Basketball for Beginners

The basketball team, in all schools, is divided into the playing five, the extras, and the wannabes. Contrary to popular belief, the most important component for the success of any such team is not the playing five, but the wannabes.

This is a story about determination…

Not how the team won the city tournament, which we did, or how this geeky kid made into the team, and we carried him off the court, in triumph, that would never happen. The only guys who ever get carried off the basket ball court, are the ones who get injured, and that too, by medical staff.

This is not a story about basket ball; it’s a story about the only thing that counts in school.

He was worried… but no one knew that. This fact bothered him even more. He was absent from school, and no one asked him the next day, ‘why,’ not even the teacher.

This made him question his own value, and he realised, he was pretty much a loser.

“Then again, may be I am not,” he said, “I am captain of the gymnastics team…” that chain of thought trailed off into space, and was replaced by the realisation, that captain of the gymnastics team, was just that.

I’ll tell you how, there are no wannabes. No one, cannot make it to the team, no one needs to improve… and try again next year… The gym team’s slogan, as far as selections go, is something along the lines of ‘beggars can’t be choosers,’ only more desperate. And he was captain of that lot.

He decided, he needed to do something to emerge from the shadows, and he had just two years in college.

The immense effort (ego bruise) it took to accept his social status, or lack there of, took its toll on him, and he missed two more days of school, and the teacher marked him present… it was that bad.

While he had faced the inevitable truth, he had no clue how to make his next confrontation with the inevitable truth, slightly more favourable.

They say, 'God helps those who help themselves.' They also say, 'success is 99 percent perspiration and one percent inspiration. 'They say, honesty is the best policy, and that hope springs eternal, the point being, they say a lot of things… very few are actually useful, like the one about luck, that I can’t remember right now.

Basically, while he was languishing in abject dejection, over the fact that no one noticed, his abject dejection, and that this was causing even more severe languishing, indifference to which brought even more severity in his dejection… basically, call it the vicious cycle, of dejection, while it was operating, on our poor friend… lady luck intervened, for the first time, in his favour.

He would have been grateful for her notice… until he discovered that his good fortune was the result of lady luck throwing out her trash… and not noticing him.

It was the day after he had taken two days off from school; he learnt that his class teacher wanted to see every one’s history note books. He did not have one. He needed to avoid her.

He could just have skipped her period, she would not know. He would have… but just to be extra safe, he wanted a good excuse.

That’s when Lady Luck, emptied her dustbin…

He overheard the basket ball coach talking about practice… selections et all, his ears only caught two words… “Till the break.” I know that’s three… but he caught only two, and the rest was drowned by the sound of lady luck’s trash.

Assuming that practice would take place till before the break… he decided to go to the courts… he did not have any hopes of getting on the team… but hoped he could postpone being sent back to class, long enough to avoid the class teacher.

The biggest impediment to getting on the team wasn’t his lack of talent, severe as it was, but, the fact that he was an outsider. See most teams in school, have a strict code of ascendancy… you need to have been actively involved in the sport around school before you can actually make a credible bid for membership… irrespective of your talent… unless of course you are a national level player…

He was not… most boys are not… actually they can be just 15 such players in one state… and the chances of them all being from one school, that too ours is extremely remote… specially when you have a dedicated sports college in the same city… so most selections to the team were based on prior involvement in the sport and to a lesser extent, greater ability than others trying out.

Well prior involvement is difficult to define… but it is generally held to contain one or all of the following in different measures…

Kissing the coaches’ ass

Loud mouthing about your ability, actually let me put it like this… loud mouthing to the power infinity about your ability.

Sucking up to the prospective captains of the team, or basically treating them to food at the school canteen.

And appearing for inter house matches, and doing one of the following, play well, and then claim it was a bad game, and you could have done better. Or, play badly, and limp of the field, holding your knee, saying you should not have come at all. A better approach, could be telling your house captain, that you are ill, when you come out to play.

If you master these skills… you are almost guaranteed a spot on a team…

When he got to the court, every one was already there. They were shooting, because, that’s what their activity has to be called, though the extreme dynamism of a team practicing is implied, it did not exist.

This is what they were actually doing. The seniors of the team were shooting. The hopefuls were standing around, occasionally rebounding. The captain to be was shouting, loudly, I don’t really think it matters what he was shouting, after all, no one on the court seemed to be reacting.

A tall lanky boy, asked for the ball, then jumped and caught it, as it was passed to the captain.

The captain expressed his disapproval. The tall lanky boy said the magic words, “I am going to dunk.”

