Character Driven (14 page)

One of the toughest things for most young players to master is dribbling the basketball. That takes a lot of concentration initially and good fine-motor skills. Because of that, as a defender you want to be up on your man the majority of the time. From that close position, you can bother his ballhandling. One of the first things we all learn on offense is to keep the ball in the triple-threat position—so that you can shoot, pass, or dribble left or right. As a defender your job is to interfere with your man’s ability to do any of those three things and to also dictate which of the three your man does. Ideally, if nothing else, you should be the one forcing the offensive player to go in the direction you want him to with your defensive positioning. That’s being offensive on defense. Going back to what I said earlier about my skills as a left-handed player, always figure out which is your opponent’s weak hand and try to get him to use that hand—you have a better chance of making a steal or forcing a dribble turnover or even a bad shot if you have him moving in the direction he’d prefer not to go.

Hand position is also important. It’s too easy to say that you should play defense with your hands up. I hear youth-league coaches yelling all the time, “Hands up! Hands up!” I feel that’s robbing kids of a better understanding of some of the fundamentals. Instead of hands up all the time, developing players should know that it’s hands down (but palms facing up) at waist or knee level when guarding a player dribbling the ball—so that you can make swipes at it; it’s one hand up and one hand down when a player is within shooting range (both to block his vision and to make an attempt at blocking the shot). One of the last key points is to deny, deny, deny! A lot of players, especially poor defenders, forget this. Your man can only score when he has the ball in his possession. It makes sense then to limit the opportunities he has to possess the ball. Denying a pass is a great way to defend. Remembering to move without the ball is important on both offense and defense. If your man doesn’t have it, make sure he doesn’t get it by strategically positioning yourself on the court.

Defense is all about protecting your goal. Basketball evolved a great deal when the goaltending rules were adopted—in the early days and even more recently in international basketball, shots could be interfered with while in the so-called cylinder—and that led to players developing even more skills to keep the other team from scoring. A player has to have a certain mentality and personality to really excel as a defender. Sure, some physical attributes can help—long arms and quick feet come immediately to mind—but it is a question of mind-set as much as mechanics or genetics. I take a lot of pride in my defense, and even though we usually think of great defenders as openly defiant, demonstrative kinds of guys (Dikembe Mutombo and his finger-wagging at anyone whose shot he has blocked after that player dared come in his house), you don’t have to be that kind of player to succeed defensively. Shot blocks are great, but the majority of them come from a shot put up in the lane rather than from a jump shot from the perimeter. They thus generally resulted from a defensive lapse. The highest-percentage shots are dunks and layups and other close-in shots. If the ball got inside that close to the basket, something broke down in the defense that required a shot blocker to come in and save the day. A lot of blocks come after an offensive rebound has been gathered—another defensive lapse—when you see players pogo-sticking up and down and the ball ping-ponging off hands, the backboard, the rim, etc. Again, ideally the ball should have been wrapped up as a result of good defensive position on the floor. The block is kind of a last resort, and the guys on the perimeter, the ones guarding the house from the outside, are responsible for not even letting those intruders into the house.

Off the court, playing defense makes a lot of sense as well. Now that I’m a parent, I’m even more conscious of protecting what’s valuable to me and what’s in my literal and figurative houses. Obviously, all parents want to protect their kids from harm and then do what they can to limit the damage when the seemingly inevitable happens. I don’t mean the inevitable like Tatum’s cancer, though Candace and I felt a fair amount of guilt and anxiety about somehow being responsible for that, but all the other kinds of bumps, bruises, and scrapes that can happen to the ones we love. That’s true whether those hurts are physical, emotional, or spiritual. My parents weren’t the kind to say to us, “You’ll understand when you’re a parent,” in the face of something bad we did or that happened to us. They may have thought it, I don’t know for sure, but at least they didn’t say it much that I remember.

I feel my own kids’ pain acutely myself. That was one of the things that was so hard about dealing with Tatum’s cancer. She couldn’t express any of the anxiety she felt about all the changes in her routine that were a part of her treatment. I know that we winced every time she got any kind of shot or was stuck with a needle for an IV or anything else. It’s always harder I think to be the one watching or caring for the person who is sick or injured than it is to be that person.

Fortunately for me, I didn’t put my parents through too many of those “I wish I could trade places with you” moments. However, back in 1981 when I was seven years old, we had a 1976 Mercury Montego sedan that my mom drove to work. We had picked it up used, and it must have been in a wreck of some kind because even though it was only five years old, it had some issues. For one, the passenger-side door latch would intermittently malfunction. We always had trouble getting it to close properly. My dad tried to fix it, but he couldn’t, so we adapted to it. We knew that once that door got properly closed, none of us would use it. Whoever was in the passenger seat just slid over to the driver’s side, and when we all went somewhere and had to use the backseat, we piled in and out from that side as well. It wasn’t efficient, but it was cost-effective. Dad didn’t need to remind us all the time about not using that door, but he did.

One afternoon, our neighbor Larry was over. A nice enough kid, he was at least five or six years older than me and the rest of my buddies including Clarence Finley, my best friend. Larry didn’t seem to mind playing sports with younger kids, and we didn’t think that much about it either. The only thing that irritated us about Larry was that his parents were strict about his being home in time for dinner, and they ate earlier than the rest of us. That meant that if we were in the middle of a football game or a baseball game or whatever, when Larry’s mother’s voice carried over the housetops calling him to dinner, that meant that the sides would be uneven. Larry’s mother was Hispanic, I think from the Dominican Republic, and I can still hear her lilting voice calling, “Lar-eeeee! Lar-eeee!” Larry also told us that his mom was fanatical about his getting home in time to wash his hands, change his clothes, then get down to the dinner table.

