talks about his coach's inability to put him in during the fourth quarter of a key high school game.
"We coulda won state that year if he'd played me," Rico says, gazing into nothing and speaking more to himself than to his nephew.
In case anyone doubts his prowess, Rico carries around a tape of himself, some twenty years after high school, dropping back and throwing the football. Ready to show the video at the slighest show of interest (or disinterest, in his nephews' case), Rico is an easy target as a joke.
It has been said that behind every joke, there is a seed of truth. We all know our own Uncle Ricos.
Just don't call me "Rico Flaco."

Steppin Out

2011-09-21T19:16:00.000-07:00

"You mean like walk walk?" I asked the doctor, making sure that when he told me to walk, he meant to like, you know, walk. My left foot had not touched the ground in six weeks and approximately three hours, and the thought of putting pressure on the foot, even when ensconced in a walking boot, was enough to make the timid six-year-old in me come out.
Yes, he meant walk. Pulling the Band-Aid off all at once, I took the awkward first step as if there was a fly under my boot that I didn't want to crush...success!
No crushed Achilles. No shooting pain. The feel of the first step was like that first sip of cold water on a hot day-no, I'm playin, this was a small step for the body, and a giant step for the psyche. The feel was of those slippery steps taken in Dad's "boats," those penny loafers that sat idle some days when he wore the dress shoes with the shoelaces.
"Just heel to toe, heel to toe," said the doctor patiently, practiced enough even as a youngish orthopedist to know that despite my fears, I would be all right. His comfort lay in the repetition of heel to toe, mine in the fact that he was comfortable.
I will be in the walking boot for two weeks, then I have a Shoe Appointment.
"Bring the left shoe with you next time," the doctor said at least three times. "We're gonna fit you, and you'll be walking in a shoe in a few weeks. Hobbling, I should say."
In three weeks, physical therapy begins, then some other followup appointments, and then...a long road ahead, I know.
Is it too corny to say that I have to take it one step at a time?
Speaking of corny, I held up my left foot today, sporting some new Chuck Taylor(s) after weeks of rocking the infamous Polo shoe that was on my foot when the Achilles was ruptured.
"Hey, look," I said, pausing for emphasis, "I got new shoe. Get it? Singular?"
The pitying laughter of the class told me that, wonder of all wonders, I was now That Guy. The teacher who made jokes so corny that students felt sorry for him. The teacher we all had, the sophomore computer teacher I had some fourteen years ago.
Time flies when you're telling shoe jokes...

Text Message Exchange Regarding How Old is too Old to Play Pickup Basketball (with Undergraduates)

2011-09-21T18:58:00.000-07:00

My friend Mikey: "Is 30 2 old to play pickup basketball at the college rec center with undergrads? Thanks."

Me: "30 is not too old. 30 years and exactly six months is. At that age, you will rupture your Achilles tendon on a harmless jump shot."

Mikey: "Buzzkill."

Before and After

2011-09-17T14:01:00.000-07:00

A few nights ago, I watched Dodgers outfielder Juan Rivera running all-out in his approach of a foul ball near the right-field stands. As he approached the ball, he ran uphill on the opponent's bullpen mound. As the ball dropped strangely with the wind, I yelled out, "Watch out!" while my friend yelled out, "Dive!"

A bit embarassed, I looked away from my friend, his gaze on me, and I clapped for the catch, an awkward one where at least Juan didn't get hurt by that darn pitching rubber that could so easily end a season or a career...

A partial list of things that are different after my injury: airport announcements asking for a wheelchair or volunteers to wheel a passenger around are listened to with greater concentration; an increased awareness of, and head nod/smile for, fellow airport crutch carriers and people in wheelchairs. An involuntary cringing watching Shaq's highlight films in which his 330+ lb. body goes flying into the stands (cringing for him and the fans); noticing more acutely the difference between a football player down with a cramp or a temporary pain and the player who's not getting up without help from another person or stretcher; recognizing the telltale hand wave that shows a teammate's sense of urgency for the trainers to check on his fallen comrade. Noting Rafa Nadal's constant changes of direction on the tennis court, his near-splits when reaching for a short volley. An even stronger sense that the shelf life of a boxer (Bernard Hopkins and George Foreman aside) and a running back--the Niners recently expressed satisfaction that Frank Gore will "retire a 49er" after signing a contract that ends at age 32-and a tennis Zeus (Federer) is very short in relative terms.

Sympathy and Empathy

2011-09-16T18:55:00.000-07:00

Sympathy and empathy. Similar, but not synonymous. Less and less so every day.

Chris had torn a ligament in his knee as an eighth grader, before I'd known him. I first worked with him the following summer, in June before his freshman year. A tough, hard-nosed player, he played all-out until he hit the floor, where he cringed and writhed as if he were on fire. It took about a year before this habitual writhing ceased.
It was the next summer when he told me, unsolicited, "Coach, I feel whole again."

As hard as I had tried at the time to feel my player's pain, to get to know him on his level, it was not possible.
Today: empathy.

See You at the Crossroads (No, not the Bone Thugs n' Harmony Type)

2011-09-14T19:24:00.000-07:00

The proverbial angel and devil are on my shoulder 24/7. Do I hang 'em up? Do my basketball shoes collect dust (my Polo shoes definitely will)? Do I spend my Monday nights watching football instead of playing in the men's basketball league? Do I spend my Sundays eating hot dog after hot dog instead of taking the bike out for a ride? Do I talk trash from the sidelines instead of playing in the annual Students versus Faculty basketball game?

The devil (or maybe the angel) on my shoulder echoes the advice, no command, of my friend--"Don't try to play ball again, man. You're gonna get hurt."

The angel or the devil tells me, "Use this as fuel. You know what it's like to have been active, and you cannot give that up! You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube (my angel/devil has a firm command of figurative language)!
Let me say this -the fear of spending another period of multiple weeks/months off my feet, virtually helpless, unable to even shower without a Herculean effort, is quite real. The fear is real, yet I wonder how long it will last. Part of this fear is healthy, I think, that which kept me concentrating with each "step" on my crutches, loath to make a misstep that would lead to a fresh tear of my balloon-fragile, newly-rebuilt Achilles tendon.
About a week after my surgery, I made my way to my usual sitting room perch, a comfortable couch with a good view of the television. As I spun around to allow myself to lay down, backside first, I made a misstep that made my weight lean forward. In a feeling that I can liken to those agonizing seconds when the wind is knocked out of you, there was a moment (who knows how long exactly?) when I felt that the next logical step was me stumbling onto my bad leg, that it was inescapable.
I uttered a pitiful cry that didn't sound much different than the Tarzanlike cries I usually exhaled in a joking fashion when I stretched out on the couch. My sister and cousin, extremely solicitous and helpful in my recovery, must have figured that things were normal, and thankfully, I regained my balance, having seen the abyss below.
As I stand (so to speak) now at this crossroads, I wonder if this tenderness, this avoidance of injury, will stick with me for a long time, will infect my brain, will cause unnecessary worry.
Will I be emboldened by this injury, quick to resist the malaise that would keep me home from a workout? Will I run to the tennis court without hesitation, savor the back and forth that I missed for many months?

"Good news is," says my uncle who suffered the same injury at the age of 31, also playing basketball, "my repaired Achilles has never given me a problem in the twenty years since. Shoot, it's better than the other Achilles. I've played a lotta tennis, even to this day. Played basketball for years, too."
"And the bad news?" I say.
"Bad news is, they tell you six months until you can exercise, but it was almost a year before I felt right. You know what I mean by 'right.' Feeling like you can cut on that leg, plant on that leg, go up in a crowd and grab a rebound. The physical will be fine. It's the mental that is the hardest part.

Will I be gung ho about my first basketball game and my first tennis match, or beg out due to the possibility of reinjury?
With apologies to Robert Frost, is it possible to take both paths?

Life's Milestone Markers and 2Pac

2011-09-14T18:45:00.001-07:00

Our life's milestone markers go from the most serious-Where were you when the second tower collapsed?-to the more specialized and trivial-Where were you when the Sox finally won The World Series? Our parents' generation had the Kennedy assassination, "The Shot Heard 'Round the World," Ali/Frazier; our grandparents-Pearl Harbor, D-Day, Black Friday
Though not the defining event of my lifetime, nor my generation's, I do remember very well the shock of the death of Tupac Shakur.
Amazing. Amazing to me that yesterday marked the fifteenth anniversary of his death. My students wear t-shirts with his face and the line THUG LIFE in Olde English writing, and they talk about him as a hero of "old school" hip hop. It came to me yesterday that my students were born in 1996, the year he was born. A few of them-the late birthdays-were not even alive at the same time as him. Wow.
Tupac has been dead for about half of my life.
I feel old.

Get Away From Zero

2011-09-14T17:56:00.000-07:00

A high school history teacher of mine used to impress upon his students the need to "get away from zero." What he meant was that partial credit, half credit, whatever it took to get away from zero percent was crucial to one's grade. A fairly obvious statement, it may seem, but it stuck with me throughout my academic career and is now a big part of my lectures to my students.
In the same vein, my immediate plan, a day-to-day sustaining plan, is to get away from zero. While I will obviously be staying away from calf raises, running, and the like for a while-the doctor has thrown on six months from the surgery date as a target date-I want to feel like I am in some increasing strength.
One of the things I have missed the most during my convalescence has been the ability and the freedom to work out, to lift weights. Until today, I had not lifted weights in a little more than five weeks.
There is something in the thirty-year-old psyche that sees any "day off" from exercise and strength training to be a loss. There is no neutral in the thirty-year-old plus psyche. There is only reverse, and a day that does not feature a machine in Drive means a step backwards.
As hard as it is to gain strength and definition at my age, these five weeks off have clearly shrunk my muscles. We have the human need to stave off the spiderwebs, to start that line on the graph in its proper trajectory-up and to the right, baby!
That's why, today, "Storage Wars" on in the background, it felt so dang good to do sixty reps with the left, sixty reps with the right, a simple military press. Yes, the dumbbell was fifteen pounds.
Fifteen? It's more than zero, right?

Atrophy

2011-09-14T09:25:00.000-07:00

"It's ironic," said TV's Tony Soprano, discussing his post-bullet-wound recovery, "You lose muscle, not fat."

My cell phone camera and my dad's nice Kodak are full of injury milestone pictures. The first: there's me in my little booties and hospital gown about ten minutes after my surgery. The picture was my idea and not my dad's. I remember feeling very, very cold and having a horrendous sore throat (from the breathing tube that had been inserted and removed during and after surgery). My head was covered with the kind of hat cooks and ladies whose hair will soon be in rollers wear.

Why the picture then? Part of it was probably my post-surgery loopiness, yes. But I must say that part of me wanted to immortalize this moment, maybe as a reminder of a low point, as I lay there with a freshly-constructed and incredibly-fragile Achilles tendon. I was, in many ways, starting over again.
A little over four weeks after my surgery, four weeks with no measurable exercise, and man, my muscles have morphed. Atrophy has set in, and as Tony said, it does attack muscle and not fat. Though I have very little fat outside of a mini-gut, I still wish the atrophy would have happened in my neck or foot-ha!-somewhere that is not as visible.
Upon uncovering my hibernating left leg from it's four week cast, it has been quite obvious that both of my legs, the left one more visibly, have morphed to childlike proportions. I've always had chicken legs, but dang! The affected left leg hides inside its cavernous home, a boot which at least allows me some freedom to move. Four or so times a day, per my doctor's instructions, I take off the boot to do some basic flexibility exercises. As I do about ten reps, moving the foot left to right, and up and down, I see that something is missing. The telltale widening of the calf about halfway up is not there.
Though I cringe even picturing any weight being borne by my weakened left leg, I'm sure that a left leg calf raise would show very little, if any, of the characteristic plumping of the back of the leg.
In many ways, with the leg and certain parts of my life, I'm starting over. Starting over is often that wish we address to that invisible genie we desire, but in this case, I'd love to have skipped the starting over. Now, how about this, how about I start over with no Achilles tendon injury instead of starting over with muscle development? Deal?

The two embedded videos show my boot in all its glory, as well as a comparison of my two atrophied legs. Enjoy, and blame my partial-Mediterranean heritage for the hirsute legs. I also would like you to observe the award-winning television that is on in the background. There is some really, really bad television on the airwaves. Yes, I was watching "Jerseylicious." For the uninitiated, it is a "reality show" that follows the trials and tribulations of the employeees of a New Jersey beauty salon.
I know-you're sitting there judging me.

Interlude-Bounce

2011-08-27T19:57:00.000-07:00

Already, I'm hyped. Bass-thumping hip hop music, huge crowd screaming and seemingly on top of us--the hated rival school and visiting team. Our starting power forward sneaks in a dunk before the refs make their way onto the court (an often-ignored rule stated that any team dunking in warmups would earn a technical foul), much to our delight. Proud of my previous example of "slapping," I approach the basket, hoping to place it through the hoop like Wilt The Stilt did when the dunk was outlawed. My weak attempt, hindered greatly by my need to jump off two feet due to my inability to palm the ball, draws snickers from my teammates, but it's all good.
The place is just alive, and all ballplayers know this feeling. It's all good. I know I'll have no trouble with energy tonight. The floor feels extra springy, like a trampoline, and each catcall from the opponent's fans just feeds the fire.
As the customary second or third man off the bench, I'm used to playing with mostly second team guys like myself, but tonight is different. Coach puts me in immediately with the simple instructions, "Keep your man off the boards." I join the four starters and when the night is over, I play a hefty thirty-plus minutes of what is to be a three-overtime thriller.
I score three straight baskets in the second quarter, satisfying because I create my own offense with a one-dribble pullup jumper, a steal and layup, and an offensive rebound putback.
In the third quarter, my adrenaline is up like I am a scared fourth-grader in his first fight. Isolated on defense at the top of the key, I poke the ball away from the wannabe Allen Iverson. As the ball bounds into the backcourt, I leap and dive parallel to the floor as I save the ball on a twisting Hail Mary to my streaking teammate for an easy layup.
With the crowd going crazy and my teammates cheering me on, my bounce is evident as I sprint back on defense. On our next offense possession, I cut backdoor at the same time as my teammate shoots a midrange jumper. Feeling like Jordan, with the cursive Bulls uniform and patch of hair, stalking a missed free throw, I leap for the rebound, time it perfectly, and tip the ball in at what seems like rim level.
In the post-victory exuberation, I talk excitedly with my friend JP. "Dude," he says, "you coulda dunked that one!"

Little did I know that night that it may have been my best (and last?) chance to dunk...

Dreams and Man versus Self, Part II

2011-08-27T16:26:00.000-07:00

Last night I dreamed of a hobbled version of me playing a seemingly-innocuous round of golf. I do seem to remember that my legs were not visible in the dream (selective memory, perhaps?).
Was this a dream of a vision of the future? Is golf, that most sedentary of sports, my future sport of choice, or sport of last resort. Tiger Woods' famous knee injury aside, it's a lot harder to get injured seriously playing golf.
I must tell you that I hate golf. One of the main reasons that I hate the sport is that I'm bad at it, or more precisely, should be good at it, and I'm not.
Great attitude for a teacher to have, huh? Yes, boys and girls, if you are not good at something immediately, give up on it, and be sure to badmouth it later on.
I played a decent amount of golf as a kid, so I should be a mediocre player at least, but I'm not. In addition, the slow pace of the game does not fit me well. I need the immediate gratification of a steal leading to a layup, not the 1-0 score of a ninety-minute soccer match.
C'mon, Dreams, you're getting so easy to figure out! A big concern of this couch-relegated (young) man is that golf and similar sedentary sports (bocce ball, anyone?) will be the sum of my future athletic endeavors.
A friend of mine who is my same age warned me, with no little amount of intensity, that playing any more basketball after my recovery will lead to yet another serious injury. "It's gonna be a sprained ankle or a knee, or an ACL next time--trust me."
I do trust him. I also trust my cousin who told me that, though it took a little less than a year to recover, he was 99% as good as new once he started balling again. I also trust those people who have told me that I will recover, but I should severely limit my playing. I also trust those who say that modern science will make my ruptured Achilles even stronger than my right one, so watch out, streetballers.
Four seemingly opposing statements all true at once?
I gotta tell you, nothing is more conducive to philosophizing than staring up at the ceiling all day.

Sherman Alexie "gets It"

2011-08-27T12:55:00.000-07:00

Reading "The Outsiders" as a confused teenager, I was amazed at how well S.E. Hinton "got It." She knew what it was to be a man and a boy at once, to act confident when scared to death. Her characters were real.
Mario Puzo got It when it came to flowery and descriptive language. Hemingway got It-his economical language said more in its gaps than its words.
Sherman Alexie gets It when it comes to the ideas of what might have been, of unfulfilled potential and the ways that we lie to ourselves about how large this potential.
A former player himself and a rabid basketball fan, Alexie wrote about Julius Shoemaker in the short story with the long title--"Jesus Christ's Half-Brother Is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation." Julius is The One Who's Gonna Make It, the pride of the reservation, the can't miss bball prospect. Two middle-aged and past their prime men watch as Julius goes from LeBron to Sam Bowie due to laziness, petty robbery, and heavy drinking. The reservation, as represented by the two men, moves on, talking about the fifteen-year-old Julius as a past tense prospect, and already moving on to the next prospect, the next can't miss youth baller, Lucy, a nine-year-old with a handle like Pistol Pete.
Alexie gets It-the way we overhype young athletes, putting pressure on them from a young age in an indirect attempt to live out our athletic fantasies through them. Don't believe me? Watch The Little League World Series-eleven and twelve year-olds on ESPN. Watch and count how many players cry. Cry.
(Pardon me, I mean The Little League World Series Sponsored by Frosted Flakes).
The Alexie short story that really speaks to this quest of mine is "Whatever Happened to Frank SnakeChurch?" Frank is in forty years old, at the very least, a loner; at most, a misanthrope. When his beloved father dies, joining his long-deceased wife, Frank is beyond sad. His parents were his life, both of them incredibly loving and eccentric.
Frank's immediate reaction is one of a crazed war widow, as he sleeps in his dad's still-perfumed bed and even collects his father's hair-from the sink, the bathtub--and eats it.
After a few weeks of weeping and isolating himself in the house that he had shared with his father, Frank decides that he owes it to his parents to get in physical shape, and joins a gym and starts playing basketball again.
A high school phenom with a basketball scholarship to the University of Washington, Frank gave up the game when his mother died.
After a twenty-two-year absence from hoops, Frank hit the courts hard, playing pickup games seven days a week. As he plays, the game and his body return to a state that allow him to regain some semblance of his past glory.
Playing with a trash-talking old-timer who utters the title question and pokes fun at what he sees as Frank's pitiful and meaningless comeback attempt at the age of 41, Frank goes into a depression where he goes into isolation, erasing almost all of his physical transformation. A therapist recommends he enroll in community college, and Frank does, inquiring weeks later about joining the basketball team as a forty-one year-old with full eligibility (he checked).
The basketball coach, a former opponent of Frank's recognizes him, and against his better judgment, allows Frank to play a practice game against his incredibly athletic and increduluos team.
The crafty Frank, tired after two possessions, pushes himself to the limit, hitting some ridiculous Jimmer Fredette-style jumpers and exchanging trash talk with the opponent's point guard. With his team at game point, Frank fakes his opponent out of his shoes, takes two dribbles, plants, and boom...he blows his knee out.
Alexie gets It. Frank played his body to exhaustion again and again, for who? For his parents, their memory, or for himself?
Alexie writes about more than just basketball. He writes about the importance of ceremony, the family picnics and Kentucky Fried Chicken that came with trips to the local park to shoot hoops. The forty-point games against high school rivals, the pride of mother, father, and player.
Why have I undertaken my own quest more than a decade after competitive basketball ended for me? Am I Frank, the one at the gym who gets the nickname (all relative, of course) of "Old Man?" Am I Frank, the one who tries too hard? Am I Frank, the one who tries to make something of the ordinary into the sacred?
One thing's for sure-with my left leg spending more time on a pillow, elevated, than on the floor, I have a lot of time to think about the motivations for this quest of mine.