Those words purchase immediate amnesty for anyone, as long as his height makes the claim believable. Some one attempting a dunk has to be allowed to carry on, no matter what.

The captain told every one to clear. The tall lanky kid, went to the top of the D, took three seconds to measure the height of the basket, estimate, where he needed to jump from, and set of.

His long legs, swallowed up the three steps to the foul line, and then he stopped his dribble, took a huge step, lifted the ball to his chest, and in the next he crouched, really low, and summoning all his strength in one gigantic lunge, he launched himself upwards, at the ring, with the ball rising above his shoulder, first with both hands, and then only the palm of his right. His legs pedalled the air, and his arm stretched itself beyond, he sailed through the air, towards the basket, then under it, and down, into the dirt on the margins of the court. He landed, still running, but managed to stop before running into the post.

“Pass the ball,” said the captain. No one really thought he’d manage, but he was going to dunk.

A comparatively much shorter senior on the team, found the whole thing rather exasperating. Especially since, he had not managed to take a single shot the whole morning… and he had been practicing like mad, getting his jump shot percentage up to where it was good enough.

He walked off the court. Only temporarily.

He noticed, our friend, watching the whole thing. These two knew each other, having been classmates, for a few years, and in one year, they had even sat together for a month, courtesy their teacher’s ideas of discipline.

So the basketballer actually knew his name. (Which unfortunately, is more than can be said for me.) I’ll let him introduce our friend to you. By the way, the basketballer’s name is Devesh.

“Hi, Kevin, what are you doing here?” Kevin so that’s his name huh? I always thought it was something more like Martin, “What are you doing here?”

“I need to bunk class, so I’m going to try out for the team,” the logic of the answer was enough for Devesh.

“Sure, cool, wait for Sahil, he’s supposed to be the coach, we’ll see what we can do. I think you’ll manage to miss at least the first 4 periods,” Kevin was satisfied. “By the way, can you play?”

“Dude, not really, I mean I played once or twice, but I don’t know the rules or anything.”

“That’s okay, no one else here does. Lets see, if you’ve got skills biatch!” you’ll have to excuse these bursts or entirely out of place ‘nigger speak’ or whatever it is we must call this. Devesh was cool, you see.

So Devesh picked up his ball from the side of the court, where it had been put. They walked to the free hoop, and started shooting. Devesh wanted to see if Kevin could rebound, and check the height of his jump. So he shot, made Kevin rebound, and very scientifically told him how to improve.

In a while the coach arrived. I am using the term very loosely here. He was a coach only in as much as he was witness to their practices, and the person who the principal called the coach of the basketball team. During his debut as coach, he’d actually asked Devesh and other members of the team, to sit on the bench, and explain what was happening on court.

I can almost picture someone telling him, “Sir, that’s called dribbling, and no you can move while you dribble the ball.” They’d have had quite a time explaining, why when it’s okay to move with the ball when you dribble, you can only take 2.5 steps more once you stopped the dribble. “And what about handball?” I’m pretty sure he asked!

The man when he came to court, in his very appearance justified his reputation. He was wearing a satiny shirt, turquoise, and shiny, shiny enough to make looking at him painful.

Around his neck was a black lace that went into the shirt pocket, I guess with a whistle at its end. His paunch was possibly the only thing worse than the colour of his shirt, of course then you looked at his legs. The trousers were striped blue with purple, and shoes were shiny patent leather fakes, you could tell from a mile off. He was running his hand across his mehndi red, almost bald head and looking at the court, wondering if there was anything he could do or say.

He looked around, happy that people were doing what they were supposed to. Even Kevin had become pretty adept at catching the ball, which is pretty much all that rebounding entails, and passing it to Devesh. And he did get good height on his jump, which immediately made him a candidate to become a good player.

Suddenly the captain decided it was time. And he said, “Start the game.” Immediately all ears pricked up. Depending on which number they were selected at they would know how much of a nobody they were, this was the moment of truth. And this is possibly when Lady Luck was on the back swing of her trash dump.

Three seniors of the team decided they didn’t want to play. Apparently nagging injuries can hit a sport that is practiced for only two weeks every year. They sat down. And the dustbin emptied, in the millisecond in which Kevin was being splattered with Lady Luck’s trash, which was particularly disgusting this week, because it was the one after her period, the captain allotted him to a team.

Devesh has asked me to mention, that he was the first player assigned against the captain, making him an acknowledged rival in skill. Kevin was on his team. He explained to Kevin what he needed him to do, in fact almost the entire team to do. Rebound of his shot, and then try to shoot, if they wanted to be adventurous, but ideally return the ball to him. One of them, the tall guy, who had been going to dunk was instructed, “You stand near the basket, I’ll pass you the ball, if my drive is blocked, it should be an easy shot for you.” He seemed to agree.

