A Church with the Roof Torn Off
vs. Lunenberg W 48-45 1-0
I see now that so much of what I love about basketball has nothing to do with basketball.
Before games, the nervous-heartbeat fluttering of fluorescent lights in the locker room. After practices, the wide flat brooms leaning together in the corner of the gym like crossed fingers.
It is because of the empty rooms in the empty house I return to each night that I can see how much I lost, and how much I have.
@Maynard L 56-53 2-1
Though I can’t approve, I do understand why our point Jack got in the face of their point after a normal reach-in foul to tell him “watch your fingernails fucking duck-face.” His anger is tightly held, so, when expressed, it’s hard to control. And anger is necessary. Anger throws its own body outstretched to stop a loose ball from rolling out of bounds (though, yes, anger also hurls the last-second three into the side of the backboard).
At least we got a shot off; at least we were in the game until it was over.
I have an intimation the season will be a good one, even as I must acknowledge we have nowhere near enough shooting to push for State. I am beginning to see that an hour of basketball is not transcendentally important, but it is as important as every other hour.
@Littleton L 55-54 4-2
Last year, after losses when I didn’t feel like going home, I would pour out half of a Coke, fill it with vodka, and drive. I see now that drunk concentration and smooth motion is an ecstasy, but it is not real. The new scar in the thick white pine is real.
For months after I was able to believe that none of it was my fault, even what I said to my wife, even what I didn’t say to my child.
After the loss, in the warm, rattling bus, Gabriel leans the corner of his forehead on cold glass and closes his eyes. I know he is reliving his last shot, a pull-up a step before the key, over and over, as if the shot is something he can still control. Each time he feels it drift a finger to the left.
“Hey, Gabe,” says Tall Ethan, our center, a shaved bear.
“What?” says Gabriel, eyes closed.
“You got your graphing calculator?” At first I think Gabriel isn’t going to respond, but then he reaches for his bag, eyes still closed, unzips it and rummages through, finds the calculator, passes it over without a word.
@North Middlesex W 58-51 5-2
Some gyms are darker in daylight, when the overhead lights don’t get turned on and the windows are high up and clouded. Being there alone is an undrowned loneliness.
Against North Middlesex, Hutch goes for 22. He smells like cigarettes and drives a black hand-me-down pick-up. He buzz-cuts his big red head, grunts at every shot, and believes in himself.
I appreciate Gabriel’s subtle celebrations at Hutch’s made threes: he spreads his hands first, then his arms, as he shuffles backwards to set up on defense. He only celebrates when it is not his three.
@Gardner L 61-55 6-3
The winter is outside and we always have to return to it. Jack has a thick wool hat he pulls down to his eyelids that gives him the appearance of a bundled-up toddler. His mother drives too much of a Lexus and there is wine in her flowery thermos.
Basketball seems like a series of binary choices—pick up the dribble or don’t; left or right; cut or wait. The geniuses, like Jack, go a third way; he throws bounce passes to where the open jump shot is about to be; he creates the story in which the choices are made. But then two plays later, he throws a punch at a gawky forward who stepped on his foot in a scramble for a loose ball and is kicked out—the story is over.
After, on the way into the locker room, Hutch kicks a locker hard enough to make a dent. I don’t say anything—it is a reasonable act of violence. Jack is sitting on a bench with his backpack on, straps tight, and the wool cap pulled down tight to his ears, staring into the floor.
Gabriel says, “You know you getting kicked out fucks us all, right?” Gabriel does not swear.
“I know,” says Jack.
“You have to stay together,” I say quietly.
They don’t say anything. Tall Ethan comes in then, pulled-off jersey dangling in one hand and in the other, somehow, half a hotdog.
“What?” he says, mouth full.
@Lunenberg L 53-34 6-4
Playing basketball badly, coaching badly, is like trying to see something in the dark.
I know we are a better team than Lunenberg. I know we are capable of playing a more connected defense. I know Hutch is a higher percentage three-point shooter. I know Gabriel almost never gives up cheap fouls reaching in on rebounds. But the game, thank God, is not hypothetical.
@Leominster W 60-50 8-4
Leominster has a great red gym, twice the size of ours. It is a church with the roof torn off.