Bring on the Man versus Self Conflict

2011-08-22T21:27:00.001-07:00

The questions came in rapid-fire procession from the nurse who put on my cast a few days back: "How'd you hurt your Achilles?" "How old are you?"
The answers, "Playing basketball" and "30," earned a hearty headnod and "Yep."
From what I've been hearing as anecdotal evidence ever since my injury, the Achilles tendon is at its ripest, if you will, for rupture in the late 20s and early 30s. It often happens, said my doctor and nurse, to the "weekend warrior," the one who plays every now and then. It seems that my age and playing status (maybe on average playing once or twice a month)put me in line for that poison arrow from Paris.
The night of my injury, I told everyone who'd listen that my lowtop Polo shoes deserved the blame. It seemed a simple proposition that these far-from-basketball-shoes led to the rupture of my Achilles tendon.
Upon further reflection, the shoes were probably not exactly helpful in protecting my leg, but they were most likely not the culprits. I didn't roll my ankle or come down on someone's foot. It was the scary one, a non-contact injury.
The unknown, then, rears its ugly head again. Why did I rupture my Achilles? Yes, I know that the doctors and the anecdotal evidence say that it was my time as a thirty-year-old weekend warrior. But how limited is this "time?"
Was it meant to be in some cosmic/karmic way? Was it just a matter of time before I got hurt? What if I had stretched out better before the game? What if I hadn't been so open for that last jump shot and I'd passed the ball instead? Was my time fixed in the cosmos, or was it patient enough to wait another week or two to rupture my Achilles if it had to do so?
Nothing like these annoying, unanswerable questions when you are on your back all day with very little to do.

Dreams

2011-08-22T21:22:00.001-07:00

There are two kinds of people in the world, really: those who enjoyed the dream sequences from the episodes where Tony Soprano was in a gunshot-induced coma, and those who thought the dream sequences were transparent and heavyhanded. I would consider myself to be more in the first camp, though the transparency was pretty hardcore--the suitcase that the near-death Tony wouldn't give up-c'mon!
My dreams since the Achilles tendon tear have been pretty easy to figure out, at least as far as an amateur (isn't every human being an amateur when it comes to interpreting dreams?) can tell. In recent years, there have been many dreams whose different details have been unified by an overriding sense of what might have been. One dream had me preparing for a big weekend game at the varsity level against a traditional rival school, another had me playing for a starting spot.
Last night's dream had an ex-girlfriend offer to get me a bottle of water, which I declined politely. The theme, according to this novice dream whisperer, is pretty straightforward: a prominent thought in my mind, subtle at times, cheerleader-loud at others, is a great desire for independence.
The dream that stood out most to me, and the one that forced me to start jotting dream details down in a bedside notebook, took place a few nights after my injury. Though ostensibly unrelated to basketball and my injury, I think the connection is not too far-fetched.
I'm alone on a dilapidated diving board. The pool is not filled. Looking around and with a sort of what-the-heck capitulation, I bounce on the diving board and am launched into the air. The scene changes as I am all of sudden descending upon a raucous pool scene. A quick closeup and I am alone, a few feet above the chair. I consciously try to move, but my trajectory does not change despite my furious attempt...and the dream ends.
Spiders, rollercoasters, pit bulls, nuclear war, these things scare us, but so too does the unknown. So too does our changing independence. Will I dunk? Will I play basketball at 100% again? 95%? I. Don't. Know.
And that scares me.

Bring on the Man versus Nature Conflict

2011-08-22T14:26:00.000-07:00

The day found me loading up my athletic bag for a day of social and athletic pursuits--a golf shirt, jeans, and Polo lowtops for a possible dinner date, North Carolina-blue basketball shorts for the tennis or basketball I would be playing, dark-blue Nike hightops with two pairs of socks. The last few days had been the epitome of summer freedom, with a few dates, two books enjoyed, and a tennis match, basketball game, and weight workout.
I went to the same university rec center I'd played at countless times, the bulk of them played in a 18 month span ending about six years ago. I did a basic workout after telling the waiting players in the gym that I had next. We had a neat team of five ready to go when the game ended, and jogged in from the weight room to lace 'em up. For some reason, probably just laziness, I decided not to get my hightop shoes from the locker room, deciding instead to play in my Mr. Rogers-would-love-them Polo shoes.
As introductions were made before the game started, one of my teammates looked at me askew, and said, "You cool to play in those?"
Thinking he was talking about my shorts, I said, "What, they're too short?"
"Naw, Dog, those shoes."
I nodded and shrugged, both an affirmation of his misgivings and an admission that my decision to rock the Polos was not the smartest idea, but that the game must go on.
The game was hard-fought, with my two jumpers helping us to a 9-4 lead before a turnover and blown one-on-one defensive assignment led to a 10-10 tie, game point. I took the ball up top after a teammate's pass was tipped out of bounds. I passed the ball in to the right wing, screened for the left wing, and stood at the free throw line, wide open when the ball was eventually passed to me. No one stood within three feet of me as I rose up for a jumper that went through the net, leading to my teammates mobbing me on the floor.
Oh yeah, did I mention that I was on the floor due to what would later be diagnosed as a completely severed Achilles tendon?
Before the shot went through the hoop, I had a horrific fleeting image of a oft-replayed injury I'd seen on tv some years back. I think this one was of Jason Kendall, a pro baseball player who ran over first base with his ankle bending at a grotesque angle.
Before I'd even returned to the ground after the jump shot, my left rear leg and ankle seemed to give out like never before. There was a sound like a dying dog (I still don't know if it was from me or from a player waiting on the sidelines)and I collapsed in a heap, breakdancing on my butt to get to a sitting position.
The feeling can be described better now in hindsight, as I know that the tendon was torn. It was a feeling of disconnection, a feeling that the calf and the foot were completely different entities.
When the doctor squeezed my left calf the next day at the emergency room, right before telling me that I would have surgery three days after my accident, he gave a knowing nod. My left ankle and left foot would naturally contract with the squeezing of the calf-go ahead, try it at home. The signals from the calf to the ankle were nonexistent.
The above might help the reader to understand in what way this pain was excruciating. After a minute of me shaking my head and saying, "Wow" repeatedly, I attempted to hobble the five steps or so to the sideline bench. I immediately crumbled and was helped along by two people whose shoulders bore my weight as I held my injured leg above the fray.
When I got to the sideline, a sense of strange clarity hit me as I looked around at the worried faces of the other players. They'd been here before, some of them. In their eyes, I can see now, were many hours of pain.
I was about to pledge their fraternity.
This was bad.
Very bad.

The Mind is Willing but the Body is Weak....or the Other Way Around?

2011-08-22T13:53:00.000-07:00

Ah, the difference in what the body does in relation to what the mind pictures doing. In today's game, even with six points and a gamewinner, there were numerous plays where the brain was much quicker than the body, where the monster rebound above the fray existed much more clearly in my brain than on the floor.
The basketball player who in my mind's eye got to the loose ball a millisecond before my charging opponent lost out to the reality of being a step slow to get to the ball.
The baller who grabbed an errant rebound to end the opponent's offensive possession failed to materialize; instead, there was an appearance by his ugly cousin, the one who couldn't bring himself to leave the floor as two shots were missed and rebounded by the offense.
Shoulda, woulda, coulda--the things old men on rocking chairs are made of...

The Coach vs. The Player

2011-08-04T13:25:00.000-07:00

Walking into the local YMCA during the last five weeks has meant a jogging suit, lowtops, and a whistle around the neck. Some of these days, I came in ridiculously overdressed, coming straight to basketball practice from my summer teaching job. I was Coach.

Today, I walked in with my Reebok bag, my hightops, and my faded North Carolina-blue basketball shorts. I was there to play ball with the workers from the local software company. I've played with these guys a few times, as my friend-quite a post player-let me know about their Wednesday and Thursday lunchtime battles a few years back. Call me Player.

This was the first time I'd played in a few weeks, and I'm a bit embarassed to say that I did my high school ritual, eating the prescribed pregame meal I adapted faithfully from an NBA conditioning book that's so old that gracing the cover and demonstrating ab workouts inside is one Doc Rivers-as a player.
My triumphant return to the court almost didn't happen, as I almost fell victim to one of the weirdest maladies ever known to keep a player out of action...
I couldn't get my bracelet off.
Yes, that's right. In a week or so of wearing this Guido-style, linked silver bracelet, I've already received a few lowblows, but a few more compliments. The only problem is that I didn't put it on the first time-my aunt insisted on doing it, and I didn't know how to take the dang thing off.
As game time approached, I realized with dismay that I couldn't play basketball with this bracelet on! Someone might get hurt. Right?
Partly embarassed, partly dumbfounded, and partly and secretly happy, I watched as the clock ticked to within thirty minutes of game time.
Finally, with a little help from a stretched-out paperclip, I opened and took off the bracelet. Any other excuses I can think up?
The game started, and I called out screens for my teammates, tried to set backscreens on offense, and basically tried to do the little things. The coach in me knew that boxing out, playing help defense, and making the extra pass would help my team to win, but the player in me at times called for isolations, leaked out early (they call it "cherrypicking"), and jacked up a few ill-advised shots from well past the three-point line.
The results of this coach versus player, man-against-self conflict? I was probably 3-8 shooting, with five misses in the middle following two jumpers to start the game. I was scored on a few times, at least once getting left in the wake of a driving player, once getting a shouldabeen defense rebound ripped out of my hands by a smaller guard.
Perhaps the coach in me and the baller in me reached a happy medium on the last play of the game. A steal by my teammate led to him having a teammate running to his left and a lone defender a step behind. The coach in me was satisfied by my never giving up on the play, running down to grab the rebound from the missed layup. The baller in me got his Andy Warhol on, gaining a bit of glory and high fives for the game-winning layup.
We'll call it a draw.

What Movie Should We See Tonight?

2011-07-23T15:32:00.000-07:00

My mind matched that weird haze that comes after stepping out of the movie theater into the pre-sunset haze (my apologies to the great S. E Hinton). I had just experienced what was to date the single worst movie I'd ever seen. The worst!

I've walked out of movies before-to hell with my $9.50! I've slept through movies before (shout out to Revenge of the Sith). I've skewered movies while in the theater, annoying a girlfriend and probably five people around me ("Come ON! That was obviously a rip-off of The Bourne Identity!) in doing my best contemporary "Mystery Science Theater 3000" impression. But this movie trumped them all in terribleness.

While I must admit that I see very few movies-a fact my friends rib me about-I believe that my voice still must be heard in the wilderness, trumpeting the horrid two hours and thirty-six minutes that was "Transformers III."

The movie was the consensus pick of my basketball team, a wholesome team activity for the first night of a three-day out-of-town tournament. I was more than happy to dodge Kevin James and his "Zookeeper," and while I didn't expect to get great enjoyment out of "Transformers III," I figured I could sacrifice for the team and it couldn't be THAT bad.

It was that bad. Five minutes into the movie, I knew that this was going to be a long evening. The 3d glasses provided gave me a headache. The Dolby Surround Sound made it doubly worse. The plot was already unnecessarily complicated and trite. Twenty minutes in and I thought about slipping out for an extended and indefinite "break." One of the parent chaperones fell asleep about ten minutes into the movie, and man, how I envied him! The other parent chaperone asked semi-earnestly, about halfway through the movie, "So, the plot is basically a good versus evil setup?"

The plot, such as it is, revolves around the shifting allegiances between automobiles that transform into fighters. The Transformers have come to Earth to take over the planet or else defend the planet.

Or something. Throw in a half-assed love story and you've got a movie that at two hours and thirty-five minutes is two hours and thirty-five minutes too long.

After the movie mercifully ended, I was joined by my ten players, the great majority of them giddy over the hot new love interest, the action scenes, an obscure quip.

Said my starting center, "Man, I told you the movie was dope!"

Half kidding, he added, "Coach, can we watch it again tomorrow night?"

The expectant pairs of eyes burned into my peripheral vision confirmed the fact that the great majority of the guys-maybe all the guys-loved this movie.

Never have I felt so old in a movie theater.

Still Ballin

2011-07-03T21:46:00.000-07:00

"I got next," I said, strutting out onto the main courts at the local university rec center. My confidence was feigned, my strut probably overexaggerated, my tone surely too clipped and smarmy. I stepped out on the court between games, promptly airballed two long jump shots, and shook my head with a sneer, making it obvious to any viewer that those two shots were anomalies, somehow not worthy of a baller like myself.
My facade reversed itself this time, as I played nonchalant when I was really scoffing inside. This was in response to my new teammate telling me, with the confidence of a , that the guy I'd be guarding was "real quick, so be careful with him, make him shoot."
I thought to myself that I could handle him, that I'd always wanted to guard the quickest player on the other team, that I was a lockdown defender.
Was. Maybe. The haze of memory tells me that I was once a shutdown defender, the Deion Sanders of youth basketball. Gary Payton had nothing on me. Maybe.
The game was not bad, as I find myself writing about the first game in (insert time period here) _______ months. Again. It has been a few months since the students/faculty game, and I graced the court for the first time since, save for a few three minute bursts when practicing with my players.
The guy I guarded was very quick, did have a good handle. By my count, he got to the basket three times; the first was helped by me getting screened, I told myself. The second was a fast break where he got me on my heels, then took it right by me, using his right hand only. The third time was the most frustrating, as I had him pigeonholed as a right-hand only dribbler, but he crossed me over and left me in his wake on his way to the hoop for a layup.
There may not be anything more humiliating in basketball than getting left behind in an isolated situation, going mano a mano and losing.
My team won easily, 11-6, with me making the game-clincher, a running layup off a great pass. I made three baskets-the game-clincher, a putback off a teammate's missed shot, and a pull-up jumper from the right elbow.
This pull-up was the shot that I'll remember most, as it was right after I'd gotten abused by the man I was guarding, leading to his easy layup. I called for the ball, settled into my favorite move, a la former NBA great Kevin Johnson. This was a move I practiced to no end as a young player, in which I go between my legs from right hand to left hand, delay for a split second to freeze the defender, and then rapidly continue to my left. The move was executed perfectly, giving me the step on my defender (Payback, baby! This is Dominique and Larry Bird in the '86 playoffs!). A defender stepped out to cut off my route to the hoop, so I pulled up for the jumper...all net!
My right hand shot up in a Tiger Woods/Michael Jordan fist pump. Did I possibly get a bit of a screen that allowed me to leave my defender in my dust? Maybe...
Rewind to a week ago. My high school team won by two points, the game saved by my center, who blocked a possible game-tying layup at the buzzer. As he manaically jumped up and down in place, I said to him, quietly, "Act like you've been there before."
Fist pumping like Michael Jordan and Snooki's lovechild? Maybe I oughta take my own advice...

Road Trippin

2011-07-03T14:50:00.000-07:00

It was a late Friday afternoon about five years ago when I called my friend and pitched the idea of a weekend trip to Las Vegas. I was a one hour flight from Vegas, and he was a three hour flight away.
"Next weekend?" he asked.
"No, today," I replied.
There was a pause on the other end. "Yeah, okay. I'll meet you at the Vegas airport at 10."
I found out later that he hadn't had time to go back to his apartment after my phone call, that he'd gone straight from work to the airport, and that his "luggage" consisted of a pair of athletic shorts, tennis shoes, and a workout t-shirt that happened to be in his car's trunk. Toothpaste, a toothbrush, deodorant-no prob, these things could all be bought cheap in Vegas, right?
It's different when you travel as a 30 year old. The days of trips--to Vegas, to Lake Tahoe, to New York--planned on whims, and without the slightest traces of practicality, are gone. Trips are planned weeks, months in advance, the three days of vacation planned to the most minute details months before, a gaggle of e-mail exchanges setting up meal coverage, how much each person will owe (down to the cents), and who will room with who.
A month from now, we will be celebrating my cousin's thirty-third birthday at a lakeside cabin owned by a friend's family. For some reason, my cousin has never had any sort of big celebration for the traditional benchmarks--twenty-one, twenty-five, thirty--but he wants to do it up big for his thirty-third (blame the Catholic in him, perhaps). The warnings started a few months back, first in the form of a "Save the Dates" e-mail, then in Evite form a few weeks later.
Ah, the Evite, that acid-test of age and youth. For the twenty-five year-old crowd, the Evite is nothing more than a sounding board for new comedy material ("It's your twenty-fifth birthday? Does it still count as twenty-five if you only remember seventeen of them?). The thirty and over set, however, uses it as an itinerary, a Rolodex ("Hey, Matt, send me your new number when you have a chance."), and a chat room ("Sweetie, are we free that weekend, or is that the weekend your parents will be in town?).
The younger set fills up the "Maybe" column with impunity (Depends on how hungover I'll be that morning!), while the older set keeps the "Yes" and "No" columns full. The older set is planned ahead months ahead, friends' weddings and business trips taking up the weekend space that used to be left free for spontaneity; the younger group's "Yes" and "No" responses are half the time wrong.
My cousin, though unmarried, is in a serious relationship (I actually wouldn't be surprised if he popped The Question on this birthday weekend), making him a little late to the game, but at least in the same arena as most of his guests. These guests have made the biggest topic on the e-mail chain about who is bringing kids and who is bringing dogs.
Dogs and kids, those stalwarts of domesticity. Five years back, the idea of sharing a room with a dog would have been ridiculed, and plus, we'd barely be at the cabin anyway...there were casinos to visit, beach parties to crash, bars to invade.
I laughed out loud as I sat at my computer the other day. My cousin's best friend from childhood e-mailed to test the waters for bringing a board game. This was the same board game that led to a raucous night of drinking games some years back between my cousin and his friends. Now, this e-mail contained a link to the board game's rules, as set by the manufacturer.
Years back, the rules were open to interpretation. Now?
The rules are the rules.

The Men's Basketball Team

2011-06-21T21:21:00.000-07:00

A few years back, as our boys basketball team tried to escape the shadow of our city championship girls basketball team, the athletic director began calling the boys team the "Men's Basketball Program." I loved it instantly. It reeked of strength, maturity, power.

