Reunion Games
Last night a friend of mine shared in the group chat a video of him draining a deep three over a student in font of a packed gym. The reunion game or the throwback game or the alumni game is a time-honored tradition.
Basketball can be a time machine; we remember who we were when we slip into a pick and pop or a curl screen with the people we spent hundreds of hours doing it with. You can feel the sweat from the floors of the gyms we once poured it into. It’s like reaching back to when we were different people.
About a decade after we all got out of college my high school teammates, and I started to get together and play once a year. Some of us had started families, many of us had started and changed careers a few times. The time warp quality of the game was what always stuck with me. For the most part our group was together that whole four years. We came from the generation right before AAU so we played a ton of pickup. These are guys that even though it’s been 27(!! When the hell did that happen??) years, the last time we played, I still knew Josh liked a little FT line pull up, I knew Alex liked a post iso, I knew where DY would be on the help. Yeah, it’s a little slower and boy do I hurt more after, but it strips the years away like layers of varnish getting a deep clean, you can see the original wood under there but the patina grows a little thicker and richer each year.
We played our first reunion at about our 12-year date (2009), we were in our late 20’s a few of us right on the edge of 30, I wasn’t the only married guy but one of the few. We played out in the Western Addition, a foggy and windswept neighborhood of little painted boxes on the hills. Minnie and Lovie Rec Center. Most of us were still paying regularly and though it had been a decade +, enough time hadn’t really passed yet. I know for me it was still a bit about settling who was best and going against people I’d spent so much time competing against. Everyone had a good time (I hope, if not I apologize guys) but as silly as it sounded then, it wasn’t far enough removed from our adolescence. We still treated it a bit like a practice. We hit the cutter with a little extra bump, we fought the screen, we helped the helper, all those things. The fun part on that first time was that even though it had been years since we all played together, the habits, the rules we played with were all the same.
The things our coach, a guy named Dave Low, had taught us was defense and discipline. How to retreat when a guy drives at you, how to help, how to help the helper. So many little pieces of language you share that you don’t even realize aren’t there until they show up again. Sports is organized friendship in a way. The friendships I’ve shared with people all have their own language. Big groups or small. They have a coded little set of rules. Sports is just one of those early training wheels situations for that and the four years we had all spent together made for deep ties.
Afterwards we had fun, grabbed lunch across from the Cow Palace at a KFC owned by another teammate’s family, then me and Dennis and a couple other guys stopped at a bar in West Portal and relived old times. The further I get from my young days on the court the more I tend to laugh at myself. I took it all so seriously. I took every practice as the most important thing that day, the tension and aggravation of caring that deeply being strictly the realm of the young. Being an adult and getting a chance to go back into your memories with the people you made them with is a pretty rare privilege.
I’ve found the qualities I value most in people have shifted and firmed as the years pass. It brings me a lot of joy to look back and recognize the beginnings of our adult friendships from our times then. Dennis at one point got transferred out to Walnut Creek and I talked him into playing in my Wednesday league in the sticks. I ended up drafting him in the first round because I knew how good he was and didn’t want anyone to take an early flier on him. It was like I said earlier, we spoke the same language. It was weird to make the defensive help I would always make, leading someone into a trap that usually didn’t get seen but to turn and see him right where I unconsciously expected him. It was neat. We would laugh about it after the games, joke about how we could still run the motion offense Coach Low drilled into us. I know I still could.
I think at around our 16–17thth we played in a busted gym attached to a senior home on the backside of Lake Merced. We went to the Beach Chalet after and drank beers and sat on the grass. We laughed about how when we were kids the coach made us run around Lake Merced for training. A good-sized cohort of guys would slip off and eat at the Taco Bell on the SF State campus. That was the first year of the Pokeman hunt craze that Sunday at the Beach Chalet, it was glorious San Francisco blue sky day.
We played our 20th at Kezar Pavilion. The court where most of us had ended our basketball careers. Most of us weren’t 18 yet when we would cross that magic line of playing for real and into the realm of rec league players. We had all played at the old grand damme of Kezar probably a dozen times over the years prior. I had gotten my first trip to the old mid-50’s locker room in 8th grade when I had been on the middle school team that won the city championship.
It was my introduction to playing in a special place. Kezar stood out from the rest, 6 months or so before, I had sat in that same locker room after on a whim, joining the football team. I got to see a whole different sport, with a whole different group of friends. Playing different sports is like putting on different clothes and walking into a different job. I got caught up in the passion of the friends that played. It was their thing and I got to share it with them. We made it to that game, the city championship Turkey Day. A game they had fought so hard for (my group of seniors had been on the team last year that broke a 36 year drought), that in the end I helped them get back to.
