Limited Purview
Oklahoma and Iowa hung on to the bitter end.
These two middle-America states were among the first in the country to offer girls the opportunity to play basketball and two of the last to allow us to run up and down the floor from hoop to hoop. If you were a girl growing up amid the corn or the wheat prior to the early ‘90s, “girls’ basketball” was a different game than the one that’s now breaking attendance records everywhere we look. Girls were allowed to play but expected to stop on a dime at the line that cuts the court in half. Apparently, our guts would explode if we ran to the end line and back.
Shake. My. Head. I was expected to run around and around and AROUND a 660-foot track, but half-court bursts were the legal limit in an Oklahoma gym.
I never thought about it though, at the time. I wasn’t offended nor did I wonder if this “abbreviated version” of basketball was fair or not. It never even crossed my mind. I just loved to play. So I’d toe-up at the half-court line and wait impatiently for my turn. It was the most fun I had ever had in my life.
It was also all I knew.
The Oklahoma six-on-six brand that I played was pretty simple. In essence, it was two entirely separate games of three-on-three. The ball moved up and down the floor crossing the center line like a baton that granted permission for action. Six of us watched while six of us played. This stripped-down version of the game was basketball at its purest. It was simultaneously merciless and forgiving, making room for everyone while giving no one a place to hide. It was my bliss.
“Forwards” played offense and defense, as they were allowed to guard the “guards” as they tried to advance the ball. But “guards” were not allowed to play offense at all. They never got to shoot. Ever. It sounds crazy, I know. (Perhaps I would have done some complaining had I been one of them.) But I don’t remember anyone ever having a problem with any of it. Guards and forwards alike were devoted to building skills. As a result, players were so fundamentally sound that contests, for the most part, were clean. People jammed their way into gyms to see us play. We, and the throngs who flocked to watch us, were head-over-heels for the game.
Then I went to college and faced the challenge of learning to play five-on-five. Once I did? I never wanted to play six-on-six again.
We can’t know what we don’t know.
For a while, the new game was really hard. The floor felt so crowded—I found it next to impossible to weasel my way to the rim. Defensively, I was ok guarding the ball, but away from it I got spun around in circles like a top. Slowly but surely, however, spacing and angles started to make more sense, as did the visionary responsibilities of defenders and the aspects of transition that in the game of six vs six did not exist. Then over the Christmas holiday break, I went back home and joined my former high school teammates for practice. It was as if someone had removed all the obstacles from the course. I couldn’t imagine why I hadn’t scored 50 in every single one of my high school games. There was so much space to create and explore! The game felt easy, but it didn’t feel as fun.
Exposure changes everything. My granddaughter loved to snack on strawberries until she learned what a Reese’s Cup was.
Once, on a mission trip to Haiti, I watched children run and play barefoot on a patch of rocks and dirt in the brutal Caribbean heat. Their “playground” consisted of a few chewed-up tires half buried in the ground and a couple of crooked swings attached by rusty chains to an uneven metal frame. Standing among the children, I had a lump in my throat the size of a walnut. I ached for every brightly colored climbing apparatus and wavy double slide these children didn’t have. Weirdly, though, I seemed to be the only one who was sad. The kids were in recess heaven. Their whooping and hollering bounced off the distant mountains scattering like shiny treasures toward the ocean and the sky.
This was all they knew. It was plenty more than enough.
I suspect if those children ever have the opportunity to choose their shoes or slip down slides or splash on a pad of water where fountains spurt up from the ground to keep them cool, that the playground in the desert will cease to make them squeal. As the aperture widens, satisfaction changes shape in different light. And we frolic there. At least until we discover what else we do not know.