I have used it at every opportunity-announcements over the school intercom, practice and game fire-and-brimstone speeches--it's very versatile.

The reason, I've determined, that I like it so much? They are not boys, so I'm not a man, an old man. I also refuse to refer to my high school students as "kids." I don't teach "kids," I teach "teens," or "young men and women," or "young adults." The older they are, the younger I am. Make sense to you? Yeah, me neither...

The Eye

2011-05-16T19:39:00.001-07:00

Being that our school does not have its own gym, my team is always scrambling for gym time. This forces me as the coach to be very creative--one day, we run stairs that adorn a local business, another day, we run to the bridge and back to school. Some days, we carve out a small swath of space outside, sandwiched between the cheerleaders and their tumbling mats and the latchkey kids who are taking their sweet time in getting home.
With all these distractions, I found it smart during a recent workout to have the players close their eyes as they dribbled the indoor basketballs on the asphalt outside the school. The idea is to have them work on game situations, in which they will hopefully have their heads up to see the floor and any openings in the defense. The fingertips do the work, locking in the good habit of dribbling the fall away from the palm of the hand for greater control.
After about ten minutes of constant dribbling--inside out, crossovers, front to back-- I gave the guys the okay to open their eyes. Our big man decided he liked the sensation and kept his eyes closed as the eyes of his teammates fixed on him.
His tall, skinny frame bent awkwardly at the waist, his right hand bent in front of him as a sort of buffer for the defense, he looked alternately ridiculous, lost, and in his own world.
His intensity, though, burned through, and he was no doubt in that zone that athletes talk about with the reverence of a prodigal son.
That zone, as slippery as it is enthralling, is what an athlete chases his whole life.
"Look," said a teammate, pointing at his still-squinting center, "Josh has The Eye."
And, that, I think to myself, is what I'm chasing some ten years after high school.

Students versus Faculty Game

2011-05-15T19:44:00.001-07:00

I'm not sure if it was the two Five Hour Energy bottles I downed five minutes before tipoff, or the excitement of a victory, but I didn't fall asleep until about 2:45 am a week ago. This was the night/morning after the teachers at my school took home a nine-point victory over the school's girls and boys basketball teams, and it might well have been a healthy dose of excitement that would not allow me to sleep. Apparently, these Five Hour Energy bottles will keep you up, and it seems fitting that one of the salves I relied on to prop me up for this Game of all Games kept me awake almost all night.
These salves included a pregame meal the likes of which I have not eaten in a long time--well, at least in the year since the last student/faculty basketball game. My carbohydrate count was similar to that of the cloudy-memoried meals I ate in my high school days, full of pasta and bread and cereal with just a little turkey on the bread and milk in the cereal for my protein totals.
I drank two eight-ounce cups of water twenty minutes before the game, strengthening the base built by the three eight-ounce cups I drank an hour before tipoff.
My pregame ritual may have been laughable to an observer, as I couldn't help but think that I was doing the same stretches and rituals that I'd done some thirteen years before as a high school player. This night, though, my ardent pregame preparation would have to make up for the fact that I had not "done my homework."
The plan was (always a dangerous three words) that I would play three nights a week for four weeks. A week later, my basketball shoes still fresh in the closet, the plan was altered: three times a week for three weeks...until I soon found myself begging into a game to 11 with players who were probably born right around the years when I was playing JV basketball. This was the night before the real thing-the students awaited the next night.
Playing the role of distributor (I mean, c'mon, I couldn't just score every time on these young players!), I fooled myself into believing that not being a standout in a game featuring all mid-teenagers was not so much a function of terrible conditioning as of rustiness. Rustiness, I figured, would be eradicated with this one game reawakening my prodigious games. My shoes had been broken in, the wheels greased.
It was with none of the previous night's confidence that I awoke on game day, fully aware that my trash talk of the previous week was far ahead of my game's readiness.
It's not so much important that the teachers recruited two former (albeit, 40s in age) NFL players with tangential links to the school, or that our personnel director's brother (he of the twenty-point output and suffocating defense) was weakly and half-heartedly cited as a "substitute" to complaining students. It's not so important that the teachers mounted a huge comeback to turn an early 14-3 deficit into a 47-38 victory, helped by two big three-pointers and a few assists by yours truly. What I'll remember is an early maze of images--a big man guarding me after a defensive switch, my brain lighting up with delight, knowing I can drive by him to the basket. An awkward crossover, our footwork in lock-step, a tip-away, a steal. As I trail this big man as he approaches for a layup, the distance between us seems to lengthen, and I trail off like a cornerback conceding a touchdown to a streaking receiver. Fresh in my mind is the idea that "back in the day," I would have blocked the layup or at least forced a bad shot.
This turnover and layup were almost as strong in my mind as the fact that we'd won.
Almost.
The next day, I resolved to play hoops more-you know, three times a week to stay up on my skills...
I have yet to lace 'em up.

Intramurals as the Beginning of the Downhill Spiral...

2011-02-19T19:13:00.001-08:00

Intramurals were most likely designed as a platform for camaraderie, fair play, and fellowship. They have devolved, however, into a Darwinian struggle for supremacy and an preview of the aging process. The leagues are full of frustrated athletes, people who weren't quite good enough to play college hoops or football or whatever the sport (ultimate frisbee?), but were the Big Dogs or Kinda-Big Dogs, or Thought They Were Big Dogs at the high school level.
I was no different when I entered the university recreation center with a few buddies to sign up for our basketball intramural league as freshmen. We were all decent ballers at our schools, still in pretty good shape from playing a lot of ball over the summer before college, and eager to be Alpha Males in the dorms and on the courts at once.
On one hand, these early games were key in building dorm solidarity, as there is nothing like an intense basketball pickup game to take acquaintances to at least cohorts, if not friends. With the uneasy niceness of those first days of college being like a perpetually awkward first date, there was nothing like a game of hoops to push you through the awkwardness to the unique camaraderie of dorm life.
I remember bonding with a soon-to-be-lifelong friends over our shared distaste for one dorm mate who consistently turned the ball over yet always wanted to be the one with the ball in his hands, demanding it in a nasally voice after anyone else got a rebound on defense.
Intramurals also house some behavior that is close to the worst of humankind. Players cheat with impunity, exaggerating scores or simply propping up wrong scores uttered by willing or unwilling liars. The ball is always off the other team, and fouls that are obvious to the other nine players on the court are always denied with the fervor of a Baptist preacher.
Guys "cherry-pick," they only hustle back on defense when they made the turnover, they throw unnecessary elbows, they chuck the ball up any time they have (or don't have) the slightest opening. When it comes down to the end of the game, though, a lot of them want nothing less than to have the ball in their hands, and the ball all of a sudden moves more at the end than it has all game.
The brave, the cowards, the selfish, the overly unselfish (the one who will not, under any consition, shoot an open shot) the crooked, the lazy--they all see their virtues and peccadilloes exposed on a grand scale.
Intramurals are the beginning of the downward spiral, where the zenith is the quality of play during the high school season, in which a player is in impeccable condition, and feels he can play for seven quarters. Rare occasions are those in which he pulls a jersey to avoid having to jump or box for a rebound, those in which he lets a guy drive past him so he can attempt the lazy man's steal from behind.
The low point of one's basketball career is demonstrated by "The Proffs," an intramural team made up of seven 45+ professors. Their strategy consisted of hard fouls on any layups for the opposing teams, pulled jerseys whenever possible, two-handed, two-footed push shots, and shouts of "Send it!" by shuffling old men who never crossed halfcourt on defense and wanted passes that would give them undefensed layups on the other side.
As my 3oth birtday approaches, just having signed up for my first adult recreation league in three years, I hope that I am much closer to the zenith than I am to The Proffs...

Aaliyah was Right

2011-02-05T11:28:00.000-08:00

Despite my crippling fear of aging, I can honestly say, objectively speaking, that 29 (30 in a few days) is not Old.
Aaliyah, though she meant in the opposite way that I mean it, was right, though--"Age ain't Nuthin but a Number." While she meant it in such a way that someone as young as her could be more mature than her age states, I understand it to say that age can be more a feeling than a number.
Exhibit A: A student of mine wrote on his recent final exam that he greatly enjoyed a certain book we'd read in class, a book whose setting was the student's hometown in the early 1990s. He remarked that the book "was great because it described our town how it was like back then (emphasis mine) when we weren't born yet?"
Dang...1992 was "back then?"

Comeback!

2011-01-23T19:25:00.000-08:00

As the ball trickled past the goalie, spinning from slight contact with his left hand, I felt an elation that I'd never felt in my three years of Little League baseball or three-and-a-half game season of soccer.
It wasn't important that I wasn't even on the soccer team for which I scored the goal or that my goal was scored on a goalkeeper who was more interested in the fading sun's colors than his temporary role as gatekeeper. It wasn't even important that I was a year older than most of the players on the field and two years older than the first-time players.
I had scored a goal. My first goal. The papers wouldn't feature my goal, the evening news wouldn't cover it at 10 o'clock. Shoot, it wouldn't even enter the scorebook or notepad of the most dedicated youth soccer fan. It was a goal scored in practice by a player who had come to his younger brother's practice with his mom after a grocery store run and had been asked to practice for a few minutes in a scrimmage because another youngster had just gotten hurt-you know the type of goal I'm talking about, right?
This was my first time playing soccer since midway through my first. As a six-year-old with a budding love for sports--basketball and baseball were already practiced in my front yard, along with some innocent and novice touch football--I had followed my friends into the La Sirra Soccer League.
It was quite clear, however, from the very first practice that soccer wasn't my thing. I was deathly afraid of the ball and well, what else matters in soccer? A few games into the season, and it was clear from my game tears, my incredible reluctance to leave the house for soccer practice and games, that I was not to be the next (first?) American soccer star.
That day at my brother's practice though, as the street-clothes-wearing mercenary, I felt what it was to score, to be a momentary spotlighter in a team sport.
I imagine that if I multiply that feeling by a million, it'd equal the feeling to rise up, hang in the air, and bring down the house with a dunk.

The Gut

2011-01-06T13:22:00.001-08:00

As a kid and deep into my early 20s, I was so skinny that I even went to the doctor to find ways to gain weight. My homebrew of weightgainer milkshakes lasted about as long as my first vomiting session induced by the milkshakes. The Met-Rx and weight-gainers/protein powders of my teenage years made me gag so badly I could never find enough fruit juice, water, or milk to disguise the taste. One of the countless nicknames of that era was "Slim Jim," and I was even called "The Skeleton" by one of my vindicative students early on in my teaching career. I still remember the laughter that ensued when our varsity basketball trainer tested my body fat, and chortled as he reported that my body fat did not even register on the index, and that I "oughta mix in a steak every once in a while."On the court, my relative height and strong-mindedness to hit the boards made me a post player, but I was no match inside for the burly and the beefy--6'2," 158 ain't likely to scare anybody away from attacking the key.

I must say, however, that this thinness did make me seem more muscular than I was. With no fat (literally none, according to my first body-fat test) to hide under, my veins and six-pack shone through like those on an anatomy class poster. As I got into my mid-twenties, friends a few years older would warm me of that most slippery and cunning of things-The Gut. They warned that they, too, were once like me, but that the ravages of the years included the sprouting of the Gut. My stretched-tight abs, though, told me a different story. My metabolism was different; the usual rules didn't apply to me. I would never get fat, never get the infamous Gut.The last few years, though, the pounds have come, most of them healthy ones. I consider myself to be in good shape, at 6'2," 188 lbs. The Gut, though, I could do without. Is it obvious? No. There are a lot of people who wouldn't consider it to be a problem. But It's there, no doubt about it. It is a Gut, a lower ab conglomeration that defies ab exercises and itinerant running. My diet, while every once in a while fatty, is pretty darn healthy on the regular, complete with boneless, skinless chicken breast and egg white omeletes, pasta, and a lot of grains and fruits.About two years ago, a friend, five years older than me, tapped me on the shoulder at a barbecue, and pointed to the lower part of my ruffled shirt.

"I told you it was coming," he said.

"What?"

"The Gut."

I turned away as I unconsciously smoothed my shirt bottom--the truth hurts.

Rockwell, University...

2011-01-05T16:22:00.000-08:00

In those heady first days of lifting weights, where the young lifter sees dynamic results in bulk and quantity of weight lifted to a degree that will perhaps never be revisited, I used to laugh as my friend stared as his biceps bulged in the funhouse mirrors of the weight room. With each bicep curl, he shouted out a name of a rival high school--"Rockwell! University!..."
There was no mistaking his motivation, and my motivation in lifting with him. We had a clear set of opponents, the Jokers, Riddlers, and Penguins to our Batman. The league title was our goal, and the goal was a quite objective one.
Now, as I approach my 30th birthday, with no competition on the horizon, no players to shut down defensively, to league titles to earn, can I bring myself to do, to the best of my ability, with a Ray Allen-like singlemindedness, those nasty leg exercises, the squats, the lunges, the jump rope, the ones the make me have trouble climbing stairs the next day?

Age and "The Acid Test"

2011-01-05T11:58:00.001-08:00

Interlude--Poem: "The Acid Test"

As I approach my thirty birthday-24 days and counting-the relative nature of age and how this relativity is continually being reinvented continue to amaze me. My parents will both turn 60 soon after I turn thirty, creating a neat sense of order for a numbers nerd like me. They will, upon turning 60, have exactly double the years of their son, exactly double the life experience. (Yes, I know-we'd all have to have the same birthday to make my previous statements literally true.) There is something awe-inspiring and comforting in the fact that they have been through two days to my every one.

The big 6-0, however, should not be as daunting for them as it will be for others (me, for example), because they are not old now, nor will they be on the dates they turn 60, nor will they be at age 85. Why, because they were born on the good side of 1950.

In my young mind, my parents were the Alpha and Omega, the foundation, the centerpiece. If a friend had a parent born before this arbitrary marker of 1950, this parent was Old. The opposite was of course true for a parent born after 1950--The Fountain of Youth was theirs.

Enjoy: "The Acid Test" by Jaime Flaco

What does a child know about BC, AD,
CE?

Nothing, except
everything.

What better compliment than to base years,
centuries, epochs—
your life measurement—on one man,
one
Savior?

When you are young and feel but cannot verbalize
His love for you, yours for Him,
you do these things--

You do this for your parents:
born before this cut-off,
this objectively subjective year, and you were
old, getting older.

Born after, and you were young,
Aging, maybe, but never aged.

Mom and Dad,
you were the acid test, the marker,
the wind-blown flag on the 18th green.

You were the Right and the Wrong.
The Alpha and the
Omega.

And maybe this is what it is like,
Maybe just so small of a fraction that it is
like an ant among the massive mass of ants of the world—
but it is love,
your love,
a love like the ant compared to the love our Father (Anno Domini)
has for us.

“Every hair on your head I have counted,” He says,
and you remember when Mom told you (your first human memory?)
that you must have a beautiful soul, because it is said that the eyes are the window
to the soul.

This soul fashioned by the Lord, but perhaps shaded in by one’s parents—
What are we to think of it?
Maybe, just maybe, only this: You have never outgrown,
will never,
outgrow the idea that your parents are perfect.

How Doctor Al Finally Got me to Prioritize Stretching

2011-01-04T20:11:00.000-08:00

If there's one thing that works on a Catholic boy like me, it's guilt. Well-played, Doc.

Some Good Did Come out of the Chiropractor's Visit

2011-01-04T20:04:00.001-08:00

Before I subjected myself to the body-twisting of Dr. Al, he asked me, fairly innocuously, how often I stretched. My perhaps exaggerated answer of "Twice a week" was met with a practiced, though not-altogether dishonest smile and canned follow-up question.
"Do you brush your teeth every day?" he asked.
"Yes," I replied, momentarily confused. Then, "Yes," again, with a bemused smile.
His silence and shrug saying more than any words could have, Dr. Al pointed to me and simply said, "You cannot neglect something that is so vital to your health."
And that is how he got me to stretch, really stretch, one minute at a time, one body part at a time, for an extended period each day since the visit.
This is the good news I report, eight days into my full body stretch routine, with three consecutive days of dunk workouts under my belt. That whole dunk thing? Oh yeah, about that...

Chiropractor Visit

2010-12-21T13:19:00.000-08:00

Galdang! Have you ever been to the chiropractor? As part of the Flaco Athleticism Reclamation Tour, I headed to Dr. Al "The Adjuster" today for a $40 chiropractic primer.

You remember the "Seinfeld" episode where Kramer played amateur chiropractor for Elaine? Yeah. Picture the eccentric Kramer as the equally eccentric Dr. Al, and me as Elaine, and you get a pretty vivid picture of what went down.

As I filled out my personal information in the cramped office with more plasma TVs than rooms, Dr. Al drew a few smiles with some jokes cornier than the ones I use in class (a true artist has got to give props to other artists in the same field). There was something about him that screamed "Used Car Salesman," but there was also a part of him that made me want to trust him. Hmm...perhaps this gained trust is part of the act to separate schmucks like me from our money.

As a man who always feels gipped by the experience at the doctor (my friend Tony and I joke that today's doctors spend more time looking at their computers than at their patients, more words summing up your visit on your chart than come filtering from his mouth), I was determined to be the aggressor and ask the hard-hitting questions of Dr. Al.

His seeming indifference to my question about how often a prospective client should come in for an "adjustment" made me again feel like I stood in front of a chiropractic Gandhi, an altruistic man whose heart beat fully when helping people to discover their full, spine-lengthened potential.

The clincher for me was his assurance that our session this day would not be painful. "I won't push the pain," he said, giving his best Cal Worthington/Tony Robbins smile.

As I felt the slight man grab onto my neck and twist, I felt confident that there was gain, even with no pain. That is why there is such training for these people, so that they can get results without pain for the patient.

Pain? It wasn't pain so much as bug-eyed shock that registered when he twisted my neck such that the pop it elicited sounded almost fake. The pop in my back; now, that had to be fake, right? The echo it produced, both audibly, and in my short-term memory, though, told me that maybe Kramer and Dr. Al were classmates.

After the peculiar experience of feeling and hearing some more body parts "pop," the session was over. It ended awkwardly, like so many first dates, with one partner trying a little bit too hard to gauge the other's interest in a second date. I assured Dr. Al with an overly cool tone that I would contact him in that murky time period we call "Soon," though I left the office with no intention of calling again, the snaps, crackles, and pops clouding my brain.

Might I reconsider? I might. There is a special bit of potential alchemy for me in that office, with a big part of me assuming that something that awkward, that potentially painful, must have some dose of relief in it for the patient pilgrim. Why else, then, would there still be so many chiropractors in business then?

Alluding to my last question, Dear Reader, you may say that I must be the same guy who thinks that he can actually win in Vegas, despite, or maybe because of, the opulent hotels and furnishings that exist there. Let's leave that one alone...

The Harbinger of Old Age

2010-12-11T10:42:00.001-08:00

I just became a registered member of National Public Radio.
That is all.

