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Inside NCR
The sky out here in the Midwest is
slate gray today. Winter has found new force, a final push of wind and freezing
temperatures. Enough to turn the thoughts to Lent. Or to the blossoming,
through this grim chill, of March Madness.
OK, so let this be true confession time. One of my passions, not
so secret if you hang around me in the wintertime, is basketball.
Blame, if youd like, Greg Pierce and his workplace
spirituality (see NCR, Feb. 2), that reach of the holy beyond the usual
places. The realization popped into place, contemplating his idea, that
basketball is thoroughly Catholic in my Catholic imagination, associated with
all the holiest places of my younger years.
My introduction to Catholic high school was via a basketball game
circa 1956, when I was about 8, and that school, St. Pius X, was even younger.
It was a special team (yes, I can still remember the names of some of the
starting five) that went 20-something-and-0 before losing and then on to the
state playoffs.
I was hooked.
To this day I can smell the faint mixture of sweat and the old
Voit rubber ball being pounded smooth on the blacktop behind St. Aloysius
Church and School in Pottstown, one of the gritty cities of Southeastern
Pennsylvania.
I can feel as vividly as yesterday the sting of cold air on lungs
pushed to near bursting. I can feel it still, the rhythm of a certain ball
movement, in crisp angles, maybe three, four guys touching it before it hit
that player, that spot, that you knew would end in a made shot. My reverie
calls up the fast break that could have been calculated on a drafting table,
where everything works: stop dribble at the foul line, hit the cutter filling
the lane from left or right, and a teammate finishing, with grace, as fine as
in our minds it could have been Walt Frazier or Bob Cousy or Oscar (The
Big O) Robertson. Those moments, like saving grace, can wash away all the
clunky times the ball rimmed out or bounced off a foot.
To say I eventually played for that high school would be
overstating the case. I sat a lot of pine for two years before my short, skinny
self was finally and unalterably cut. But in the minds eye, even the
sting of that cut melts away at the memory of playing, if for only a time, on
real hardwood, of getting a real school uniform, of the privilege of hearing
the ring of a dribbled basketball in an empty gym before the start of an early
morning practice.
Only a few high school games remain on the schedule out here. Then
the NCAA tournament cranks up. Im ready. Gray days in March do this to
me.
-- Tom Roberts
My e-mail address is troberts@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, March 2,
2001
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