A few minutes before it is time to take the court, I perform the new ceremony: I step into the bathroom to wash my face and find the basketball coach in the mirror. When I re-enter the locker room, the team is huddled around Gabriel, who’s seated on a bench, bent down over his phone. He looks up when everyone else looks up. The phone is an illegal rectangle of light on his knee. “Sorry, coach,” he says. “It’s about a girl. I had to ask.” Gabriel is respected by his peers, and for good reason. I have to tread carefully: discipline is only meaningful when there is also justice. “It’s okay this once,” I say. “I’m sure it will be good news.”
“I don’t think so,” he says. And he squeezes off his phone and sets it firmly dark at his side.
In the first half Gabriel plays the same as he always does: gliding to his spaces, hanging just a bit too far back, it seems, but then a quick step and a leap for a rebound. He bonks a few jumpers but tips in a few misses, a normal game.
I don’t notice him check his phone at half, but he must have, because he becomes a different person. When we return to the court, he isn’t making eye contact with anyone. I know it was bad news. On defense first, he crouches and slaps the floor, hard, with two open palms. His usual watchful restraint is gone. His every step is a slash. He wipes sweat from his eyes with the heels of his hands. I don’t even think to give him his usual five minutes of rest. He misses all his threes, but he deflects a million passes, collects a million offensive rebounds. In a tussle for a rebound, their center turns away from the rim and tugs Gabriel’s arm down to keep him back, but Gabriel gets the ball anyway. Between free throws, Jack steps in and taps him, twice, fingertips on his sternum, a gesture of acknowledgment, brotherhood.
I understand how a broken heart leads to playing with such desperation, as if you could win what you loved if you only loved it enough, if you only tried hard enough, if you could tear your own arms out of your shoulder sockets by reaching. Because of how hard he plays, everyone else plays hard, and we win.
Through the confusion of handshakes afterwards, I spot Gabriel on the other side of the gym, stretched out, leaning back on the bleachers, exhausted, contemplating the sea of the court. I let him be until the teams are in their rooms, then drift his way, crouch next to him in a coach-ly way. I don’t know what I am going to say. But he tips his head sideways, slightly, and his face breaks into a sheepish grin, and I know she said yes. What I had taken for frustrated longing had been joy.
@Narragannsett L 59-42 9-5
Some nights nothing goes your way and there is nothing to say. The sky-blue profile of the eagle on the wall does not have a soul. Jack dribbles directly off the foot of the kid with the wrist brace and the ball boinks away at an angle into their center’s gut. Tall Ethan gathers the made free-throw to inbound, winds up, and hurls the ball into the back of the backboard, and it thwacks down into the ref’s face. Hutch fires up his usual perfect arc: an airball. Gabriel tries to dunk down 15 with a minute left and jams it into the corner of the rim.
After, Jack is inconsolable. He sits hunched on the bench in the locker room with his knuckles pressing in on his temples. I sit with him. He’s vibrating. When my son was an infant, the only way to calm his screaming was to squeeze him, tightly, into my breastbone. I put my hand on the back of Jack’s neck and grip. “It’s okay,” I say. He sucks in a breath.
“It’s not,” he says.
Out in the night are flurries we will sail through to our homes.
@Townsend W 60-46 11-5
The instant the game ends and we are qualified for the district playoffs, I am thrown into the future and I see the season compressed into the name of our town on one line on one column of one page in the back of a Thursday Lowell Sun sports section listing the class 3-A high-school boys’ basketball seedings.
Home to my empty house, I get into bed and stare into the ceiling forever. Everyone alive lives through every day and every night. Everyone I know and love is, at this second, either awake or dreaming.
I can see Tall Ethan at work on a set of math problems. He is an Honor Roll student. I never taught him—as a freshman he was already more advanced than the basic math classes I am tasked with. He is sitting in a dark dining room in a dark house with only the one light on overhead. He is neither frustrated nor happy; he moves his pencil deliberately, filling squares one by one.
I can see Jack up late playing video games, wandering through ruins with an enormous gun, sitting cross legged on the carpet in a white room accented by gold and brass. His coat is still outstretched above him on the white couch, where he’d tossed it when he’d walked into the room. His little sister is asleep under the coat. An empty glass of orange juice is on the coffee table. He hasn’t eaten. His mother is arguing on the phone in the kitchen.