Interlude-"The Move"

2010-08-10T10:36:00.000-07:00

It is a normal eighth-grade practice at the crackerbox Our Lady of Perpetual Help "gymnasium." The gym is more often used as a parish staging area, or for school pancake breakfasts or for rowdy parish group meetings. And it shows--faded free-throw line, incredibly inconsistent three point-lines and ridiculously-small spacing between three-point lines and halfcourt, baselines and wall.

In the middle of a heated practice for the varsity boys team, I catch an outlet pass around "halfcourt," where I am met immediately by Tom Bermudez, a friend and the type of friend who you compete against on a daily basis for neighborhood pride. His ball hawking forces me to catch the pass, transfer it to my left hand, spin (for some reason) off him, and catch the ball in stride with a my right hand, whereupon I continue dribbling towards the basket with an astonished Tom left in my wake.

Years later, when Allen Iverson was at the apex of his fame and ability, he made a Reebok commercial in which he made a similiar move, one that clearly could not be used in a game, and Tom joked that I should get royalty fees. Tom is and was the type of guy with a childlike enthusiasm such that he couldn't contain his glee after I made "The Move," even if he were the victim of such tricky greatness. Even today when we see each other, the conversation invariably comes back to "The Move," no matter the occasion or the conversation topic.

The truth? It was a lucky move, one that was forced by the particular circumstances, one that I do not honestly think could be replicated by me in 100 tries.

But, man, did I feel like The Ish after that move and whenever it was brought up as evidence of my prodigious Game.

This was Street Cred. This was Juice. This was Respect.

Man, I should have retired right then and there, complete with crocodile tears at a press conference held at the school and replete with Jim Brown comparisons...

August 9, 2010--Back on the Horse

2010-08-09T23:12:00.000-07:00

"Time flies." What does that even mean? How can time fly? Isn't time just time? Doesn't time tick away in the same practical and emotionless way each day?
I must say, however, that time does fly, it seems. It has been a year since my first post, and it seems like my quest to dunk is situated exactly where it was a year ago.
Here I sit--again with a few weeks of free time before I start teaching again, with the hours stretching ahead listlessly. The life of a teacher and basketball coach is such a frenetic one during 10-11 months of a year, so much so that the remaining month or two is alternately absolutely necessary for sanity and strangely boring in its leisurely pace.
I am happy to report a return to the dunk workout schedule tonight, my workout a quiet success, if only for its workmanlike nature. I did my 25 calf raises, 20 rim touches, 20 squats, and five knee-to-chest jumps. These exercises are exactly what was prescribed by my high school workout book. This is also the exact same number that I started with a year ago. Should I be comforted by this uniformity, or disturbed that I haven't made any measurable progress in 365 days?
It seems significant to me that I have returned to my workouts on the day of my "birthday." Today I am exactly 29 years and six months old. Based on the fact that I was born at 1:10 am, doesn't this mean that I am closer to 30 than I am to 29? Maybe this milestone will inspire me to dunk, for real, by the big 3-0...

(Interlude) What My Pre-set Radio Stations Say About Me

2010-07-16T08:25:00.000-07:00

After about 14 months, I finally got around to learning how to lock in the pre-set radio stations on my lumbering 1991 Oldsmobile. I should say that my girlfriend did this for me. Part of my personality contains an annoying trait that I am fully aware of but usually not in control of. This personality trait is partly a tendency to procrastinate--an every-human quality, I think--and partly a tendency to make things harder than they have to be.
My sister has always teased me about my tendency to exit her street via a right turn, though I need to go left to get on the road to my place. My modus operandi makes sense to me, but apparently, to my sister and much of the outside world, this right turn is as strange as Aunt Viv changing from one actress to another during that one random season of "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air."
My peculiar sense of impatience, you see, impels me to do something while I'm waiting for both directions of traffic to slow enough for me to end up heading towards home. Instead of venturing into the center lane to wait for the far lane to open up, I routinely take a quick right out of my sister's place, then pop a quick (and illegal) u-turn.
Why this bit of u-turn madness? I don't know. And, you know what? I'll probably do it again next time.
Now back to the tell-tale pre-set radio stations--why, you ask, did I not just invest two to four minutes to set the channels ahead of time instead of inefficiently flipping through the channels slowly for one whole year, always settling on the same few stations?
Dunno.
Of these four stations, one is the local hip-hop station, another the local rock station. The third station is the local "old school" hip hop and R & B channel, complete with a lot of West Coast 90s rap-Snoop, Dre, Kurupt, Westside Connection, E-40 and Too Short. The fourth is...drumroll...NPR.
Yes, National Public Radio. The station I swore I'd never like, the station of ol' Garrison Keillor and his aw-shucks, Midwestern spoof mainly enjoyed by those who remember the days when people made a huge deal out of the Lutheran/Methodist divide.
I remember, as a kid, hitching a ride with a friend's father who constantly had the dial set to NPR, insisting on discussing the current events mentioned on the radio with my friend and me. That the two of us had some 25 years of combined life was unimportant, as the father was really just using us as practice, as a sounding board, so that he could impress his contemporaries at parties and the water cooler with his in-depth knowledge of the dicey political world.
Though I couldn't have verbalized it at the time, there was something vaguely adult, vaguely nerdy about someone who listened to NPR. It didn't feature flashy commercials, announcers with deep bass to their voices, or cool million dollar giveaways. And it was quite obvious to me at that point in my life that there was no greater harbinger of old age than the discussion of politics.
Democrats? Republicans? Might as well be 90 years old.

"old like you..."

2010-05-21T21:34:00.001-07:00

If there's one thing that I hang my hat on as a teacher of teenagers, it is that my corny jokes and trying-too-hard pop culture references will at least get some reaction. Most of the time the reaction is a "Weaaaak" call, a groan, or a laugh, a bit too hearty. At these times, I actually feel bad for the one who laughs. My joke, my pop culture reference is usually not funny enough to warrant laughter.
But you see, Dear Reader, I am playing a part. I am the man who plays the man who is funny by purposely not being funny. Get it?
So, on a particularly listless day in my classroom, a first period lesson on the armistice signed after World War I, I referenced a primary source document we were reading in which an American soldier writes a love letter to his girlfriend from Europe.
As I spoke about the letter and its significance, I dropped a line about the soldier missing his "baby boo."
Suddenly, from the waves of sleeping students came a high-pitched manaical laugh. The girl, pint-sized and always full of energy and opinions, could not stop laughing.
" 'Baby boo!' " she said in explanation.
"What?" I said, playing Gene Wilder to her Richard Pryor. Playing, though, you see, as I knew that I was being coy, and that's what made it funnier...
"It's just funny when someone old..." she started, and the class, silent before, became even more silent.
"No need to finish," I said, moving on, a bit too quickly to more tidbits about World War I.

Interlude--Tony Montana

2010-04-12T20:54:00.001-07:00

I really, really love teaching. I do. But it's a job that takes a ridiculous amount of hours; that is, if you want to do your job well. My curse is that I love my job. If I didn't, I could see myself pulling a 9 to 5 (err...7:30-3:30) and being out the door, but nope, not when the job consumes you (in a good way). Dang it, I hate my job that I love.
In this bubble of grading, worrying about grading, lesson planning (and not doing my dunk workout!), physical outlets--hoops, running, lifting--are so necessary, but they are often the first to be neglected.
In that particular teacher-funk brought on by a weekend in which very little recreation was had, very much fretting over grading was done, and comparatively little grading was done, followed by a day in which I'm still grading at 8:57 pm, I gotta let a little Tony Montana out...

Is this it? Is this what's it's all about? Eating on the run, drinking, grading, correcting? You're eating this microwaved stuff, you haven't exercised in days, you got spaghetti sauce on the World War II essay. Your youth is there but lays idle like a tarpcovered car. So, say goodnight to the bad guy. The one who talks a big game but doesn't train as much as he should, who doesn't give you as much scintillating description of the quest to dunk a ornage oval as you were expecting from this oddly-titled blog...
In the words of Don Fannuci from The Godfather, Part II: "Tomorrow. Always tomorrow."

Good workout!-March 31

2010-03-31T21:00:00.000-07:00

Man, I was humming today! Bouyed by my new Strength Shoes pill, I managed to greatly up my dosage of exercises. I increased the number of calf raises by 10 to 40, the number of squats by five to 30, and the number of knee-to-chest jumps (this time with Strength Shoes) was doubled to 10. I also did 100 jumps with both legs separately, and 100 jumps with both legs together, for a total of 300 plyometric repetitions while wearing the Strength Shoes--video of this should be posted tomorrow.
Measurable progress is what I need now. There is something liberating about such a prodigious leap in the number of repetitions, and the relative ease with which I completed all of the exercises makes me wonder if I have been pushing myself quite hard enough. Perhaps this lack of a deadline, lack of a "drop dead" date by which I will need to dunk (mentioned in yesterday's post) has brought on a sense of malaise.
I've had friends recommend measurable goals and ways to stick to them. Perhaps, said one friend, you have people donate a dollar to cancer research for every inch gained, or every quarter-inch. Or, said another friend, you have to have people bet on the date on which you will first dunk.
I gotta say, I love the wording of the second friend. Many teachers, myself included, speak about college and say, "When," not "If you go to college..." when disussing university in the classroom. In the same way, I will from now on use the certainty of the term "when" in looking forward to the day when that skinny wrist, bright orange ball in hand, climbs enough above Everest to place the ball in a downward motion into a net.
That's a dunk for all you literal people out there. A slam dunk. Word.

Strength Shoes, Day One

2010-03-30T15:45:00.000-07:00

I finally put the hibernating Strength Shoes into action today, some two months after they arrived in an awkward-sized package. With a week off from teaching (Spring Break 2010, woo!), but not a week off from grading history projects on World War II and Japanese-American internment camps, the perfect time has arrived for the beginning of the Strength Shoes Era. The need to take some time off from the monotony of grading cookie-cutter teenage projects, coupled with five days off, has given me the perfect time to start a Phase II in my quest to dunk.
The workout was a very good one, tantalized to its peak by this new object in the mix. With the strapping on of the suprisingly un-unwieldy shoes, I felt heartened, as if this new pill would help me get well. In addition to my usual dunk workout of 30 calf raises, 25 squats with a 10lb. medicine ball, 20 rim/ceiling touches and five knee-to-chest jumps in place, I did 300 plyometric jumps with the Shoes on--100 with both legs at the same time, and 100 with each leg separately. I also hopped through 75 jump rope repetitions with the Shoes on, pleased that I didn't fall on formerly wobbly legs adjusting to having my calves so prominently platformed.
So, what's ahead? Is this dunk imminent? I wonder now if I have to set myself a deadline an arbitrary or not-so-arbitrary date by which I will dunk. My next birthday, a holiday, New Year's?
Last week, a student of mine turned in a twoweeksearly essay, written with great passion about a subject close to her heart. As the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, she wrote a hasty but passionate summary of the Nazi camps, her loving paean to her grandparents and her idealistic attempt to use her pen to say "Never Again."
With the words, "Here's the final draft," and a throw/flutter of the paper from her hand to my desk, she smiled, turned, and with a flourish, walked away into her cave of friends, with the Hollywood scene missing only a bar of soap and a washbasin for her hands.
Talking to her later, I fumbled through my words in trying to convince her that what she had turned in to me had in fact been a rough draft, but one stripe of a stilldeveloping road. "The only thing that makes a draft a final draft," I said, navigating clumsily into a strong-sounding aphorism, perhaps stolen from another source in my past, "is a deadline."
So maybe the Shoes are my revisions, my last touches, on the project I have been dallying on a bit too much. Maybe the Shoes arrival will force me to set a deadline for The Dunk.
Or maybe the Shoes are a panacea, a harbinger of more procrastination to come, because we all know that once the aspirin sinks in, we are now living in an altered world, and it's hard to tell where the world's devices and our personal choices intersect...

Interlude--Youth and the Young

2010-03-29T16:54:00.000-07:00

"Youth is wasted on the young," said the great writer George Bernard Shaw, and I think yesterday's tennis partner and his sore lower body would agree. I dusted off the racket, bought for about $15 at Ross--is there anything they don't have there?--and proceeded to beat my friend 6-3, 6-3. His compliments were heartfelt, but there was an intensity and hardness of resolve that attached itself to his declaration that he would simply need "to make a few adjustments and get me next time." His forty-year-old body, though, may have something to say about that.

Do not get me wrong--forty is no advanced age. Forty is Favre, Jamie Moyer (at least 2003 Jamie Moyer), Dikembe Mutumbo (well, bad example)...it is an age that allows one physical freedoms that will not peter out fully for quite a while, hopefully.

But what would have happened had my friend had his incites, his mental acuity, when he was a seventeen-year-old speedster, equally adept at stealing bases, running deep routes on the football field, and leaking out early to his offensive side on missed jump shots?

What would have happened if I had possessed that killer instinct evident in so many one-point games at the local health club? What would have happened had I possessed the confidence (some might say stubborness) to shoot a three-pointer in rhythm, with my team down game point to 19 in a 21 point game?

The sixteen year old me was tireless, skinny, athletic, crafty for my age, and limited in my game by a shaky jump shot and an almost blind belief that my job was to be a garbageman, a banger, a rebounder who controlled the paint. Though it occurred to me that a 6'2" 145lb. center was a rarity, almost as unheard of as a 6'2" 145 dominant center, my previous coaching, my upbringing, and my fragile self-esteem dictated that I stay away from the perimeter and play my role.

What is about the macho need to impose one's will on an athletic match that makes one so stubborn? This high school version of me has spawned a coach who, impressed by the sheer force with which his high school coach derided zone defense as "for weakspirited teams," has very rarely called such a scheme into action for his high school teams, maybe at the expense of a win or two? Or three?

Perhaps youth and its lingering bravado is wasted on the kinda young, too...

Interlude--What's My Motivation?

2010-03-20T14:06:00.000-07:00

Last night, I accompanied my basketball players, most of them sophomores and juniors, to a local rec center for some Friday night basketball. Dressed in my best Crockett and Tubbs outfit, with a white polo shirt tucked into khaki slacks and black dress pants, I definitely didn't look the part of a baller. I did, however, have a set of shorts, t-shirt, and basketball shoes (with double socks, of course, stuffed into them). Gotta be ready in case a bball game ever breaks out.

As the game began, I observed that basketball first-date routine, with both teams, some players unknown to each other just a few minutes before, sizing each other up. There is that same lack of genuine personality in both first date and first few minutes of ball, with players and daters a little bit further apart physically than normal, a bit more stilted in words and actions.

As the game worn on, each player whom I knew stood out as an individual with his own particular goals manifested--or was I just a bit too analytical? My sophomore point guard went out of the way to handle the ball at every opportunity, sometimes to the detriment of the team, such as the fast breaks that he slowed up by riding the back shoulder of the willowy big man who ran the middle of the fast break, demanding the ball.

This willowy big man tried, and failed valiantly, at least three times to take a charge, flopping to the ground at the slightest contact from the one he was guarding. Governed by playground rules in which the "lesser" violations like offensive fouls, backcourt, and over-the-back are neglected unless the violation is an egregious one, the flop is that most cowardly of moves, and this big man was rewarded with silence and a few playful taunts when he demanded that his team get the ball on multiple offensive fouls.

The junior off-guard, who has been obsessive in his workout regimen since the season ended about two months ago, was loath to shoot from the outside even when the shots were wide open. He continually drove to the basket with reckless abandon at times, showing off his improved quickness, explosion, and strength for all to see, thanks to two-a-day workouts with weights and plyometrics, and long runs with a classmate who longs to be a Marine and trains like it.

The point guard is motivated by the team's need for a reliable ballhandler to make himself known, the big man by outer and inner criticism about his physical and mental toughness, and the off-guard by the defenders in previous years who crowded his jump shot with little regard for any possible drives to the basket.

And me? What's my motivation? Is it an inner motivation? If so, why have I opened up my goal, my dream, to so many outsiders (shotout to the three of you reading my blog on a regular basis!)? Is this opening up just another way of motivating myself from within, heaping on a sort of pressure to make myself more accountable to others, though they may be "Internet friends?"

Is it the thesis posited in my Introduction that I want to prove to myself that I was (am?) good, athletic, an achiever?

Watching my players on this night struggle, sweat, dive, and push themselves and their teammates, I have no clear epiphany on my goal, no way to make my vague goal to dunk completely understandable to my readers and to myself, but I do know that I miss the game very, very much.

Interlude--What's Next, 4:15pm dinner at Denny's?

2010-03-11T19:55:00.000-08:00

I was supposed to go to KRS-One two nights ago in concert. There was something rebellious in this Tuesday night outing, something vaguely liberating. It was, I think, a salvo against middle, old age, the notion of disappearing youth. It was all set to go: myself, three friends, a pre-party. As Monday approached, doubt set in--will I be too tired to "perform" as a teacher on Wednesday? Will the next day be a waste? KRS isn't going on 'til 11? Dang! That's late...he gets on at 11/11:15, goes for an hour, I get outta there at 1 am, get home 1:30, get about five hours sleep max...
A few reps of "Sound of Da Police" and "Step into a World" culled my energy and resolve. Hell yeah, I was gonna go! KRS live? Local? Shoot, I might even let it slip to my students that I was out the night before. Late. At a concert. Dare them to ask. KRS One? You've never heard of him? Let me tell you a little somethin..."
The afternoon of the concert, with the tickets still not bought (a harbinger, I can now see, looking back, and Strike One), I ran into my coworker and fellow concertgoer. We both made small talk with no mention of that night's concert--Strike Two. I received two sorrowful texts from the other concertgoers, pleading too much work, errands, but really hoping that I still go to the concert-Strike Three. My courage sapped, my will fading, I capitulated.
"Hey, man" my coworker says, "About tonight...I'm kinda stuffed up, and..."
The saddest part? I had to act like I was upset, bummed out, steely in my resolve to hit up the Tuesday nightlife like I used to.
I might as well have hit up Denny's for a late-afternoon dinner, gotten that discount, and gotten off the streets before all the "weirdos" came out with the darkness.

