Pickup Hoops
Walking into a gym the first time is a unique feeling.
You don’t know what time the run starts, you don’t know the setup, sometimes it’s a board (civilized), sometimes it’s “you gotta call next” (not civilized and depending on the run a real potential pain in the ass), and now we even have sign up apps (newfangled but damn they work).
I remember the feeling in the 90’s of being a kid on the hunt for a run, my brother and I grew up in San Francisco, we both went to Lowell High School and we were both good players. He was much better and two years older, shorter 6’1” and a power forward, I was tall and gangly. Gav was first team all city as a senior and his varsity group (which I joined after jv my sophomore year) was really good. They had been ranked in the holy Chron and Examiner rankings which up until the prior two years hadn’t happened in forever (I think like a decade which to us yungins was objectively the beginning of time). So I tagged along with him wherever they played.
We had a run at the Stonestown Y, two short courts 4 on 4 winner court and loser court, winners got to leave the “crap”court. I learned not to randomly yell “fuck you” at adults in that gym and that’s where I got most of my post school run in. The crazy stuff you remember, we played in a league there, we had one adult on our team, he wore sweats, we went out after the championship game for pizza and he ordered beer, we thought he was fifty, he was probably 28. That was such a crazy gym, it would pull all the high school guys from Lowell and some SI guys in, but we’d also get the football players in and wrestlers etc. I couldn’t even imagine playing there if I was an adult. But we loved it, I used to play with the guys from Lowell for hours, talking shit, fouling, cussing, cheating, anything, then you’d go get on the bus and head home.
Gav got access to a higher class of hoops than I did. We had someone with a key to a gym down in the mission and a couple times a month we’d get to go in there. There it was all varsity guys from all over the city and nobody really knew us. We were both from the nice part of the Richmond district and would only see these guys in season maybe. So one night we go in and I get picked before Gav, just on the basis of being taller. All our friends gave him shit but really it was just the whole looks were deceiving thing. You never know who you’re playing with till you see them play. I played well that night, but Gav was a monster.
That’s one of the lessons I’ve gotten from damn near 30 years of pickup hoops. You don’t know a guy till you see him move. There’s something about the way someone who can play moves around the court that just speaks for itself. There’s also never been any hiding from who you are when you play basketball. The person you are most deeply inside is the one that comes out. When everything you’re doing has to be done with half an eye on who you’re playing against and the other half on who you’re playing with, you don’t have another half to be anything but who you really are. Cheat on calls, people know, help your teammates when they get beat, people know, blame someone else for a pass or a turnover or a missed shot, we all know. It’s accountability in it’s fastest delivered form. I’ve been every one of the good and the bad in my time, I don’t think you can grow up and change and not be. If anyone tells you they’ve never had a bad moment playing hoops they never played enough or never grew.
That first time you walk into a new court becomes a new relationship. It becomes a new set of relationships. You move to a new city, find a court, then find another, then another. Do it until you find your place. Because that’s the day you start knowing where you are.