Day 15: Benched

Basketball season started for real tonight. Coraline and I have been following the women's basketball team for my alma mater for the past four years. Of course, Coraline didn't watch much when she was only four, but now she sits and watches most of the game. I watch from the edge of my seat, ready at any second to get in there and play.

OK, I'd be killed in the first 15 seconds, but I did play basketball in high school. It was my consuming passion during the season, and it is also the home of one of my greatest regrets. One that comes back to haunt me after every game we go to. One that I will only talk about now that my mom is gone, because for all these years she never knew what happened ....

I am not an athletic person. I was often the last one chosen in gym class, even after the special ed kids. I was just slow. I don't have quick muscles. I have no idea why, but I wanted to play basketball, even with little proof I would ever get off the bench.

Girls basketball is huge in Iowa. Almost as huge as wrestling. But in my little home town we hadn't had a girls basketball team since the 50's, when a girl was killed during a game. She hit her head on a wall or something, and that ended our girls basketball program.

When I was in 6th grade though, enough time had passed and the idea that we needed a girls basketball program started gaining traction. My friends and I canvassed the town gathering signatures on petitions.  I'm not sure we helped the cause, but a new girls basketball program was born just in time for me to play in 7th grade.

I was awful. I couldn't get the ball to the basket, much less put it through the hoop. Did I mention I'm slow? I had hardly ever watched basketball on TV, and even if I had, professional basketball is nothing like what we were doing. I was awful and I knew nothing about how to play basketball, but I loved it. Loved. It.

I hardly ever got to play. Maybe the last 15 seconds in a couple of games. I didn't care. I even liked to practice.

Then when I was a freshman something happened. The first junior varsity (JV) game we played, one of our starters got hurt. The coach put me in. I have no idea why he put me in that game. I guess he didn't know how bad I was. It was the first quarter, not the last 15 seconds. I was ready. I was fierce. I wanted that ball so bad the girl I was guarding whimpered every time someone threw it to her. I smelled her fear and it made me into a super jock. (Not really, but in comparison .... yeah.)

I got to play the whole game. And not long after that I was starting on the JV team and suiting up on varsity, where I sometimes played more than 15 seconds. I wasn't fast. I'm not that tall (5' 7" before I lost an inch). I can't jump high. But I was mean and I played with everything I had. By sophomore year I was playing both JV and varsity, and usually started varsity. Junior year I started all the games and missed All Conference by one vote..

My parents came to almost all of my games, driving all over southwest Iowa, even in snow storms. My mom yelled so much she lost her voice every time. I was an anomaly among the women in our family. None of us were athletic. Except me. I could play basketball. They never said it, but I think they were proud of me.

And it was amazing for me too. I was lean and strong. I could run for miles. I was a jock, and I was part of a team. It gave me confidence I'd never had in every part of my life. I had become someone else.

And then I fucked it all up. I mean I fucked it up hard. I was at a little beach at a little lake about 8-10 miles from my home town with a friend. We were lying out in the sun smoking Virginia Slims and drinking vodka in Grape Crush. By the time I saw our assistant coach walk across the beach it was too late. I was busted.

I guess it didn't matter that it was out of season. I never started another game. I sat on the bench my entire senior year. I still practiced just as hard. I practiced with the girls who were still starting, my team, as if I were one of them. I had always loved the practice as much as the games, just as long as I got to play. But my ass was on the bench, game after game after game. Didn't matter that I was better than the girls who replaced me out there, and we lost games.

The coach never said a word to me about it, which I've always thought was a shitty thing to do. He never told me why I was benched and I was too proud to ask. I thought I knew the answer. My mom was devastated. She sat there game after game and wondered why he wasn't putting me in the game. She wanted to go talk to him and I wouldn't let her. I didn't want her to find out what I'd done. And I didn't talk to him either because nobody had helped me learn those kind of skills. Every game I sat on that fucking bench. Sometimes he would try to put me in with 15 seconds left. It was an insult. I wouldn't look at him and I didn't go in. Even writing this I'm trying not to cry.

He cared more about punishing me than he did the team. Or the fact that I was just a kid and maybe he could have tried to guide me in a better direction. If he'd let me play, I would have given up cigarettes, booze, pot. All of it. I would have stayed home on the weekends. And let me just say for the record, there may have been one or two goody-two-shoes on the team who didn't smoke and drink, but most of us partied as hard as we played. I was just stupid enough to get caught .... off season.

I never told my mom what happened. Over the years she would wonder about it and I said I didn't know. She died last year or I wouldn't be writing this now. I guess I'm ashamed about it. I have obsessed about how I could have handled it better. How I could have worked my way back on the team. How I could have gotten back on the court that last year of high school. How desperately I missed it.

After we lost the first game of sectionals -- a game we would have won if I'd been playing -- I took off my uniform and left it on the floor of the locker room. I didn't even go to the awards banquet. I worked that night. I didn't put my letter on my letter jacket.

I don't think I learned a single lesson from that experience. It was just devastating. Humiliating. Maybe I could have crawled on my knees and talked to the coach. I wish I had tried. And maybe I did learn one thing. I never treated any of my students like that. I never knowingly humiliated any of them like that. I still hate him for doing that. I don't think the punishment suited the crime. I don't think he did his job. I think he was small about it. So fuck you, Coach Larsen.

See? I still obsess about it. And that's the other lesson. Thinking about the past doesn't change it. Never will. It might give insight into how you can do better in the future, but I was never going to get a chance to play basketball again. That's what I lost. The last year I could have done something I loved with all my heart. All these decades later, it still hurts.

So I go to the games with Coraline. And I sit on the edge of my seat, ready to block a shot or steal the ball. In my head I'm out there playing with them -- certainly much better than I ever could in real life. Like a million times better. And then I come home and I remember my senior year on the bench. Not the games I played that made me feel like I could do anything. But the games I sat on the bench and wanted to die.

One more thing. I did not stop smoking and drinking that year. In fact, I partied with a vengeance. I drank and smoked pot before school whenever I got the chance. I cut classes. I got grades just good enough to keep my parents off my ass. And two weeks after graduation, I left and made my way out into the big world with the intention of never coming back. And I never played a game of basketball again.