Interlude-Youth as a Natural Link

2010-02-15T15:20:00.001-08:00

My first year of teaching-I taught Spanish I, II, and III to non-native Spanish speakers--was a nightmare. I hated each day equally, and though I am aware of the exponential growth of legend over the years, I still am confident saying that I enjoyed somewhere between ten and zero days of school that year.
I was twenty-two, two months removed from college graduation and the charmed life. Two months removed from highlighter parties, Thursday night "Just Because" bar hops, half-assed on-campus jobs, and a place where I was clearly Jaime. Two months later, I am wearing a tie (more about that in a little while), badly-wrinkled khaki slacks, and am trying to comport myself like the "Mr. Flaco" that is my new title in the classroom.
I spoke much more English than I should have in a Spanish language classroom, but not because of any lack of Spanish know-how. I figured out very quickly that the total-language immersion model touted by my credential-class teaching, ivory-tower-dwelling college professors failed to take into account the fact that "BE QUIET!" or "STOP TALKING!" are much more powerful than "Callense!", particularly when coupled with a beet-red face and spittle that serve to quiet the class, if not for a long while, then at least for a "Whoa, his head's gonna pop off!" moment of awed silence.
Throughout my first year of teaching, I was alternately too mellow, too excitable, a yeller, a soothsayer, a tough grader, an easy grader, a time-waster, a time-spendthrift, too friendly, not friendly enough, too relaxed, too tightlywound, and usually not mature and professional enough, though I did throw in a few instances of student-puzzling utter formality.
I threw a few yet-to-be graded assignments in the roundfile--and by "few" I mean "many." I singlehandedly proved to the students the need for some sort of rubric system with a fickle and unfathomable grading system. I showed to my superiors no organization either in classroom setup or lesson plans.
But the students loved me. They loved me, though not enough to be quiet for minutes at a time, though not enough to not drive me to tropical drinks a few times, and not often to show or verbalize it too many times during that tumultuous first year.
I learned of the this love at times outside of class, through teenage verbal code that is always hard to crack, through gossip, through secondhand accounts from my students' parents and friends.
In reading student surveys given to my students at the end of the year, I received glowing praise and hearty thankyous. They were for "being cool," for "knowing what it's like to be a teenager," for "understanding," for "being more of a friend than a teacher--sometimes."
The subtext of these glowing comments? I received more praise for my youth than my teaching, more love for my love of the Sacramento Kings in a Golden State Warriors and Los Angeles Lakers town than my pedagogy, more adoration for my daily "Chappelle Show" and hip hop allusions than my lesson plans.
I was young. They were young. I had an instant connection through no merit of my own. I was young, and this youth gave me instant credibility that my older colleagues, more worldly, possessive of much more experience with teenagers than the young buck named "Senor Flaco."
I was a very, very bad teacher. I once pretended to have lost my voice to avoid a lecture in class. I presented lessons on such disparate themes as slavery in Colombia, -ar verb conjugation, and Spanish numbers that my students couldn't help but be lost by the lack of unifying concepts.
I was a poor teacher, the kind whose lack of confidence shone on his face like a Vegas hotel. And young people are, if nothing else, very skilled at smelling that professional fear.
I was a horrendous teacher, but in many ways, in the fleeting and fickle world of the teenager, I was cool, and that was all that mattered.
Oh yeah, and once I showed "A Bronx Tale" in class. The film was not dubbed or subtitled for Spanish. I taught Spanish class. We were not studying patriarchy in the Italian-American community, nor the urban racial tensions of the late 1960s in my Spanish class.
The kids loved it.
The kids loved me.

Interlude: The Immediacy of Today, the Fogginess of Yesterday

2010-01-18T10:01:00.000-08:00

Reggie Bush (or should I say, Barry Sanders) or Gale Sayers? Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan? Brett Favre or Fran Tarkenton? Sophia Loren or Halle Berry?

Today's heroes, idols, and lowlifes are viewed in a oxymoronic way: both great because of their recent entries into our consciousness, and flawed because of this same recent entry. Kobe, for example, is great precisely because he is playing now, and our attention deficit disordered-society heaps immediate praise on the here, the now, the latest, the freshest.

This immediacy, however, and the flavor-of-the-month culture that it imbues and that flavors our daily lives paradoxically forces us to demand a higher and sustained level of greatness from today's heroes. It is precisely this idea that raises the level of greatness of Jim Brown, the football great, in our minds. He is both immediate--still alive, lively, and philanthropic--and an object of nostalgia--he retired at the "top of his game" at age 29, fresh off a season in which he tied a career high in touchdowns and gained the second most yards of his career.
Just don't judge his greatness based on "Original Gangsters."

When I was four years old, I saw a picture of my preschool class. We'd posed at lunch on a sunny day, on the playground where a youngster feels so contented. I pointed out to my mom that I was squinting, my right eye closed against the oppressive sunlight.
"It's called a 'stigmatism,' she said soothingly, "Doctor Pharrell told me that you have this. It's not bad, though, Honey. It's what makes you special."
So "special," in fact that it made me like the saints, or so I thought. A book sitting on my grandpa's toilet about Saint Veronica Giuliani, a famous stigmatic, and pilfered pieces of a conversation at church told me that it was just a matter of time before I would bear the telltale marks of Jesus' crucifixion on my hands.

When I was young, my parents were not Old. They were old, but they weren't Old. Subjectivity and objectivity can often be one and the same when we are young, and it was indeed their arbitrary birth year of 1950 that served as the acid test, the border between old and Old. My dad's older sister, a year older than he, had the great misfortune to be born slighly south of 1950. She was therefore marked as "Old" in the young boy's encyclopedia.

The simplicity and delineations in our minds as youngsters made things so easy. Sixty years old was clearly "Old"--though Mona Robinson of "Who's the Boss" reruns threw a confusing wrench into my categories--eighty years old was "ancient," and twenty was "cool old."

As I approach my dreaded twenty-ninth birthday, it helps to know that somewhere out there, somebody considers me both "cool old" and light years from "Old."

January 6, 2009

2010-01-05T13:32:00.000-08:00

I hoping that I've reached the "tipping point" expounded upon in the book of the same name by the savvy Malcolm Gladwell. Tipping points are "the levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable."[1] Gladwell defines a tipping point as a sociological term: "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point."[2]

This book has me thinking about the way in which a phenomenon, a trend, operates in the same way as a ball rolling down a hill picks up steam. While it is often true that worrying about the inevitable forces it to come more quickly, it is also true that an assumption of a fact leads one to a self-perpetuating. Though not a 100% proven formula, I have found that writing beforehand of my jumping workout, in other words, visualizing it has led me to follow through with my workout, even in the face of fatigue, a busy schedule, and "Situations" occuring on Jersey Shore reruns.

My streak is at seven straight days, with the prescribed (and necessary) two days off for the weekend. I have had some good days, none great. A good hip-hop beat on the gym radio and a little bounce in my rim touches are enough to keep me coming back for another day, enough to make this perhaps-deluded quarter-lifer think a dunk is coming soon...but time is relative, isn't it?
How soon is soon?

December 27--UGLY Attempt at Dunk

2009-12-28T08:46:00.000-08:00

December 26, 2009--The First Visual Evidence--Jaime Tries to Dunk...

2009-12-26T18:49:00.000-08:00

So that you, Dear Reader, know that I am a real person, I have uploaded three short videos: the first, showing my knee-to-chest jumps and a little too much of my butt; the second, my jump rope routine; the third, my first attempt to dunk. After positioning the video camera on a little tripod (I upgraded from my earlier beach chair concoction), I made a fairly-sorry attempt at a left handed dunk. Being that I'd forgotten to bring my trusty tennis ball, I improvised by using a mini-medicine ball, similar to the balls used in a swimming pool.

My second attempt was honestly a little better than I expected it to be. Trying to achieve to perfect run-up to the rim, I felt a little awkward in my jump cadence, but you'll see that I came pretty dang close to a clean and clear tennis-ball dunk.

Encouraged by brush with Candace Parker-tinged-greatness, I'm ready to hit the lab with renewed fervor, knowing that another well-performed calf raise, a lengthened stretch for my tight hamstrings, or a to-failure set of squats may be the tipping point, may raise me to heights accomplished by the members of the fraternal Phi Slamma Jamma...

December 24, 2009

2009-12-25T10:26:00.000-08:00

Another "good workout" (are these two words redundant?) today--playing McGyver, I used a long. flexible stretching device as a jump rope, and a recently-painted wall as my "rim" for my "rim touches."
Can I use any more quotation marks?
In the spirit of the rhetorical question, may I add one more: When does one go from "Man" to "Sir?"
As I walked about the school where I teach a few days back, a recent graduate who hadn't known me as a teacher saw me in my t-shirt and jeans, gave me the nod and said, "What's up, man?"
On this same day, as I exited the airplane in my Central California hometown, a youngish man (early twenties?) smiled at me, and said, "Hey, Mr. Flaco, how are you?"
"I'd be a lot better if you called me 'man,' I said to myself, as I smiled back.

An Athlete's Prime? (December 24 Interlude)

2009-12-24T22:11:00.000-08:00

The sports world takes its young stars and spits them out in a frenzy, as if they're all Macauluy Culkins and Gary Colemans. A gymnast is considered old when she is in her late teens, Andre Agassi can make his comeback at age 28, a star quarterback begins to age at 33 or 35, or in Brett Favre's case, 56--apparently, athletic years are akin to dog years.

In this era of advanced technology that allows people to live much longer than ever before, it seems weird to say that an athlete, depending on his sport, might be on the downside of his career at 27, 29, or 31. Though it is of course quite subjective, I have heard people state that a pitcher's prime is around 28, and a golfer's is in the early 30s. This seems true, or else how else would you justify the fact that Jamie Moyer, while by no means dominant, is able to pitch fairly effectively in the Major freakin Leagues up to the age of 46 with a fastball that averages 80.4 mph.
Golf, pitching, these are more intellectual pursuits than sprinting the length of the floor or dunking a basketball, however. Seeing a 30 year old Kobe watching his Afro'ed self dunk on video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP_teS6y3e8, Check #5 particularly) last spring and commenting that it was his "young legs" that allowed him to do that and that he "wouldn't try that these days" was frankly a little depressing for any weekend-and three-days-a-week warrior.
It seems now like it was so long ago, but it was only four of five years ago that Shaquille O'Neal was absolutely unguardable. There was not a man alive who could guard Shaq one-on-one, and it was pure brute force that made it this way. To see Shaq in 2009 is to see but a shell of his former shelf. It is unfortunate that this hobbled image, while not in any way diminshing Shaq's earlier accomplishments, will slightly distort the picture in one's mind of Shaq when he decides to hang up his size 28s.
LaDainan Tomlinson was at the top of the football world for a relatively short time before he had one subpar (at least "subpar" according to his souped-up scorecard) season, and dispersion was cast on his legs, his cutting ability, his speed, his future. That those critics were in some way right is not the point; the point is that many times, perception of an athlete's future becomes reality. In many ways, those sounding the early death knell were the ones printing the accusation on Page One in blaring bold type and printing the retraction of the accusations on Page 13.
It seems that it is getting earlier and earlier in one's career when he is said to be a "cagey veteran." On the plot diagram, rollercoaster-shaped, of an athlete's career, it's scary how close the "downside" of his career is to the prime of his career.
As I set forth on my quest to dunk, where do I fall on that rollercoaster?
Ah, to rid my mind of these negative thoughts, I'm going to watch some Rocky--good thing Rocky Balboa/Sly Stallone never used any performance-enhancing drugs to reverse time...

December 23, 2009

2009-12-23T22:41:00.000-08:00

My workout today makes it four straight days, an accomplishment that I have not duplicated in a period of at least three months. I feel more bounce, particularly in my "rim touches." My quest to finally videotape my dunk attempt was partly thwarted by a dead battery on my camcorder, tons of peering eyes at the local outdoor basketball court, and a teenybopping skater who spied me through the chain link fence and gestured to his buddies, saying, "What the hell?"
Despite the haters, I thought that I filmed my attempt to dunk--using a leftover softball of my uncle's fished from deep in my car's trunk.
Without the visual evidence and without a tape measure on my person at the time of my attempt, I am inclined to say that the rim where I slid the softball through had to have been at least three inches lower than a normal rim. I gotta say, though, and this can be echoed by anyone who's ever thrown down a monster dunk on an eight-foot hoop or a Nerf hoop--it felt good to dunk; it gave me a sense of vanquishing an opponent and a sense of accomplishment.
Sitting down to watch my 9'10" softball dunk on my camcorder, all I saw was a fleeting shot of the rim before the blue California sky took over. I guess next time I shouldn't rely on filming myself with a miniature Flip video camcorder, propped on a small groove in a folded-out chaise lounge that just happened to be sitting in (you guessed it) my car's trunk.
When I dunk for real, this out-of-focus beginning video will be sold on Ebay...

December 22, 2009--Are high-level athletes really low on self-esteem?

2009-12-22T17:56:00.000-08:00

"I'm focused, man."--Jay Z

It occurred to me as I ran through my drills today (my third straight workout day!) that Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Jim Brown, Muhammad Ali, Jerry Rice, Kobe, Lance Armstrong, and the rest of the legends of athletic history must have low self-esteem.
This occurred to me as I ran along the curves of the beach and found myself stride for stride with a middle-aged man with an orange biker's hat pulled down low over his eyes. I had been running for less than a minute when we crossed paths, with him having run for an indeterminable time. In a show of bravado, I ran to his left, as per the runner's code that allows passing on the left and put him in my rearview mirror. Feigning a look at the beautiful apartments straddling the beach, I noticed with great satisafaction for the first five minutes or so that only his shadow was even with me.
After these five minutes, however, he returned the favor and passed me quietly to my left. After another ten minutes, his orange hat had become dulled in the twilight sun, and his figure, though not the "ant" seen from high above in an airplane, wasn't highly visible either.
It is a universally-accepted tenet of athletic greatness that he or she must have a certain cockiness, arrogance, or, in 2009 parlance--"swag." MJ was known for demeaning teammates, owners, and opponents. If you don't believe me, read any book about him, or just watch his 2009 Basketball Hall of Fame acceptance speech. Ali almost made tough-guy Joe Frazier cry, and there is still an uneasiness between the two that lasts to this day, based on the fact that Ali called Joe Frazier a "gorilla" and an "Uncle Tom," among other things. Kobe is still hated by some as much as he is beloved, for his purported aloof nature and negative comments about teammates--see Bynum, Andrew.
It occurred to my amateur psychologist-mind that the great athletes must have low self-esteem, as they always see someone as better than them. Michael Jordan was known for increasing the intensity of his off-season conditioning program even while in the midst of three consecutive NBA titles; Kobe went right back to the gym this summer after winning his fourth NBA title, reinvigorating his game with the help of post play tutelage by the great Hakeem Olajuwon, worried about the Young Turks like CPIII, 'Melo, Le'Bron, etc., coming to take his throne.
So is it endemic among athletic stars, this feeling of inferiority? Even those on the top of their athletic universe feel that there might be, nay, there is, somebody who will overtake (or has overtaken) his spot at the zenith of sport.
Mr. Sigmund Freud, meet Michael Jeffrey Jordan...

I am 12 or 13 years old, fresh off an all-tournament selection at the Zephyr Trail Basketball Camp, an acclaimed camp in the area. I am smack in the middle of the euphoria of a championship in the Green Division (the Young Bucks), the all-tourney selection, and a stoked and stroked ego from the glowing comments ("Great attitude," "great feel for the game," "quick off the dribble," "willing and able passer...") provided on the "Player Evaluation" form filled out by my coach from the week.
In the folder provided for each player at the end of the camp, among the advertisements for off-season conditioning, AAU teams, and camp certificates, there lay a pale green sheet that looked like it'd been copied out of a 1930s-era college media guide. On the sheet were sobering statistics:
-Each year in the NBA, approximately 60 players are drafted. Factor in the number of graduates from Division I college basketball, and the chance of you making the NBA is minute.
Whoa. I'm stunned. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss, and the subjectivity of dreams and aspirations can progress due to a lack of facts and statistics. It's the first time that the front of my mind has come to terms with the knowledge rusting away in the back of my mind: There are many, many (many), players who are better than me, and they will get to the NBA, and I won't.
Probably.

December 21, 2009

2009-12-21T22:18:00.000-08:00

Today was another good workout day. I clenched my butt as the physical therapist told me for my core strengthening, I stretched my calves and hamstrings, and groin to loosen up my tight lower back, and watched my posture as I kept my upper body parallel to my thighs.
I've now got a video camera, so I will be visually capturing my quest starting tomorrow.
As I ran basketball practice tonight, I felt it necessary to run the last two wind sprints as a way to motivate my players to run their hardest. I didn't win either sprint, but I wasn't last either. I'm gonna say, conservatively, that I finished about fifth in a group of fourteen. In their defense, however, they had run six or seven sprints before I joined.
But, in my defense:
-I was in sweatpants and a Nike jacket, in my best Paulie Guatieri/Guido outfit
-I was wearing street shoes, and the floor was extremely slippery for someone like me with non-basketball shoes
-I hadn't stretched
-my legs were tired from the earlier dunking workout

Ah, who am I kidding?

So, should I be happy that I got fifth, or upset that I didn't get first?

December 20, 2009

2009-12-20T20:45:00.000-08:00

"No excuses that I know." --Alice in Chains, "No Excuses"

"No excuses that I know (yet)." --Jaime Flaco

So, as a three-week vacation from teaching spreads out wide open in front of me, the only question is what excuse will I now invent?
Though it is true that there is some work to be done (countless essays on the Industrial Revolution and imperialism in Africa beckon to me, as well as many hours of second semester planning for my world history class), I am kidding myself if I say that I will busy for all of these three weeks.
It is ironic that the suffocating schedule that I have undertaken this year--history department chairperson, full-time teacher, basketball coach, classes at the university to get my teaching credential, being moderator of two student clubs--is a perceived deterrent to my dunking program in the same way as is my wide-open schedule for these next three weeks.
There is something about an uninhibited schedule that allows me to waste an exorbitant amount of time. Perhaps this is a harbinger of literary fame, as we all know that all the great and tortured writers (redundant?) do more non-writing than writing, hate their writing when it does ooze through their fingers, and always have very low self-esteem.
Just kidding?
So, as today wore on, I watched Kobe put on another clinic, watched my 49ers crumble down the stretch against Philly, and started and dang near finished a thoroughly enthralling book on the Mexican Mafia. All throughout the day, the specter of my workout lay on the projection screen of my mental movie theater.
At 11am, I vowed to do my workout at 1pm (cuz, you know, I have to let my big meal properly digest).
At 1pm, I vowed to do my workout at 4:15 (cuz, you know true fans watch the whole 60 minute NFL game).
At 4:15, I vowed to do my workout at 6:15 (cuz, you know, I have to let my big meal properly digest).
At 6:15, dang, I did my workout. Despite incredulous looks from the two middle-aged women doing aerobics, I did the whole of my jumping regimen in a barely-lit back exercise room at the 24 Hour Fitness.
"No one raindrop thinks that it started the flood."--Anonymous
As a true Cali boy, I hate rain, but I love raindrops.

Friday, November 27

2009-11-27T22:23:00.000-08:00

The day after Thanksgiving, with its belt-loosening turkey (dark meat and white meat), stuffing (bread-crumb infused), mashed potatoes and clear gravy, a random antipasto plate of three different cheeses, crackers, and salami, and pumpkin pie is enough to make a man stick to his couch's butt groove for a few days.
After reacquainting myself with my couch, my remote control, my laptop, and refreshing my e-mail 276 times, I decided to do a late-night workout. I successfully crouched into 25 squats, using only my body weight as resistance, stood on my toes boxer-style for 30 calf raises, rocked into the raised-fetal position for five knee-to-chest jumps, and pogo-sticked for 20 below-the-rim rim touches.
The workout was fairly brisk and quite successful, if only for the fact that I actually followed the stretching regimen outlined for me by my physical therapist. Why do I, why do we, often ignore advice that we know is good for us? Why have I not taken as much time to stretch as I have to flip through the channels aimlessly and heedlessly, or click on thirteen random links on Wikipedia?
The answer is simple and embarrassing--because it's boring. Stretching is boring, and though I know it is beneficial for my back and me, maybe even more beneficial than any of my jumping exercises, I have to force myself to do it because it's "boring." Anything worth doing has to be exciting.
Great advice for a high school teacher to pass on to his students, eh?