We sat in that same locker room, dank and painted in that thick peeling institutional off-white latex paint before my last basketball game. I had never connected the two memories until writing about it. We sat there in our pads on thanksgiving in 1996 before a championship game that we would lose 40–0 and then I sat there with a whole different set of friends six months later in our last game together.
I look back and the memories are faded just like any would be. The pain, if there really was any true pain, has long since mellowed. More than anything were two plays. Early in the football game I went to tackle the muscle bound diminutive Galileo running back and he hit me so hard I gave up the ghost on football right there. In the basketball game it was in the middle of a last gasp run for a 4th quarter comeback against Burton. I went up for an uncontested rebound on a missed free throw and instead of grabbing it, I went to slam it together and the ball slipped out of my hands. I remember that more clearly than almost anything in 30 years of basketball. I remember looking at Josh and just feeling like I had let us all down. The crowd sits right down on the court there, I got to see my mistake in their eyes. God, that’s strange, its still there. Most things you think of in a narrative way, in the minds eye you accept them as a reality but when you really look deep back and find them they are still there.
That all being said, I didn’t think about that 20 years later. I thought about how young we all still looked. I thought about the smiles I was able to give them when I worked out how to rent the place. I thought about how big the court was and even though it was empty how it still smelled of popcorn, how the floor still squeaked. Kezar had this special floor system, they installed springs under the floor as some idea to lessen injuries all it did was give you an extra bounce. The same system was as far as I know only installed in one other venue, Maples Pavilion before the remodel (30 years ago). As kids we all tried to dunk or slap or jump as high as we could at Kezar. As a fan the court shakes as a fast break comes running down the floor at you. There’s great video out there of a young Steph Curry lighting it up. I remember Jason Kidd, Gary Payton, Lamond Murray, Al Grigsby, Steve Nash (before he was Steve Nash), Hook Mitchel (he was only ever a roster spot, a name shrouded in pre internet mythology). For us to get back on that court was as great a gift as I could’ve ever given myself.
Beginnings and Endings
Every decade of hoops is different, your teens are for playing real basketball, teams, coaches, stakes etc. If you’re lucky you get to play varsity or beyond, but the math isn’t there for lots of people. I’m watching my oldest daughter and her classmates navigate the first year of high school athletics. The funnel gets narrow, there are only so many spots to move on. You get to college, you play through your 20’s, your 30’s, your 40’s… Each one comes with it’s own group of friends and contemporaries. You have new young guys, new old guys, it all cycles as you move through it.
I’m at the other end of that tube now. I just watched the kids at my daughters High School team get honored for winning the State Championship but by the time those guys are playing rec league I’m likely to be done with the game at that level. Maybe not, but probably. So, I’ve seen a few debates, I’ve seen a lot of ball, I’ve played a lot, and I’ve been lucky to be around lots of guys that got really far. Most of the debates are dumb.
Video lies to you. The grainy clips from high school barely show the feeling of guarding one of “those guys”. The guys that would make the paper, that would make the All-State Team. Someday soon the clips of todays games will be dissected and found wanting.
Peter Jackson made a work of art about 5 years ago, he took all the footage the BBC had in its library from World War I, smoothed it out, sped it to real time, and made the film of the actual people eating, marching, laughing, crying, sleeping, living and dying. It was magic it made them come to life. The movie was called They Shall Not Grow Old. It takes an artist to make the records of yesterday into a reflection of real life.
The feeling I felt in 8th grade sitting next to my 15-year-old brother as we watched Riordan play Saint Ignatius in Kezar on a Thursday night with Jahah Wilson and Fergus Intemen facing off on the floor with the springs under it that shakes the whole building was full speed. The place roared when Ferg dunked on Jahah, it shook, and it felt like the center of the world.
The same can be said for how in my playing days it felt like those were the most important games going. When after that was over, I can still remember lots from the rec games, the fraternity games where the crowds edged the court, the pickup leagues, the tournaments, the draft leagues, all of it. But the film never does the memory justice. Hell, the film doesn’t even do the present justice. I’ve played in pickup and rec games that felt like they moved a million miles an hour then someone shows you something they shot on their phone and it’s like everyone is stuck in concrete. When life is happening, and you don’t know what’s next it happens in a blink of an eye.
So as this generation of great players starts to fade away. Let’s not get caught in the same pointless arguments. My youth was fleeting to me. It is fleeting to us all. Enjoy the next kids coming up, they look to be a doozy, and enjoy the kids that get to enjoy them. Don’t spend your time lecturing them on the game of basketball “back in your day” because the tape will only tarnish your memory. Then you will spend all your time trying to justify the wonder of the way it was.