I can see Hutch sleep. He snores richly. He has forgotten to set his alarm for the morning.
Gabriel is reading. His room is dark, but he has set his phone to flashlight and placed it by his ear. He is chewing on his lip. I can’t see what he is reading.
I get out of bed and write a letter to my son. I tell him about the falling snow outside my window that vanishes when it touches the earth. I ask about his days.
Vs. Quabbin W 61-60 District First Round
Here is the play that won the district playoff game:
Down two, five seconds left, I call our last time out after Jack had the ball swiped out-of-bounds. He comes to the huddle whining about getting hit on the arm, looking around wildly but not spotting the ref, lucky, because who knows what he could have said, and I get my hand on the back of his neck. “Focus,” I say. He wants the ball on the inbound, of course, but he doesn’t do more than frown and hop when I draw up for Hutch to come around a down screen and then fade on the opposite side for the look at the three. It’s not a bad idea; they’ve been under screens all night.
The whistle chirps for start-of-play, then in one breath the team is up and across the threshold, onto the bare stage of the floor. It’s a moment when you know the future is opening its eyes to watch. Our gym is packed and not quiet, like a forest full of hidden birds.
Once the ref delivers the ball, time changes. It’s not slow motion—it’s like everything has already happened. The ball goes in to Gabriel first, as it was drawn, but their two wings fly to double Hutch coming around and there’s no pass to be made. One heartbeat. Gabriel takes one dribble, then is up for the only possible shot. Like a gunshot it thwacks down in off the back of the rim, and the crowd erupts, and we win.
I have seen the video of myself leaping and hooting in celebration. Hutch is pressed into my side, both arms wrapped around my belly, like he’s about to lift me up.
@Sefton Hill L 72-56 District Quarterfinal
In the moments after the buzzer that marks the season-ending loss, I shake the hand of the other coach, who is gruff, play-acting serious respect as a means of showing respect. He has burst blood vessels in the white of his right eye. There is sweat on his neck.
After, I glance around the gym because I am trying to stop drifting away from shore by looking at it hard enough. There is a kid on the bleachers struggling to work himself out of the straps of the bass drum he holds like a second stomach; he is noble and ridiculous, like a turtle. Their cheerleaders, sparkling yellow and black numbers painted on their cheeks, dart birdlike in and out of the crowd in twos and threes, so quick they will never die. Their scorer, a whip of a shooter on his way to Fitchburg State, leans on himself for the moment under the basket, breathing, open-mouthed, exhausted. They’ll win district easy, and who knows from there. I try to catch his eye to nod, but the only part of the world that matters to him now is in the future.
I descend into the locker room, let the door whoosh closed behind me. The atmosphere is familiar, like any locker room: thick radiator heat, steam and sweat, the tang of the bleach that keeps things clean. It was the same when I played; it was the same last year and it will be the same next year, when most of my players will be gone.
In this moment the team is still together, a unit for the last time, before they become a photograph in a glass case. They sit together in a line on the bench, thigh to thigh, soaked through and dripping, looking up at me, waiting for a word. They believe their lives are inextricably connected, but they don’t understand how lives can intersect but not intertwine, how individual lines continue on their own way, separate, out toward infinity.
Here’s what I say, “It is important to give your best to each other, and you did. It wasn’t good enough, but it was worth it.” And something I have never said before, “I want you to know—next week, next month, in your life—you can come talk to me. You can always count on me.”
When I was young, I was a wing like Gabriel, though I was nowhere near as fast. I had perhaps a slightly more reliable jump shot, one I could take driving in toward either elbow, jerk to a stop then rise up into. I practiced the exact shot thousands and thousands of moments, in the dusty center of summer, on snow day afternoons when I’d shovel out the driveway and shoot, alone, into and through darkness, until my fingers were numb.
I remember—each time I began my motion into the shot—how right it felt, how my body and my arms and my hands were of a piece with my mind and my wishes. Every shot I made was a blessing; every miss what I am only now prepared to receive as a revelation.
Rob Roensch (@robroensch) is the author of a collection of stories, The Wildflowers of Baltimore (Salt), a novella, The World and the Zoo (Outpost19), and a novel, In the Morning, the City is the Prairie (Belle Point Press, forthcoming). He lives and teaches in Oklahoma City.