Spring Has Sprung

This is always an interesting time of year for pick-up ballers. The High School season is over, and most High School athletes are either already participating in a spring sport (like baseball, or track & field) or gravitating into the gym for a little off-season work-out. There's one more weekend of College B-Ball yet to be played, and the NBA is entering into the backstretch toward the most interesting part of its season.

Meanwhile, us old guys who have been playing all winter are finally starting to hit our stride...at least those of us who aren't nursing injuries. It's taken us six months to play ourselves into shape, but in a few more months it will all be over for another year, as daylight savings time and better weather begins to tempt many of us outdoors in the evenings and on weekends.

It's been years -- maybe even decades -- since I've played serious ball on an outdoor court. (Of course, there are some who would say that it's been decades since I've played serious ball ANYWHERE). But the concrete is just too hard on my fifty-year-old knees -- not to mention the potential embarassment of "shirts & skins." I just wear way too much spandex and neoprene to play comfortably under the hot summer sun, and that's the long and the short of it. So I'm trying to savour these last few months of gym rat, and trying NOT to let my new-found Spring friskiness tempt me into trying to make imaginative moves that my aging body can't execute.

Last night I was mostly a passer, a defender, and especially a rebounder. I actually get a great deal of pleasure out of those aspects of the game -- showing out over the top of a screen to cut off a drive out of a pick & roll, or making that extra pass which leads to a wide-open shot for one of my team mates. I tend to see the floor pretty well, which helps me both to anticipate what my opponents want to do, and also to find my team mates when they're open. But the rebounding gives me particular pleasure: boxing out, getting up high with both hands, and especially those Worm-like second-hop self-tips, where nobody can really get control at first, but I'm able to get enough of a hand on the ball to tip it to myself. And then making the quick outlet pass to start the break and create an easy basket.

Of course, after making a few plays like that, the call of one's long lost athleticism becomes dangerously seductive. For example, I drove to the basket off the bounce three times last night, but naturally couldn't get anywhere close to finishing at the rim. Instead, I missed a long, tear-drop finger-roll on the right baseline, its mirror-image twin on the left, and then finally an eight-foot jumper from the right short corner (which really should have gone down...I'm still not sure HOW I missed it). I did score a game-winning three to open the night (after first calming my team down and helping to bring us back from five down to win by two), and also a game-winning jump shot from the left elbow to end the night on a winning note.

That shot I will remember for a long time, simply because of how I got the look in the first place. My team mate "Curly" had once again put his head down and dribbled into a triple-team just inside the three-point line on the right wing, made his predictable reverse pivot into the face of the trap, then offered up the pointless observation "Someone's Open!" So I called back (in a somewhat sardonic tone of voice, I'm afraid) "I'm open..." -- corralled the wild pass, knocked down the easy Jay, and headed home feeling a little frisky myself after two hours of a pretty good run.