November 11, 2009 Workout

2009-11-11T13:10:00.000-08:00

I'm actually writing this prior to my workout, partly to avoid having to grade papers. There's only so much a man can take when it comes to essays explaining the importance of the spice trade in the shaping of the early modern world. (You might be able to determine, correctly, that I teach world history.)
I am hoping that this writing will make the future, as presented on paper (or a blank Internet template, in my 2009 Hemingway impression), a reality.
My workout today was a robust one. In addition to a hearty twenty minute jog, I got in a solid back and shoulder workout. The wide-open, dimly-lit workout room, usually reserved for yoga and stretching and aerobics, was my refuge as I ascended into thirty calf raises, descended into twenty-five slooow squats without resistance, transferred potential energy into kinectic through six standing jumps--bringing my knees to my chest, connected my feet and concentrated on calf flexion as I performed thirty-five jump rope jumps with each leg and thirty-five with both legs, and tiptoejumped to twenty-five "rim touches"--in this case with the "rim" being the face of a solid metal beam.
So, now I'm in the situation where I've RSVP'ed early to the party, and as the date gets closer, I don't wanna go. I've got three "Sopranos" episodes on DVR calling my name, and ten different errands to run, but I have to make the self-perpetuating truth written above come true.
Dang.

The Power of the Dunk (Interlude)

2009-11-08T12:53:00.001-08:00

Whoever first said that a dunk is "only worth two points" was "unduly suspicious or fearful of being replaced by a rival"--this is to say: he was a hater. Anyone who has ever been left in the wake of a powerful dunk, watched from a front-row seat underneath the dunker, or heard the crowd erupt upon a thunderous dunk (or any dunk, for that manner) knows that this truism is not so true.
Now, being that my basketball experience has run the gamut from statkeeper to player to referee to coach to fan, one would think that I am above all of this jealousy, right? Wrong. I, too, am a hater. Believe that.
I am a senior in high school, playing some of the best basketball of my life. I have missed the whole of my junior year after successive bouts of pneumonia and mononucleosis took a serious toll on my basketball conditioning. I am playing myself into shape with daily grudge matches at the local health club after school each day, as well as participating in a Nike spring league.
I have reinvented myself in a way, adding a solid jump shot from 15-20 feet to my formerly one-dimensional game. The formerly skinny, undersized post player with a keen ability to keep alive offensive rebounds and score on putbacks and tip-ins has become a skinny, undersized post player with a keen ability to keep alive offensive rebounds and score on putbacks and tip-ins (and an occasional jump shot).
True to the fraternity/mafia that is hoops, young Turks need to be initiated and make their bones before getting immunity allowing them to play on the main court of the gym. There is a certain sophomore who is doing his darndest to speed up his button ceremony--so much so that I'm pretty sure he's already got the the knife to prick his thumb and the saint's card in his backpack...
My team has the ball with the score is tied at 14, with me scoring five or six of the points with a couple of garbage buckets off loose balls or putbacks, and two or three jumpers from midrange. Guarded by a fellow senior, a star player on the varsity team and the Lex Luthor to my foiled Superman, I relish the opportunity to finally wrest a win from his greedy hands. Though every game played with us on opposing sides seems to end with a fight to the end and a two point margin, my record against him is not something I care to know.
As we pass the ball around, each of us looks for an opportunity to end the game with a three-pointer, which is worth two in the halfcourt game, a game in which a team must win by two points. My opportunity opens up, a reward for my constant movement without the ball. I catch a pass slightly outside the three-point line, my feet poised and pointed towards the front rim, hips low and body folded, ready to explode up for a jump shot in perfect rhythm.
The shot is soft, true, and in. I know it--any player who has had enough reps has a feeling (99% accurate) when a shot will go in after hitting the rim first. The shot hits softly off the front rim, lightly settles, and falls to its destined position inside the net...only to be interrupted in its fall by a thunderous shaking of the rim by the hands of the upstart sophomore. His dunk, more power than grace, leads to the incredibly rare (and appropriate in this case) "offensive interference" call. The basket did not count, the ball was turned over to the opposing team, and (need I even say it?) we went on to lose the game.
After the game, I played my role, sufficiently contemptous of this youngster putting his personal glory in front of the team's. I'm in loud agreement with those who insist that my shot would have gone in and won the game. What I lack in certainty, I make up for in volume, and anyone listening to our postgame conversations will be swayed by the passion with which I make my case for the continued barring of this pledge from the upper echelons of the frat. I make it quite clear that he will always be the nerd, he will always be Jeremy Piven as "Cheeeeeese," he will always be on the outside looking in, and he better gain a better understanding of the team concept that will make him a better player.
That's what I say. That's what I insist.
How do I really feel? What do I really think about the dunk?

"Dang, why can't I do that?"

In the immortal words of Ice T at "The Player Hater's Ball"--"Hate, hate, hate, hate..."

November 4, 2009--Not quite Willis Reed, but....

2009-11-04T20:03:00.000-08:00

I am checking back in with my monthly post. I am back at it today, hoping to ride this momentum to "And One" helicopter-dunk status. As I worked with my basketball players today (I coach high school ball at a small Catholic school), I found myself talking about the basketball of my youth--the competition, the training regimen, the year-round rigor. As I talked about plyometrics with an interested and knowledgable player, I found myself using the dreaded phrases like "When I Used to Play" and "In Those Days.."
As the dreaded 29th birthday comes near, I feel that I will somehow wake up some five or seven or fifty years older tomorrow, simply for having uttered those words so near and dear to those who fought in American wars that were justified and know what life was like when the world (or was it just tv?) was in black and white.

Saturday, October 3

2009-10-03T20:38:00.000-07:00

Ouch, I'm back after an embarrassing absence of a month and a few days. This blog may bear a title rife with subjectivity, but its very format blinds me with its objectivity. As this listing from October 3 is right above the previous post from August 28, it would seem that I have done nothing in my "quest" for some 30 plus days. That is, unfortunately, fairly true. With the exception of three runs and maybe three or four days of jumping exercises, I have not done much in the area of vertical leap improvement. I also have not met with my physical therapist, nor done more than three days of stretching.
I am in constant back pain--not debilitating, but enough to change the way I sit, the way I sleep, and the way I walk.
I am also in a fairly constant reverie about what it would be like to dunk, or what it would like to talk about dunking, about what it would be like to surprise myself (and everybody else!) in some meaningless pickup game by going up for a rebound and dunking a followup on a missed shot.
I've even dreamed about dunking--all of them misty and hazy in my memory, but they seem to have left a fairly light footprint on my mind as functional, simple dunks.
My back alters my life multiple times a day, I am often thinking on rim-rocking glory--shoot, I even dream about dunking--so why haven't I done much to alleviate the pain and bring about the glory?
I ask myself the same thing, and then I mentally castigate for not keeping to my regimen and my physical therapy, and then I ask myself again why I haven't done much to alleviate the pain and bring about the glory, and then I think of how much work I have to do, how many deadlines I have to meet, how many errands I have to run, and how much work I should be doing. This cycle continues so faithfully and drains so thoroughly that action is often slow in coming.
Ergo, a month off, but I'm back now. And this time, I'm back for good....right?

"Never mistake motion for action."--Ernest Hemingway

Friday, August 28

2009-08-29T17:30:00.000-07:00

I felt a little bit more bounce tonight in my workout. My stretching regimen, as tedious and repetitive as it feels to me, seems to have freed, if not my locker-tight hamstrings, then at least my calves a little bit. These are the days that I will look back to when (if?) I'm dunking and say that they were the ones that made it happen.
Nothing spectacular happened today, but I completed the workout. I stretched, I strengthened, I (conquered?). Now the grand total is fourteen days of work, with six days off. I must say that I am looking forward to two days off. Sometimes, in the minutia of the calf raises, the calf stretches, the same exercises, day in and day out, I feel like it's a job.
I think I'll watch some "Office Space" this weekend...

Interlude, Part VII: The Forgotten Part of MJ’s Last Game *

2009-08-29T17:22:00.001-07:00

If you ask any basketball fan who was in or past his formative years in the late 1990s about their lasting memory of Michael Jordan, it will most likely involve MJ crossing over Bryon Russell, pushing off on Russell’s leg, and rising up for an absolutely perfect jump shot—nothing but net as he holds his follow through in the air for an extra moment.
This shot was memorable for so many reasons—it was his last shot as a professional basketball player, it won the championship for his team—really, what better way for an all-time great to retire?
To watch that shot again (trust me, Youtube has been a godsend; I must have watched that shot hundreds of times in the last two years) is to see a maestro execute arguably his finest stroke on the last offensive play of his career, in the most pressure-packed, important moment of a basketball game, to win an NBA title.
There are few people in our lives who seem to be shadows, wisps, ghosts, even while they live. I remember having a conversation with my brother right after my grandfather’s funeral about how both of us had always imagined what his funeral would be like and what people would say in their eulogies. He was that kind of a man—legendary, saintly, larger than life. The morbidity of imagining his funeral while he still lived and breathed was overshadowed by the pure reverence for a person who seemed to be of humanity and some other group and the same time.
Jordan was one of those rare ones, the one that you savored while he still played, the one whose present was not overlooked in place of fastforwarding to his past. Many of us (most of us?) understood the grace, the elegance, the power, the dominance, the intensity, the rarity of this man named Michael James Jordan.
This shot over Russell, as beautiful as it was, would never have mattered if it were not for the savage steal Jordan made on the play before, karate-chopping the ball out of the Popeye-muscled Karl Malone’s hands. Prior to the steal, he had abused Bryon Russell (poor guy; does he have an “Owned by MJ” tag on his body somewhere?) for a quick bucket with about 37 seconds left. I cannot even imagine the nausea that welled up in every Jazz fan as Jordan, Michael Jordan, had the ball in his hands, with the shotclock off and fifteen seconds to go in the game. It was like David with no pebbles left in his slingshot trying to fight off a charging Goliath.
It was, as my more serious gamers know, like that uneasiness that comes in the last minute of any sports video game in which you are beating the computer at its own game. Especially if you are playing the computer at a high skill level, your imminent loss is pretty much like death and taxes. Despite what my brain would see as a seemingly insurmountable lead, a fumble on a light hit from the computer’s team in "Tecmo Bowl" or a missed layup in "Bulls vs. Lakers" always seemed to lead to a game-winning Hail Mary pass or fadeaway three-pointer for the computer, so much so that I learned to expect failure.
Michael Jordan was the Computer. He was the one who was never out of game, dragging his teammates along out of the sheer force of his resolve. In this way, then, we mortals feel for Karl Malone, as we know that he was just a vessel through which Michael Jordan would cement his greatness.
I ask you, dear reader, to return to Youtube: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJmNrGSXpgA).
When you watch Jordan’s poster-perfect jumper fall through the hoop with 5.4 seconds to go in the game and you feel those familiar chills, don’t forget about the approximately eight seconds where he had the ball on the left side of the court, pounding the ball into the ground, waiting for an opening, sending the Jazz fans’ hearts into their throats.
Sometimes the wait is harder than the fall.

Good advice to remember for a pessimistic wanna-be dunker...

*It is your prerogative to count his Wizards comeback as part of his career--I just choose not to, thanks.

August 27, Thursday

2009-08-27T16:36:00.000-07:00

I started today with baby steps towards a legitimate cardio program. I have always loathed running long distances--anything more than the length of a basketball court really--but I know this component is key to maximizing my dunk training program. I chose to run along the beach, as just the sight of the water has worked its rejuvenative powers on me in the past.
Today was an inauspicious debut, as the even the beautiful people, palm trees, blue (ish) waters and stunning views were not enough to give a huge boost to my cardiovascular system. Before I ran, I performed my jumping exercises at a beautiful grassy parkette overlooking the ocean.
Unfortunately, that ugly harbinger of fatigue, the random cramp that seems to emanate from the shoulder, showed up just a few minutes into my run. The 94 degree heat, even at the shore, probably didn't help much either. I am a bit embarrassed to say that I was only able to run for some fifteen minutes before I stopped, or at least slowed to an elderly crawl.
My lungs burned, my stomach felt queasy, my legs ached--you'd have thought I'd just finished a marathon as I tried to control my nausea. Despite the fact that the younger me would have thought this a beautiful shared experience with nature (see my poem below), I am definitely not going to throw up on a public beach. (I haven't thrown up for some twenty-one years, by the way, a Jerry Seinfeld-like record, but that's a story for another blog.)
This younger version of me, the blindingly and blissfully idealistic one, would have found some gray in this dark cloud of only running for fifteen minutes. "It's a start," he would say, and I will agree.
The glass may not be half full, but I feel fine saying that it's a quarter full.

"Pau'i*"--2001

Miles, hundreds of miles
all within one horizon.

Hundreds to the left,
hundreds to the right.

I take it all in,
yet take in none of it.

Gulls fly by in a perfect "V,"
("V" for victory?)

And as the waves turn chillingly white
from their seemingly permanent green...

As the blue sky stretches stupendously
to places unknown...

As the waves crash continuously, making
me feel securely safe...

As I feel the grainy sands of time between my toes...

As time indeed slows to a crawl...

I think to myself that
there is no place in this wide
world
where I'd rather
throw up.

* "Pua'i" is a Hawaiian word for vomiting

Thursday, August 27--Interlude, Part VI: MJ

2009-08-27T13:24:00.000-07:00

I'm reading a great book right now by David Halberstam called Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made. Halberstam is one of those incredibly objective writers who is able to steer the facts to his developed hypotheses, though not in a heavyhanded or bombastic manner. It is truly a book written by a journalist who is skilled enough to make the reader forget that he is a journalist.
It has been eleven years since Jordan retired (feel free to count his Wizards comeback as part of his career--I choose not to, thank you). How then has he gotten better as a player each and every year that he has been retired? How it is that his airtime seems that much longer, his fallaway that much more unstoppable, his pullup jumper that much more deadly, from a 2009 viewpoint? Something about the mass-media age in which we live has elevated our celebrities and athletes to even greater heights with each highlight, each ESPN Classic retrospective, each YouTube search for "Greatest Jordan Dunks" or "Jordan Mix."
As Kobe Bryant led (is this too much credit to say he "led" a very talented team?) his team to this year's NBA Championship, there was a bit of the old man in me who couldn't wait to be asked my opinion on whether this had catapulted Kobe into "GOAT" territory. The more I was asked, the more had to defend my generation and speak my piece on how he was a great player, but not in Jordan's territory, lacking the unselfishness, the number of NBA titles, the pure "Did you see that?" quality of MJ's game.
There is something seemingly innate to humans that causes us to insert ourselves into the era(s) in which we have lived and defend that era to the death, because we are in effect territorial people. How dare a Young Turk come and shake the bars of our era, claim Lil' Wayne as the best rapper, when we know the best has to be someone from "The Golden Era of Music" (our era)--Dr. Dre or De la Soul, Tribe, Tupac. How dare someone say that these current cartoons are the best--umm, have you even seen Batman: The Animated Series?
In the same way that old-timers saw Elvis as profane with his hip-shaking Antichrist routines, so too do I have to remind any disbelievers that rape accusations against Kobe would not be forgiven in my day. (Sure, Jordan has proven to be a philanderer, but let's not let the facts get in the way of the story here.)
Your grandpa will never concede to your father that Ali was better than Marciano or Joe Louis, or to you that Tyson in his prime would have whupped any 1940s boxer.
And you will not, cannot, ever concede that anyone, be it Kobe or maybe even LeBron in a few years, was better than MJ.
Word.

Wednesday, August 26

2009-08-27T12:29:00.001-07:00

My regime is coming along nicely, in terms of improvement with the intensity and frequency of most of the exercises increasing. Tonight's regimen:
-45 jumps with each leg individually, and 45 with both legs, for a total of 135 jump rope repetitions
-40 squats, using my body weight
-40 calf raises
-Six knee to chest jumps; jumps executed from standing start
-25 "rim touches," which have become "pole touches" in the basketball court-less local gym

It is clear that the next step for me is a more involved cardio program. As I did when I was training for high school basketball, I will start with more aerobic exercise and taper it down to sprints and other anaerobic exercise. I usually do 20-30 minutes of cardio at the gym, though it's on the seated workout bicycle, and I don't feel like that is incredibly taxing. I don't necessarily love running just for the sake of running, so I either need to find some workout partners, or just suck it up and take a little run, maybe along the beach...not a bad option.

Tuesday, August 25, Part II

2009-08-26T23:29:00.000-07:00

There is an inherent competition in exercising and training, even if it's for something post-scholastic like my training for a future dunk. This competition starts in oneself, pushes him to do one more rep, then one more, then ten more of a different exercise. It is a natural extension, then, despite the mostly collegial atmosphere in a gym, to this sense of territoriality and selfishness that comes with one's training. How can there not be, when you are pushing not just against yourself--your physical and mental limits, which seem to be entities outside of your own body--but against Time itself?
This sense of competition will manifest itself, in some ways more subtle than others, against any who is perceived as an outsider, . So it was that I felt a certain swarminess and cockiness in the words of the youngster training next to me tonight as I did my exercises. This young man and his training buddy, both with close-cropped, lined hair, long Nike shorts and obscure, generic Nike jerseys, were tortured by a pleasant-looking man who I guessed was in his mid-30s, maybe some 15 or 20 years later than his boot camp victims. The trainer had them doing multiple exercises with a compact medicine ball--squats, lunges, partner abdominal work, and chest passing drills.
As the pair ran and shuffled and threw and pushed themselves into exhaustion, they passed into the corner where I stood doing jump rope drills. As the taller of the two approached me, he stumbled just a bit, seemingly surprised that I stood in the corner, previously unseen to him in his athletic concentration.
As the two received a well-deserved break, I walked past them to the water fountain, lightly breathing after a fairly strenous set of jumps, but nowhere near as exhausted as these two. The one who had almost tripped over me looked me up and down, and smiled, saying, "Ah, sorry, man, you came outta nowhere. Sorry to crowd you."
Kids these days! So cocky. I knew that inherent in his wording and body language was a message, strong though unspoken: "Let me just play the better man here, with the false modesty. Yeah, I'm sorry that my incredibly intense workout almost interfered with your minor little one."
I smiled, said it was no problem, and toweled off my dry forehead unconsciously as a kind of silent response.
I finished my workout, finding myself feeling noticeably springier and more on balance on my "rim touches." My stretching and training regimens seemed to work together as one on this night, as I incorporated the two stretches (plus a "butterfly stretch" for my hip flexors and groin, and two standing calf stretches) and one core strengthening exercise shown to me by my physical therapist.
Also, my calves felt noticeably looser as I jumped, and I felt myself able to hold my calf raises for a split second longer than before, and I felt better able to explode out of my squats on my knee to chest jumps.
As I walked out of the gym, I swear that the young man working out looked down his nose at me as I left.
Is it possible that I imagined all this, that the youngster was being sincere when he smiled and apologized to me? Is it possible that I'm seeing things that aren't there as some sort of defense mechanism to a perceived flaw in my training intensity? Maybe I...
Naw.

