Follow the Bouncing Ball
When I was in third grade, I wanted to be just like Starla Cosper. She was the leading scorer and best player on the Healdton High School girls’ basketball team, and I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather be when I grew up. Her mother was a beautician who worked at the hair salon in town and like clockwork my Granny went to visit her every week to get her hair done. In the summers when I was out of school and my mom was at work, I tagged along.
One morning, as I played leapfrog on the row of domed hair dryers attached to the chairs that ran along the back wall, Starla bee-bopped into the salon. She had on a T-shirt with the sleeves cut out, gym shorts, tube socks with blue stripes around the top, and high-top Chuck Taylors with the laces untied. Her sweaty hair was in a quasi-bun/ponytail and she was swinging a keychain full of more dangly things than keys. On her way home from open gym, she had stopped to give her mother the day’s lay of the land.
As she riffed off her plans, with some questions in between, her mother lobbed back approval dusted with questions of her own while continually “ratting” Granny’s hair. Then Starla spewed as almost an afterthought, like a thing her brain lunged at before it got away, “We’re doing a week-long, half-day basketball camp in a couple of weeks at Plainview (a neighboring school about 15 miles away). It’s for 4th, 5th and 6th grade boys and girls and we’re all supposed to invite a few…” Her eyes drifted toward mine in the mirror, “Hey, would you like to come?” Both Granny in her cape and Starla’s mom, still in charge of the comb, waited to see how I would respond.
I sat frozen, my head half inside the plastic dome I’d been raising and lowering like a dump truck only moments before she came in. Locking eyes with Granny through the mirror, I pleaded silently without blinking. I remember thinking I must have somehow died and earned the right to sit at the pearly gates.
“Can I?” I finally blurted out, the words freeing themselves from the log jam in my throat.
“We’ll have to ask her mom,” Granny said to Starla, while still intently studying me.
“Great!” Starla lobbed back as she bounced toward the door, “I could take her every day, if that’s OK with you guys. She could just ride with me.”
I almost couldn’t breathe.
I waited for my mom to get home that day like a dog waits at the edge of a table for a bone. Then I met her at the door. “Mom. There’s a basketball camp at Plainview in a couple of weeks. Starla Cosper invited me to go, and she told Granny she would drive me there and back every day. Can I go? Pleeeeeeeeeeeease. Can I please go?”
I still remember her semi-smile.
Two weeks later I was riding shotgun in Starla Cosper’s car.
I don’t remember what we talked about– my real-life hero and me-- though I recall that we did. I don’t remember what songs we listened to on the radio-- though music certainly played, both through the dial on the dash and the eight-track player bolted just below. But what I do remember, vividly, is that Plainview Basketball Camp is where I fell in love with a dimpled orange ball.
That ball became the vehicle that shaped the trajectory of my life.
Initially, I got hooked on developing skill. The way you could get better fast at dribbling a basketball, simply through repetition, was addictive to me. The way you could bandy against the game whether or not you had a gymnasium or a human foil provided the autonomy that I craved. To rapidly improve, the only things required were some want-to and a ball. I happened to have both.
As I learned more about the game beyond the skill set required to play it, I grew enamored with its angles. Its dependency on spacing. The massive extrapolation of possibility that grew when people moved in sync with one another in accordance with the movement of the ball. The game played like layered poetry to me.
Then sometime later, though I can’t exactly pinpoint when, it dawned on me that basketball was more than all I loved about it. It was a tiny laboratory for life. The game, like all kinds of other sports that tease and test you, gives those who play it a trial run—a chance to figure out who and how we want to be on a stage with stakes much lower than those in the world outside the lines.
That little ball I fell in love with provided framing for the way that I do life. It is my informant. My trusted teacher. My loyal sidekick. My pathway builder when all roads forward are under siege. My childhood fascination with Starla Cosper quickly faded, but basketball made its bed and stayed. I am better for it still.