Intramurals as the Beginning of the Downhill Spiral...

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

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!

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

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...

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"

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

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

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

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

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

Interlude-"The Move"

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

"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

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..."

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

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."