Life and Sport
Your Opponents Only Live Within the Four Corners of the Game
Author: Bryan Davies
I am an inveterate map reader. My taste in maps runs from the everyday and the utterly utilitarian to the wonderful and the whimsical. I have happily indulged myself with route maps in bus shelters; I have fixated upon great cartography, like the route maps of Lewis and Clark, or the atlases of the world. My late and beloved father was a land surveyor, peerless at his craft. His free hand maps could pass for the product of a mechanical drafting set. I have supposed that a love of maps is a genetic thing.
And true to every male stereotype, I am never, ever truly lost. I never ask for directions, either.
Last week I was examining a road map of the north eastern United States. Our daughter Claire had sent along her basketball team's schedule for next season and I was determining which of her opponents could be reached within a day's drive of our home in Whitby.
Sharon, PA
As my eye traveled along the I-90 west from Buffalo to Cleveland, I was stopped in my calculations by a name I had not remembered for a long time – Sharon, PA. I laughed as I remembered her, as hot as a pistol in the summer of 1992.
I was the volunteer coach of the Port Perry High School (PPHS) girls' basketball team in 1992. Port Perry, as quaint as a tea room and as picturesque as any Ontario landscape, was then a town where girls sports had yet to achieve any sort of primacy in the public consciousness. Based on our improvements the season before, I had formed the idea that if I could encourage the players to work on their game in the summer, we could win a first ever high school championship in the fall.
Such notions today sound absurdly basic. Female athletics at every level has taken on an intensity and a structure that was formerly restricted to gymnastics or swimming. But this is a true sea change, for in most Canadian small towns in 1992, my experience was the norm.
I know that in my own mind, I have buffed and polished my memory of that PPHS team to a luster that is beyond its true shine. They were a nice group of young women who liked to play basketball, not a dominant or ultra talented team. My coaching work with them was a benefit for all of us, but I never achieved a standard to place myself among the coaching deities of the sport. In many ways, the PPHS girls and I were made for each other.
As part of the building process for our intended fall conquests, I persuaded a group of the players' parents that a hot August weekend in small town America, sandwiched between 5 hour car rides was a great idea. I marvel now at how entirely laid back these good people were with respect to any developments in their daughters athletic careers. The parents were collectively pleased that the young women were enjoying themselves and that they were evidently doing something productive – that was their simple, wonderful standard. Winning games, or personal achievement, was a bonus.
It is the parental attitude towards the athletic participation of young women that is the most prominent wreckage on the beach of this sporting sea change. When a player is in elementary school, the parent often seems to manage the young person's athletic and extra-curricular schedule like summer camp director on crack. Girls are enrolled in volleyball, hockey, basketball, indoor and outdoor soccer, swimming, piano, and dance, often two or three in the same season.
In the high school years, there is a statistically irrefutable decline in female sports participation. The ones that have survived the elementary period are now not parented; theirs is an athletic cause that is championed. Sport is now perceived by the parent in many cases as a ticket to a grander world of elite teams and inevitable sports scholarships.
Many of these parents could benefit from the words of Oscar Wilde and the triumph of parental hope over athletic experience.
I have digressed from Sharon and that August in 1992 that had so much to commend it.
The Gus Macker 3 on 3 basketball tournaments were the most prominent outdoor summer competitions in the United States with events staged in every state, in large cities and small towns alike. There were 10 years old and under divisions, 70 years and over competitions, and every subdivision and gender in between.
Our players were excited by the prospect of competition in "the States," the basketball Mecca. Our point guard, Shawna, wore a Canadian hockey toque the entire weekend in the blistering heat, to proclaim her heritage. The Americans we met thought that she was insane.
I created three teams from our group and we battled on the blistering asphalt. No referees, just a court monitor whose apparent duties were to keep score and to call 911 in the event of an incident.
We won a few games and likely lost more; my memories are of the event and the atmosphere. Our players, all of whom had seen the recent movie "Wayne's World," took to approaching strangers to ask them for Grey Poupon mustard. The loyal parents checked out the ubiquitous shopping malls. The girls checked out the boys. There were some outstanding players in all of the divisions, heaven for the hoops junkie. It was an excellent time.
The highlight of the tournament did not involve our players.
It was late Saturday afternoon; the air temperature had blasted past 35C. With the heat and the sweat of hundreds of players mixing with the heavy humid air, the Gus Macker was one huge out door sauna. We were waiting for one of our teams to take the court. As we waited, two teams of men in the over 65 year old division were doing battle, slowly.
It was as ferocious a game as I have ever witnessed.
A fellow spectator told me that "the boys" were all local men, who had played for the over 60 year old championship the previous year. Old men, pushing and shoving; they fought for every loose ball and they contested every rebound, even if there was no separation between the pavement and their shoes. Knees were scraped and elbows were thrown, not one of them inadvertent. The play was accompanied by a level of trash talk that would have made an NBA star or a sailor blush.
To my surprise, the game ended without a defibrillator or a stretcher being summoned. The crowd at court side saluted both veteran squads with an ovation. The teams trooped off the floor together, arm in arm, taking up their positions at the rear of a large nearby recreational vehicle. Beer was handed out all around, and each team serenaded the other with a song that appeared to begin with the verse, "See ya, see ya, I wouldn't want to be ya..." There was laughter and more beer as the sun made its steamy descent towards the Sharon countryside. Sharon is no old flame, but the town that I remembered from that basketball weekend in August.
In sports, your opponents should only live within the four corners of the game. Your friends are for life.
The old Sharon basketballers clearly knew the difference between a friend and an opponent.
Delicious
Digg
reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon
Published: May 04, 2006