At the other end of the court, the captain hadn’t bothered with any such instructions. He merely pointed out to people where they were supposed to stand on defence. Offence, it was assumed was not something anyone else needed to participate in, necessarily.

And practice was underway. The coach did take his whistle out of his pocket and held it in his hand. But he couldn’t really blow, or call a foul. The players were much quicker, and better versed in the game. There was the occasional descent because of the two separate traditions of exposure to the game, one came form ESPN and the NBA the other, from playing on courts in the city, with people who’d been to the camps for state and the national team. Of course these were resolved without recourse to the coach. When trying to settle a dispute over the first step being taken after receiving a pass, and whether or not that constitutes a shifting, or travelling violation, if the coach asked, “first tell me the rule, why exactly can he not run after the collects the ball. 2.5 steps is allowed na?” I think would spoil the entire of the exercise of consulting him. And he seemed to appreciate the situation; he never tried to make a call either.

During the game, which did in fact play out in the manner it was supposed to. Something not quite natural happened, Kevin brought down a lot of rebounds. Both offensive and defensive, and once or twice over the captain himself, if he wanted to get noticed, he’d managed in style.

After the game Devesh congratulated him, “You’re my beatch, nigger, like my brother from another mother, dude you’ve got an awesome jump, you should develop the rest of your game, and you could make it to team. See you later homie.”

The captain was more subdued, though surprisingly respectful, “Hmm good game. You’ve got a good jump you should learn to use it. Learn how to shoot with the proper technique and develop your game. You should come to the stadium with me and practice, we have a proper coach, and he’ll be able to teach you. Be regular and you will obviously play for college, but I think you could even play district.”

The spark in Kevin’s eyes was almost as bright as Sahil’s shirt. Except of course he didn’t know how to do anything more than dribble, but since everyone around him was making such a big deal of it, he assumed the rest would be easy. To have had the arms of both Devesh, who was undeniably cool, and the captain around his shoulders in one day, was more than he had dreamt of.

I really don’t want tell you how he figured out that the ball could be dribbled by more than one person on each team, and sometimes other people could even shoot, in fact once he realised these two things, he actually set about learning how to do them.

Blah Blah… play some high energy work out song, and picture him practicing alone all day long. Like I care to actually tell you the part where he worked hard. If you haven’t yet realised I’m more into Lady Luck’s trash… smelly as it was.

Anyhow, he did, depressingly make it to the team, though not to the playing five. The year’s playing five had been decided by the captain way before anyone even came to the court, in the canteen in fact, over a plate of kebab paratha that one of the playing five was paying for.

So the tournament came and passed, we did win the tournament, playing against 5 teams, we claimed to be the champions of the city. We were given our certificates and prizes in assembly on a breezy Monday morning.

This was what Kevin had been waiting for. Because what with practice, and playing in the stadium, he hadn’t had the time to declare to the rest of college that he was in fact on the basketball team, and his social status had changed to ‘in.’ But today, everyone would know.

The names of the team were being called out. His was the last, and he was standing in the front of his class line, so that he didn’t miss it, and could walk up comfortably to collect his reward(the stares of the rest of the school) for the weeks of hard work he’d put in.

He waited patiently, and just as his name was to be called out, and to him the crescendo of his existence rose in the back ground. Just as the final drum roll, rolled to its end, and the resounding clash of cymbals and the heavy beat of the bass drum were awaited, the principal’s mic failed.

“Kevin,” was a mere whisper, no one heard it. And had he not expected it, he’d probably have not known it was said in the first place. The applause for the team had died down, and the whole assembly seemed to be concerned with mystery of malfunctioning mic, entirely unconcerned that there was one more certificate on the table to be distributed.

The attendant for assembly had left the Kevin’s certificate on the table, and then started fiddling with the mic. A faint crackle, and then the hiss of static got everyone’s attention, and then it went dead again. The speakers emitted a low hum, and then the attendant, in the most technically advanced way, tapped the body of the mic, the hum went. “Hello, Check!” came across fine. He stepped back.

The principal stepped up again, and looked at his sheet of paper. Kevin waited expectantly, as he scanned the sheet, finding where he’d left off when the mic went dead. Then he looked at the school again, and said simply, “Let us Pray.”

Where was lady luck you might ask? Well unfortunately, the garbage guy was arguing with her, about inappropriate disposal of her trash, “Wrap them up in a plastic bag,” he said.