Tuesday, August 25

2009-08-25T23:16:00.001-07:00

"The key is to close your butthole," said my physical therapist, and galdarn it, he was right!

Today was my second visit to the physical therapist, and my progress had been barely discernible in the 19 days since my last visit. I have really taken to this therapist--he understands that the frustrated athlete in me wants to push and push in the exercises, go fast, "knock 'em out," as we used to say about the remaining line drills or "suicides" left to run at the end of hoops practice.

Alejandro, my therapist, knows, though, that I must be protected against myself, as speed is not key in my back exercises, but instead precision and execution. He is the Phil Jackson and Tex Winter of physical therapy, a veritable bastion of knowledge, but it still doesn't make it easier for me to slow my roll, even with Angelo Dundee in my corner.

Alejandro gave me three exercises last time, two for increased flexibility, and one for strength. As back sufferers know, back pain is not really back pain at all-it's hamstring tightness, neck pain, shoulder weakness, and on and on. The pain shoots down and up your body like a pinball machine lighting up, gradually highlighting a different part of your body.

The first stretching exercise is one in which I do a sort of lunge with one leg forward and the other back, with the knee of the front leg directly over the foot.

The second exercise is a pretty standard hamstring stretch, in which I lay on my back, extend one leg in front of me, and stick the other leg in the air, straightening it as best as my tight muscles will allow.

The third exercise is a strengthening one, designed to fortify my core muscles that are very weak and add undue stress to my lower and middle back. I lay on my back, with one leg outstretched, and the other pulled tight to my chest. The movements are nuanced and a bit complex. I am to push out with my outer abdominals (my obliques), flatten my lower back to avoid arching, and avoid puffing up my ribs and lower chest area too much. All this is to be done while concentrating on not holding my breath. It is seemingly an oxymoron in that I need to expend energy on concentrating my breathing, so that the breaths are so smooth that I don't have to think about them.

This is still my biggest issue with the strengthening exercise, as I feel that I am having to work harder than I should have to at breathing, while simultaneously tensing every muscle of my core. It seems harder than it should be, but it is getting better...

All of this improvement can be linked to the hallowed words of that Yoda in a physical therapist's guise: "Close your butthole." He said that he was not sure why this worked medically, but it did. Other patients of his were not able to enjoy the full benefits of the core strengthening until they heeded this advice, and I must say, though, I still feel a bit hurried and the exercises still feel unwieldy, the butthole advice has helped me immensely.

Monday, August 24

2009-08-25T00:05:00.000-07:00

Ugly. Tonight's workout was ugly. I would say that getting two hours of sleep two nights before a workout, on a weekend in which you're supposed to be "resting," is not a smart maneuver. I skipped the jump roping, though the blame can be passed on to the personal trainers at my local 24 Hour Fitness for not leaving their cabinets (full of weights and jump ropes) unlocked as usual.
Besides that, the number of reps for each exercise was equal to that of my last workout. My prowess, however, was lacking on many of the exercises. My "rim touches" were more like broad jumps into the pole I use as a rim, more horizontal than vertical towards the end of my 25 jumps.
I am at times an optimist, and at times a pessimist, which makes me a staunch pessimist, right? Don't be so sure, you never know what can happen with a little positive thinking...
The optimist in me is sleeping tonight, though I can say that at least I went through with the workout (more or less) in its entirety, when my legs and my brain said "NO!" just a few hours before. Who knows, maybe this workout, in all of its gory and ugliness, will be the difference in that quarter-inch that allows me to throw down, and oh so beautifully....

Interlude Part V, Short Fiction: "Shadows"

2009-08-24T14:40:00.000-07:00

Memories invaded my thoughts as I shot around the other day at Stevenson Park, right next to the baseball fields where I batted the highest in my league, stole bases with abandon, and made four straight Little League All-Star teams. Across the way were the football fields where I ducked right and left and left defenders in the dust as a seventh-grade tailback.
After about twenty minutes of shooting three-pointers, elbow jumpers, and free throws, two long-haired, scruffy dudes pulled up in a beat-up truck and jumped out, pushing and swearing, laughing the whole time. They wore jean cutoffs and wifebeaters, and let's just say that they did not look like basketball players. As they shot around, they actually looked like decent players. The one with the long sideburns and red doo rag on had a nice little jumper from the outside of the key and in, and the other longhair, complete with a mullet that Billy Ray Cyrus would be proud of, couldn't seem to miss on one short bank shot after another.
The usual basketball player flirting set in, then, and we eyed each other for a few minutes before I made the first move. "Hey, guys," I said, standing up as straight as I could, ball in hand, chest out, "you wanna play some 21?"
Doo Rag looked at Mullet Man, they both nodded, and we shook hands and introduced ourselves as Joey (me), Donnie (Doo Rag), and Jason (Mullet Man). The game was relaxed at first, the defense always played by one man, while the other defender stood in the key waiting for a rebound, in the 21 version of "cherrypicking." As the scores crept into the low-teens, the double-teams started, and the elbows and hips took on a wider arc. Just as I stood at the free-throw line, my score at 17, a shadow stepped onto the court.
The shadow asked if we were done, and then politely waited while we finished the game of 21, which I won with a fallaway bank shot from the left side of the key.
The shadow and Donnie made their first two shots as we picked sides, and so teamed up against Jason and me. As the shadow was my approximate height, I picked him up, leaving the 'Necks to giggle and guard each other.
The shadow came out a little tentative, passing up two open jumpers created when Jason failed to let me know that his buddy was setting a screen on me. As he warmed up, however, his shots began to fall. He was a master at using Donnie's gangly and awkward screens, freeing himself up for midrange jumpers. When we double-teamed him, or faked a double-team, he was agile enough to spin out of it and hit Donnie in stride for an easy layup. The score was 7-0, by ones, before we finally scored. Jason hit an ugly twenty-footer, no small feat on an outdoor hoop, to get us going.
I checked the ball to the shadow, and he threw it back softly underhanded to me as he got into defensive position. I lulled him to sleep with a steady right-hand dribble mixed with a few crossovers. I didn't make much forward momentum as I waved away a screen from Jason with a scowl, readying myself for "The Move," as my jv high school team had called it. As the shadow's left foot stepped forward, I smoothly passed the ball to my left hand by going through my legs, hesitated for a moment, and then came out of my crouch to explode to the left side of the basket. This was a move that had gotten me countless buckets in the past, a go-to move, the one that would have been my "Signature Move" on many an old school video game.
The shadow, though, beat me to my spot with a deft backwards step, his balance seemingly never compromised. He body bumped me, legally, and, surprised to feel contact where usually there was only an open basket ahead, I leaned in to him, causing us both to fall, him backwards, and me flat on my stomach and chest, as I moved my head up and out of harm's way.
As I helped the shadow up, he seemed to be the one helping me up, and I asked if he was okay. "I'm good," he said, smiling, "but you look worse for the wear."
There was something vaguely familiar in his quiet and innocent cockiness, and as the game wore on, the poor 'Necks must have felt that they were playing with Jordan and Kobe, as the game became a battle between the shadow and me. I scored a few through sheer physical strength and blind fury, but most of my drives and pull-up jumpers were met with a hand in my face and a dead end ahead. My usual head fakes and changes of pace did not fool my defender, and as the game wore on, I tired from such sustained offensive possessions, and the shadow and Donnie passed the ball between them like old teammates, with most possessions ending in short jumpers for the shadow or layups for the streaking Donnie. The shadow was one step ahead me on both sides of the ball, and his spinning, twisting layup, just over my outstretched hand, wrapped up a 21-10 victory.
I slapped hands with the shadow, told him and the 'Necks "Good game," and toweled off. The shadow's gaze never left me, and I saw his slightly goofy, slighty cocky smile as he surveyed his fallen prey. It was this look that convinced me that it was time.
"Wanna run it back?' said the shadow, and I replied, "Ah, sorry, guys, gotta go. Wife's demanding more time at home again--it's never enough, huh?"
Not waiting for an answer, not looking back, I walked away, aware that the shadow had just gained his second victory over me.
As I walked to my car, pride and chest hurting, the football fields and baseball fields seemed somehow wispy, farther away, their outlines barely on the horizon, and I blinked hard, hoping to reconcile reality with the truth.

What I Would do If I Could Dunk, Hard

2009-08-23T20:58:00.000-07:00

If I could dunk, and I don't mean dunk like a player in warmups who purposely doesn't touch the rim, or dunk like a player who slips the ball into the rim on a breakaway, I mean dunk like the explosive Vince Carter, or the punishingly powerful Shaq or Dwight Howard, I would celebrate so much they'd have to pull me off the court before I get thrown out of the game for taunting.
I remember the first game of my junior varsity year, in which I was the sixth man for the team. We were playing in our opponent's opening home game, and the air was rife with schoolboy bravado and adrenaline that seemed to be more plentiful than oxygen in the cramped old-school gym.
With the opposing fans shouting out idle epithets, the rap music on the gym's P.A. bumpin with its bass, and both teams trying to outshout each other as they warmed up, I felt like I could touch the top of the backboard each time I jumped for a layup or a rebound. Anyone who played ball as a kid remembers that the dunk had as its training wheels the vaunted "tap." To tap the backboard as you shot a layup was to join the ranks of the apprentice ballers hoping to move up to the dunk in the near future.
The game itself was probably the most exciting one in which I participated as a player, as three of our starters fouled out, I played some 35 minutes, and it went to three overtimes before we finally lost by one point.
In the last period and the three overtimes, there were multiple lead changes, and the momentum stayed suspended between the two teams in this tug-of-war. There was an intensity on each possession, on each free throw, on each shot that cannot be explained but only experienced.
I remember after the game talking to a teammate who played all 47 minutes of the game, and asking him if were tired. After hesitating a minute, scanning his previously numb body, he remarked, "Yeah, but I didn't realize it until now."
This adrenaline provided by the gym, the fans, the floor, the competition is something that all formerly competitive athletes miss like it were a human being. It felt that night like we could have played all night--and who's to say we couldn't have?
I imagine that if one were to take the sum total of that adrenaline-filled 47 minute game, it would be about equal to that felt in the split second after a dunk of Vince Carter's magnitude or Shaq's (in a furious rally that turned around a losing series against the Portland Trailblazers) giddy dunk off a precise pass from Kobe Bryant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phM-QS6o8qc
This is why I think that if I were in Vince Carter's shoes after his dunk on Frederic Weis, I would have done the exact same barking, scowling, screaming, pounding, posing, and punching that he did. I also would have talked about Weis' mama, marched in place like a soldier, wagged my index finger, a la Dikembe Mutumbo, done the "Ickey Shuffle," and maybe even have held a ceremony featuring various luminaries to plant a Jaime Flaco flag (sure, it'd have to be manufactured ahead of time, just in case) on Weis' body, thereby completing the metaphor.
Ah, a man can dream, can't he?

Two (or three, or four, or five) best dunks of all time? Please weigh in with your picks

2009-08-22T12:53:00.000-07:00

Though my mind changes on this on an almost daily basis, I have to say that my two favorite dunks of all-time (ask me again tomorrow and I might throw in Kevin Johnson or Dr. J or 'Nique...) are MJ with a ferocious throw-down on Patrick Ewing-(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmxJvWW5Ksw)
and Vince Carter's ridiculous dunk on poor Frederic Weis (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMrPjl-927Q&feature=PlayList&p=DDBA5EDF63D7D09A&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=15)

I love the "Oh no!" or something similar uttered by the Knicks defenders as Jordan slithers out of the double team in the corner and then absolutely posterizes Ewing.

As for the Vince Carter dunk, I remember seeing it live and being absolutely blown away, thinking that my eyes were deceiving me. I have since tried to intellectualize the dunk by trying to figure what his vertical leap was on that particular slam. Weis is 7'1", or 85 inches tall. Assuming that he was bent down a bit as Carter soared, "Vinsanity" (or at least his crotch) had to have been about 70-80 inches above the ground to clear Weis' head.
Mad, mad hops.
No amount of intellectualizing, however, will ever beat the chills and visceral reaction created as people around the world, me among them, sat and watched a man soar above another grown man, this one some 85 inches high, almost sit on his head, and throw the ball throw the hoop with a frightening and exhilarating amount of explosive force.
Absolutely electric.

Saturday, August 22--Interlude, Part III

2009-08-22T12:31:00.000-07:00

The first time I ever lifted weights, at a summer conditioning camp for incoming freshman athletes, I bench-pressed 50 pounds eight times. That is lifting the bar "loaded" with two and a half pound plates on both sides. To see this pitiful image is to think it even worse than just hearing the total of 50 pounds. I was an incredibly skinny teen, about six feet tall with about 140 or 150 pounds on my fifteen-year-old frame.
There is, I think, no greater athletic optimism than that that comes with one's first attempts at lifting weights. The chart we used to gauge our progress at this camp showed incredible weekly improvements in bench press, incline bench press, and the other exercises. This early progress (my bench press had increased to 115 pounds by the end of the summer, a swell of a ridiculous 130%) will never be accomplished again in one's life.
It it with this knowledge that I know on an intellectual level that I will not just wake up one morning and rise up Vince Carter style (see above post) on some unsuspecting rim and/or defender. But I must say that there is a bit of the innocent, optimistic kid in me who hopes and believes that this training and focus I have undertaken in recent weeks will pay off, much sooner rather than later, with rattled rims and shaking basket supports.

Friday, August 21-Jimmy likes the Strength Shoes?

2009-08-22T11:48:00.000-07:00

Today's workout makes it nine days off and six days off. I've definitely made stretching a priority, because my muscles are incredibly tight, as my yoga instructor and physical therapist will tell you. It seems that I spend as much time stretching as I do exercising, but as boring as the stretching is, I know that it is crucial to me meeting my goal.
Some people have asked me if I'm going to use the Strength Shoes, or something similar. As for now, I have no immediate plans to do so, but I'm thinking I'll probably give in and buy them in a few weeks.
These shoes bring up two disparate images in my mind: the first is the obvious success of some of my friends and teammates who used them regularly throughout high school. Yes, high school was ten years ago, but I would be more than willing to swallow my pride and be That Guy working out with the shoes long after his competitive basketball days are over if the shoes help me to throw down.
The second image is of Mel Torme singing "When You're Smilin" to me as I sit with a goofy smile on a dais next to the "Velvet Fog"...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jimmy.

Thursday, August 20 (Interlude, Part II)

2009-08-20T18:14:00.000-07:00

It's the fall of 2007. I am in reasonably good shape, as I am playing in a men's basketball league, though I can't say I play much more than the requisite once a week. The night before a game, I decide to take advantage of the free personal training session offered at my local gym. As happens to all of us, I've become a bit bored of my stale workout routine, and I go to the session particularly interested in learning a few new abdominal exercises. With the game the next night, I plan on a short bit of conferring with the trainer, maybe a few practice exercises, and I'll be on my way.
This is not the case. What follows is one of the toughest workouts I've ever experienced. The trainer, an amiable Aussie, tells me that I am his first personal training client, and it is apparent to me that he aims to earn a reputation for thoroughly exhausting and emasculating workouts.
Not only he does he show me four or five ab exercises, stopping for a few minutes to have me do complete sets of each, he does it all with a broad smile. This throws me off--should I already be sweating and shaking, or is this just the warmup? As we continue through the session, I sweat through my shirt and feel as if my arms have the strength of a baby's.
As the workout winds down, I get a second wind that is rebuffed by the trainer's suggestion/demand that I do three different types of pushups--with the different arm positions targeting the chest, triceps, and shoulders.
Let me also note that this sadistic Aussie is demonstrating each of the exercises, not content to be merely a bystander. But (and maybe I'm saying this to cushion the blow to my sensitive ego ), I must say that he has done probably a quarter of the reps that I have as I do my pushups. As I near the end of the third set of pushups, my arms are absolutely dead, and I compensate by moving my legs up in an accomodating yoga-esque pose. In other words, I am cheating. I am of the belief that I will not be able to finish these pushups without a bit of cheating.
As I falter, the trainer encourages me, as he is wont to do, with words that approximate, "You can do it, just four more!"
With fewer than ten pushups to go, I feel that the whole of my body, with its particular alchemy, has but six pushups left in its shell. I am of the opinion that it is physically impossible for me to do another six pushups. This thought coincides with one in the trainer's head that impels him to grab my torso with his hands and guide me into each pushup as the ultimate spotter. I will look back later and laugh at how ridiculous we must have looked to anybody unlucky enough to look into the personal training room and see one grown man lifting another grown man into a pushup.
One can never lie to oneself, and this seemingly innocous workout sticks with me to this day because of the knowledge that I was spent, that my body or my mind (or both) had hit the end point. The spoken bravado of later revisionism cannot overcome the deep knowledge that for that time span (some twenty to fifty seconds), my body gave up. I gave up. Complete surrender.
The last image that sticks with me is this: as the trainer encourages me to finish, I tell him what was completely a true statement in my world for that one moment--"I can't! I can't!"

***

It is the fall of 1995, and I am a skinny and athletic starter at power forward for the freshmen basketball team. We end the season at around 20-10, but at this time, we have gotten off to a 3-5 start, and we have just been embarrassed by our local rival in a primetime Friday night game, with them continually scoring layups and putbacks on our lax defense. Our coach does not suffer fools, especially fools who choose not to use their God-given athleticism on playing defense. The popular saying that "Defense wins championships" becomes "Defense makes men" in this particular coach's lexicon.

To drive home his point about the utter necessity of defensive effort, our coach informs us at the beginning of practice that we will not need basketballs, as we will be running for the entirety of practice. This running mostly takes the form of Coach's patented and dreaded "Fivers," in which we run the length of the floor once, return to the initial baseline, and count that as one rep.

Can it be that we did run for the entire practice? Is that humanly possible? Did we run almost continuously for 100 minutes? The faults of memory do not allow for certainty, and perhaps this is what lends itself to exaggeration, this is what soothes old men's muscles and leads to the "fish stories" of lore.

Whether or not we do run for the full 100 minutes, one thing I am sure of is that while I catch my breath after one of the innumerable sprints, my gaze catches a teammate's, and I see from him and in him a capitulation, a surrender, that I will not allow myself to experience. His wretched condition is, to me, an absolute anathema. In the same way that a person unconsciously moves away from a sneezing person, so too do I lengthen the space between myself and the contagion. As the team runs yet another sprint, this poor boy throws up and wheezes in an outside garbage can, complaining of a heretofore undiagnosed asthma condition, and I speed up, if just for an instant.

Thursday, August 20

2009-08-20T16:17:00.000-07:00

The tally is growing and growing, as is the adrenaline. Today marks eight days of solid workouts versus six off days. I definitely notice an increase, however slight in my hops. I played a solid game of five-on-five today (I shot the lights out like Jim Les or Dell Curry or Nick Van Exel, but I couldn't get my shot off in traffic). There is definitely a skill to getting a shot off in traffic, and "creating space" is one intangible that has never been a strenth of my game. I am trying to gauge my vertical leap by my rebounding prowess, and I would give myself a "C" for today, with a couple big boards, but not enough to satisfy me.
After a pretty exhausting two games, during which I felt pretty fatigued, I wanted to rest, but I decided to push myself through an immediate workout.
I was pleased with the workout, using the same number of exercises as last night. One follower of this blog made a very good point in asking me if I think I should be doing less reps with more weight for strength. That is on my mind as I almost close out my second week, so maybe I'll change things up again next week.
I am not by any means an expert on athletic conditioning, but I am currently of the belief that my stated goal (dunkin, babeeeee) lends itself better to a series of exercises that will increase anaerobic readiness as well as strength--hence, lower weight, more reps? Any thoughts?

Wednesday, August 19

2009-08-19T23:56:00.000-07:00

In the words of O'Shea Jackson, today was a good day. It was also my toughest day because of some unfortunate circumstances last night. Two Dodgers dogs, two malts, and a lot of drinking after the baseball game served to ennervate me on the crucial day in which I could put the balance in my favor--seven workout days to six off days.
The local Irish pub apparently serves rum and sambuca, my two favorite drinks, and, if you ask me, two very un-Irish spirits. These liqueurs, served to me in great quantities thanks to a generous friend and a talented bartender, made exercising the last thing on my mind when I woke up this morning. The greasy chorizo and eggs I had for a late breakfast didn't help the cause much either.
I finally hit the gym about ten tonight, and my chosen motivation was a higher number of three of the exercises. I did thirty-five squats, forty calf raises, and thirty-five of all three types of jump roping. As it was my normal "legs" day in my weightlifting routine, I also added some lunges, using the length of the dark workout room and twenty pounds of resistance. I can promise you I will be very sore tomorrow, if from nothing more than these lunges.
There is something about progress, be it small or large, that motivates one when he feels he cannot do something. Sometimes this progress is imagined or its truth stretched, but for one crucial night at least, it worked for me.

Wednesday, August 19: Interlude

2009-08-19T14:33:00.000-07:00

It's 1993ish. I'm with my brothers at the local park, complete with three full basketball courts. As we're shooting around, playing a HORSE or 21 game here and there, another baller joins the fray. He sets up shop on the court next to us. This guy is fresh from the mall--trust me, you know the type. He needs to be added to this list, which is dead on:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgZ-KQKrzZ0&feature=PlayList&p=173B019A02876429&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=37
He's rockin the fresh Jordan jersey, the new Air Jordan shoes, the low socks, the long Nike basketball shorts. He definitely looks the part of a baller, but his game looks like it leaves a lot to be desired. He's doing fallaways, determined drives, and shooting pullups like nobody's business. Somewhere, I guess, a college recruiter is watching.
He even has the tongue going. The tongue wags, just like UNC's native son. His game, at least when he's playing on a deserted court in front of no one and against no one, is quite Jordanesque. Though he is far enough away that I can't hear what, if anything, he is saying, I'm pretty sure it would have been, a la Dave Chappelle, something like "Jordan!" or "Kobe!" like we all said when we were 12 or 13.
But this guy is at least in his mid-30s.
For myself and my brothers, there is no greater indignity than being That Guy, trying to hold on to lost talents, holding on to a world spinning in its way to throw you off. Full of youthful ignorance and the transparent bravado of life's uninitiated, we trade jokes about him, incredibly confident that we will never be like him.

Today, as I went through the rim touches, the jump rope, the running, I had the horrifying thought: "Am I that guy?"

Tuesday, August 18

2009-08-19T12:09:00.000-07:00

Today was a good workout. We're even, baby. Six days on, six days off. I played a little pickup ball today, and I felt a little bit more spring on rebounds, but maybe it was just the placebo effect. I gotta satisfy my curiosity soon--I'm still not sure how close I can come to dunking. or what my exact vertical is at this point.
If this dunk happens, I have to figure that it'll have to be on an alley oop or a throw off the backboard, as I cannot palm the ball. But, hey, that's a bridge I would be very happy to cross.

Monday, August 17

2009-08-18T00:03:00.000-07:00

Indeed, the gap is closing. Now I have done five workouts with six off days. It is pretty amazing how quickly I can lose some of the gains made in a week of training. As I do my calf raises, my legs feel the combined effects of a week off of leg exercises and a strenuous stretch at yoga yesterday. As I do my "rim touches" against a beam at my local 24 Hour Fitness (nice product placement, eh?), I feel dizzy and can't seem to jump straight up. Small victories, though, rule the day. I finish the workout, do all my exercises, and am hyped to even up the tally at 6 and 6 tomorrow.....
The key is to avoid the mentality that has weighed me down at times, which says that if my level of success goes down, I often become very hesitant to continue with the sport or workout until my level is visually appealing to the masses. You know, the masses that watch 3-on-3 halfcourt games at the local schoolyard.
As one can safely assume, it is hard to improve on anything when you do not practice it. Exhibit A: My disbelief over my staggeringly-worsening golf game, which may be in some way connected to only playing about five rounds in the last five years.

Sunday and Monday of Week Three, August 16 and 17

2009-08-17T18:48:00.000-07:00

This week has started on a Sunday, as I have put my masculinity on the line, attending the first of (I hope) many yoga sessions. I threw down twenty hard-earned dollars for a two week, all-you-can-yoga pass.
Walking in to the studio in a somewhat yuppie part of town, I am either the youngest or second youngest of the participants, and one of four males and about ten women. The instructor is a gentle and welcoming woman, with an incredibly calming voice. Ok, I can do this.
I have always had an interest in the rejuvenative effects of yoga, and though I have read a lot on its history and practice, I have never attended more than three or four classes in my life, all of them heavy on fifty-something Desperate Housewives.
I have entered this yoga class to help me deal with daily stressors, and to gain lost (or maybe, never-there) flexibility. The snickers from a few friends who ridicule my choice of exercise as feminine will easily be overshadowed by that flick of the wrist over the rim and into the hoop. But, yeah, it’s a little embarrassing, especially when I come in two minutes late and knock three yoga mats off the shelf, sending echoes throughout the dead silent, relaxed room. And I am the only wearing socks. Yup, no bare feet for me.
As a formerly (presently?) competitive athlete, this “Introductory” class is quite humbling. The poses are alternately challenging, painful, uncomfortable, and inhuman.
I sweat, twist, and, at times, fail. Tough to say, but there are a few poses that are too much for me, and I have to stop.
Towards the end of the workout—yes, this wording is indeed apt—we are challenged by our instructor to see if we could perform the pose called “The Crow.” This pose involves one on his hands and knees, leaning forward onto his hands, which are spread on the ground in front of him, and lifting his body weight off the floor, with only the hands touching the ground. Many people, all of them women, are unsuccessful. Three of the men have varying degrees of success.
I am not one of these three men.
One woman, noting the troubles most of the class had with the pose, remarks out loud, “Man, that’s hard. This one’s for the guys, though. We just don’t have the same upper body strength to lift ourselves."
Yeaaah. See, what had happened was…

I must lay a few things out right now. I have yet another excuse already laid out: I have a friend in town. A friend who is a brother to me. So I must focus on his visit, right? Ok, ok, I can still make time for the workouts. But I’m just letting you know ahead of time, so you’re not disappointed in me.
Also, I haven’t yet dared to test my vertical leap, or see how close I can come to dunking. This is the purpose of the quest, right, so what is holding me back? Like the purported horrible movie from this summer: Knowing. Knowing I am quite far from dunking. Knowing I don’t seem to be able to even dunk a tennis ball. Knowing that I can’t do what I saw a 5’10 player on my basketball team do a few weeks ago.
What we don’t know can’t hurt us, right, and I wonder why I should be surprised that I haven’t peeked behind the curtain yet, and tested myself. Much of my current life is governed by this maxim. I don’t want to look at my online checking account, though I am well aware that it is much smaller than it should be, due to reckless spending.
I don’t want to check the text message beeping on my phone, knowing that she can’t (won’t?) go out this weekend with me.
I don’t want to look at the pile of paperwork on my teacher’s desk, because I want to pretend, even for a minute, that my workload isn’t that intense.
As Monday dawns, I am happy to get back in the weight room, to have a cause, to...okay, it’s 6:15 pm, and I haven’t done anything. But I will.

Charity Timeout

2009-08-17T18:16:00.000-07:00

Time to give a shot out to a great charity. Check them out: www.nothingbutnets.net.

You should start donating.

I'mma try to get them to sign on to my "quest," maybe have followers be able to donate a certain amount of money for each inch I gain on my vertical leap.....more to come.

Week Three: August 10-14

2009-08-17T17:54:00.001-07:00

Ok, your brother’s engagement party, while a beautiful event, is not conducive to one trying to stay in/get in shape in order to dunk. The food, the drink(s), the general state of pleasurable malaise that comes with this weekend has made me loath to get off my couch or even leave the house.
The excuses, yes, the excuses. They are many. I am in a city where I have no gym membership. I am in financial straits such that it would be a waste of money to spend some $15 for a day pass. I am entitled to a week off, especially after a week (actually, four days, but who’s counting) of exhausting workouts after a long period of inactivity. I just had two weeks of irregular sleep—one because my trip overseas threw off my biological rhythms, and the second after having to all of a sudden conform to a teacher’s early schedule again for a one week island of substitute teaching.
Pessimist that I am, I have calculated that this workout schedule designed to help me dunk has seen more off days than workout days—six to four. This statistic, this objective fact, inarguable, overwhelms me with guilt, and I promise myself to get right back on the workout horse come Monday.
At least until I think of another excuse.

2009-08-17T17:53:00.002-07:00

Week One, Part II
No, that’s not all I wanted to tell you. I wanted to tell you that I feel old and stiff, but imbued with this sense of purpose, I feel strangely young again. I feel like I’m back in my high school days, where the world (conspiring against me as it does all of us) had not yet brought its crushing denial. I have pieced together—at least 75% of it—my old routine, formerly posted above my teenage bed, designed to maximize vertical leap. There is something like déjà vu in this retreading of the exercises—the squats, rim touches, calf raises—that gives me an occasional jolt that tells me this feat can be accomplished.
But there’s the work. You know, we’re all so busy with our jobs, our responsibilities, living our lives, that there’s no time for anything else. Yes, I truly am really, really busy—I teach, work very hard in planning lessons and grading papers. There are a lot of these papers, as I am an English teacher. I tutor, four to six hours a week. I coach basketball. I craft and crack jokes. I write—or at least pretend I do. I cook, sometimes. I watch television. I do a lot, trust me.
Sure, I don’t have children of my own, a wife, or a serious girlfriend. I know that these things equal time, and I think of my friend who has run some forty marathons, including all twenty-six Los Angeles Marathons, and I know that he has a wife and daughter, so, hey, it can be done. He’s run 1048 miles—shoot, what have I done?
I try to remember: what was it like, really, to have no job, no real responsibilities, to be able to play hoops from 11 am to 8pm, to go home tired and exhilarated, then wake up and do it again the next day?
Here is my routine that I have proudly followed for the first four days of this week:
--Five standing jumps, with a strong base, in which I jump as high as I can while bringing my knees to my chest
--Twenty squats, using a ten pound medicine ball for a bit of resistance, and being sure to hold the squat for at least two seconds
--Twenty five “rim touches,” in which I jump continuously as high as I can, touching as high on the rim (or net, depending on the day) as possible
--Seventy five jumps with the jump rope—twenty-five with the left foot only, right foot only, and with both feet.
--Thirty-five calf raises

The routine of yesteryear, which I performed as religiously as an old woman reciting the rosary, also included sprints of varying length, but I will leave these thirty, fifty, and seventy yard runs for later. Gotta catch my breath first.
I must say, too, that a bit of my reluctance to perform the deeply important sprints is a bit of elder hubris. Twentysomethings who haven’t played a competitive game in years shouldn’t be running sprints on public fields, feigning seriousness about a sport in which they will never be rated by a high school or college coach or professional scout. Not that I’m worried about outer appearances and external approval, but it just looks ridiculous. Right? Don't you think?

Week One, Part I, August 3-7, 2009

2009-08-17T17:53:00.001-07:00

I finally started. That’s all I want to tell you. My original start date was June 29, and it’s about five weeks later, but hey, such is life. I started—that’s all I want to tell you.

Chapter One and Day One (At least Original Start Date)

2009-08-17T17:43:00.000-07:00

It is 1997 or ’98. The Time has come. We have just gotten done with basketball practice, and those of us without a driver’s license decide to hang out in the gym while waiting for our rides. The practice we have just completed hasn’t been very taxing, a fairly brisk one-hour workout designed to give us a bit of a respite after a buzzer-beating loss the night before. I am stretched, fresh, and full of youthful zeal. Conditions are perfect. So I try It.
I pick a time when the others are clustered on the main court, and I use the small basketball left there by a teammate’s little brother. I take my prescribed four step drop, leap, and throw the ball in. Almost.
Waiting another minute—you know, to rest up for the impending thunderous dunk—I get a little closer, but I don’t quite execute the wrist cock that will signify the real thing. It is more a throw-in than a slam; more a line-drive than a dunk. That night, I will invent a dead spot in the floor, a loose basketball from the adjoining court, and a mistimed leap brought on by overcompensating for a knee to the thigh the night before to explain why I couldn’t dunk. But, man, I was this close!
It is with this memory in my head, as well as the fuzzy memories of numerous other “near misses” in the ensuing years, that I enter my twenty-ninth summer convinced to finally dunk a basketball. To dunk a basketball is to show the world what I once was and what I can still do. To dunk a basketball is to convince all those haters (let’s be honest, no one really loses too much sleep evaluating a man for whom it’s been ten years since competitive sports were even an issue) that I can in fact do it. And, perhaps, more importantly, I will be able to prove it to myself, the biggest hater, that in the haze that we call memory, I used to be pretty darn good…
***
Monday, June 29, 2009
Day 1
In the ten or so years since I last played competitive basketball, I have grown perhaps an inch at most, and I have gained some thirty or thirty-five pounds. I have gone from a fairly-shy, skinny, gawky acne-tinged greaseball to a gregarious, skinny-looking, sometimes gawky, acne-tinged high school teacher with a Matt Lauer-style haircut. Ten years haven’t done much for the confidence, though, so that a desire for exterior approval often trumps everything else. Let’s just say that not being named one of the two “Heartthrob Teachers” in last year’s high school yearbook stung a bit more than it should have.
In the meantime, I have earned a high school diploma, a Bachelor’s Degree in Spanish Studies, a Master’s in Education, along with my California teaching credential. I have dated on and off, with too few of these relationships even tiptoeing into “Kinda Serious Relationship” territory. And, I’ve played a lot of basketball, shot a lot of jumpers, attempted a lot of bank shots, but never have I climbed the mountain that Lisa Leslie and Candace Parker, the first two women to do it, have climbed—I have never dunked a basketball, never reached that particular mountaintop.
Much like a person going for that last hurrah before starting to diet on the somewhat arbitrary date of January 1, I chose a date a week after my school year ended. The previous weekend had been a dizzying medley of rum, coke, and rum and coke. The drunkenness led to the usual bravado masked as drunken ramblings, or maybe vice versa, and too many people were let in on the secret plan to dunk by the end of the summer. Many questions, some unanswerable, came up in the midst of the haze, some ones that might not have been brought up in the cowardice that is sobriety. Among the questions:
-What constitutes “summer?” If I dunk on September 8, let’s say, when I’ve gone back to school, does that count? Do the calendar and the workday have to synchronize?
-How many people have to be present for the dunk to be official?
-What constitutes a “dunk?”
-Do conditions vary? Will there be an asterisk next to my dunk if the dunk is executed on an especially springy floor?
-And maybe most importantly, will anybody care about this dunk?
And then there’s the back. Much like the obese woman who is said to have a “pretty face” that will finally be presented to the world once the weight is lost, there was always the assumption on my part that once my back healed, my natural athletic ability would be able to truly shine.
Despite the fact that I weighed about 155 pounds soaking wet as a 6’2” high schooler, I have had chronic back problems since then. Due to a combination of horrible posture and a ridiculous lack of flexibility, my back has been in a weakened state for as long as I can remember. I have not, however, done much to remedy the situation, always too “busy” to really start an authentic rehabilitation program. With the exception of some irregular visits to the doctor for followup on my back pain and three or four visits to a psychical therapist, I have not made a concerted effort to deal with an issue that has plagued me on a daily basis.
I’ve never been a fan of the cliché that says that “time flies.” No, it doesn’t. Time is time. One minute is one minute, sixty seconds, right? I am amazed, however, as to where the years have gone. It seems like yesterday (well, not yesterday, but maybe a few days ago) that I was psyching myself up for every practice and game, sometimes praying that I would get the strength to finish the game. As a sophomore, I’d had a particularly ugly case of pneumonia from which I was still regarding months later (I still can pop my ears on command due to that bout of sickness), and a protracted bout of mononucleosis my junior year further depleted my strength, so that I often felt that I wouldn’t be able to finish a practice without a little divine intervention. The dramatic musings of a drama king, possibly, but in my defense, I will say that no one besides me knew of this daily struggle as it was happening.
I guess they do now.
But the part that gets me? The part that haunts me? It’s this, the ugly truth, that I hope to flesh out through the course of this book.
The truth: maybe, back problem or no back problem, I was never that coordinated, never that athletic.
Maybe, just maybe, I was never that good.

Prologue

2009-08-17T17:40:00.000-07:00

Prologue
“The older I get, the better I was” is a credo that seems to be as innate to manhood as locker room boasting, messy bedrooms, and a disinclination to resist a challenge. It is because of this that the JV high school game basketball in which you scored eight points and had five rebounds becomes the night that you dominated that player who ended up playing ball for some big college and you heard got a tryout with the NBA, even though he went to San Jacinto Junior College for a year before dropping out and they haven’t really had regular “tryouts” for the NBA since the days of really short shorts and two handed push shots.
That game takes on legendary status as you recount the fiery speech Coach Jones gave to you as he told you the game hinged on you taking the challenge of shutting down the opposing team’s best player, the San Jacinto Junior College guy, though in reality, your defensive stopper was in foul trouble, and you were really only guarding the guy one-on-one for like eight minutes.
A varsity basketball average of 8.9 points per game becomes “about twelve or thirteen a game.” Your forty time was “like 4.6 or 4.7,” even though that sub-5.0 you ran was aided by a novice timekeeper whose painted nails, naiveté, and schoolgirl crush ended the run at about 35 yards. Your vertical leap is not necessarily worth mentioning, but you attribute that to it being measured the day after you tweaked your hamstring playing pickup ball with the neighbor kids who couldn’t guard you so they had to play dirty and try to hurt you by undercutting you.
The only thing that hinders you nowadays from replicating that 4.6 time or doing ninety straight pushups, like you used to do, of course, is, well, time. That and the lack of flexibility, of course. But that comes from having to be at a desk job, you know. Gotta pay the bills. It’s a tough life for a former star athlete. One who used to break people down off the dribble, one about whom people would say, “Man, for a white boy, you can play!” One who was so quick that you couldn’t be guarded one-on-one.
And, there was that one time, when you came this close to dunking…