I can’t remember why Larry was at our house, but because he was with me, and my mom had to do some grocery shopping at the Kroger nearby, Larry came along with us. I slid into the front seat, and Larry got in the back from the driver’s side also. But when we got to the store, Larry opened the passenger door to climb out. My mom hadn’t explained to him about the door, and he did what you’d normally do—get out on the side closest to where you’re sitting. When my mom saw Larry standing there trying to close that door and it was not quite catching properly, I saw a look of “Oh my God!” on my mother’s face. She’d done something wrong by not following my dad’s rules about not using that door. He seemed to be the only one who could shut it properly, and the rest of us had no business messing with it. My mom stepped around the car and Larry bucked the door shut with his hip and then my mom checked it. Satisfied that it was fully shut, we went into the store and my mom did her shopping.

My mom explained to Larry about the door and apologized for being so flustered earlier. Larry said he was sorry and that if he’d known, he wouldn’t have opened the door. I don’t know if it was because my mom was feeling bad about things or not, but she bought Larry and me each a can of Dr Pepper from the machine just inside the door before we exited. I was pretty excited. Dr Pepper was a sweet treat and I loved it. We helped my mom put the bags in the trunk, then got in the car, avoiding the passenger-side door. I was still small enough that I couldn’t really see over the dashboard, but I was happily guzzling my soda. I heard my mother say something about all the traffic, then I felt myself lurching forward and bouncing a bit as we exited the store’s parking lot, crossed a lane of oncoming traffic, and made a left turn. I could hear the tires squeal just a bit as we made that turn and I jolted to my right.

The next thing I remember I was tumbling along on the pavement. The first thing I did was look for my can of Dr Pepper, but then I felt something warm and wet and sharply painful on my knee. I looked down and saw that my pants were torn open, and I imagined I saw blood and bone. I started howling, then when I looked up, I thought I was in a Road Runner cartoon. I could see a semitrailer tractor truck bearing down on me. I looked at the wheels and then turned my head to see that my mom had completed the turn to get out of the way of traffic in that lane, and I could hear her screaming out my name, panicked and tearful.

I had the good sense to get out of the road, and I sat on the shoulder crying and crying. I was upset about being hurt, but I was even more upset about seeing my mother borderline hysterical and sobbing. A bunch of cars had stopped, and all these people were looking at us as my mom hugged me and rocked me and looked over my leg. After a minute or so, she scooped me up and put me back in the car, making me sit as close to her as I could. I was probably more scared than hurt, but I could not stop crying. I was practically screaming at the top of my lungs. The whole time, Larry was just staring at us wide-eyed as if we were the craziest family he’d ever been around. As we drove home, I kept staring at that passenger door. It wasn’t fully closed so it was rattling, and I could see just a bit of daylight between the edge of the door and the car’s rear quarter panel.

We dropped off Larry, and my mother carried me in the house and straight to the bathroom. She found some gauze pads and a washcloth and dabbed at my wound, and that set me to howling again. Blood was still oozing, and my mother didn’t have what she needed to properly clean and dress the wound, so she loaded me back in the car and we went back to the Kroger, which also had a pharmacy. It may have been my being back at the scene of the accident, but I was still crying hysterically. Later on I thought that maybe it was as much over the loss of my Dr Pepper as it was over my leg—after all, my body could replace the blood I lost but not that treat. My mom initially wanted me to go in with her, thinking that maybe the pharmacist would recommend what to do for the wound. I was still chest-heaving crying, and either she didn’t want to aggravate my injury by moving me again or she didn’t want to haul a crying child through the store, so she left me in the car. I can still picture the wide-eyed stares of people as they passed by the car and saw me in there with my leg propped up, a bloody bit of cloth pressed against my leg, and me bawling like a newborn baby.

Eventually my mom got me back home and poured some hydrogen peroxide on the wound, which had finally stopped bleeding, then put a bit of Neosporin on it and a gauze pad and wrapped it with tape. Though no longer crying, I was still breathing hard and whimpering, hoping I guess to earn some sympathy points that I could use to my advantage. The worst part was the anticipation of the searing sting from that hydrogen peroxide. I didn’t know what it was, but it sounded nasty, and the only thing I’d ever had put on my cuts and scrapes before was a bit of Bactine or some Mercurochrome. When that hydrogen peroxide bubbled, I was scared, thinking that it was going to eat away at my skin, but strangely it didn’t hurt.

My mom told me to keep my leg elevated and propped some pillows behind me and one behind my knee so that I could be comfortable and rest. I was exhausted from all my crying, not from the trauma of having fallen out of the car. I wanted to get outside and play, and I spent most of my time “resting” scheming about how I could manage that. I also thought about how I didn’t like seeing the lines of worry etched across my mother’s forehead. Normally she was happy and upbeat, and seeing her downcast made me sad. She had given me all kinds of hugs and kisses on the head and face while she was tending to me, and I liked all that attention.

Later that afternoon my dad came back with my sister, and I could hear some murmuring from the kitchen. The sound reminded me of the wasps that had taken up residence in the eaves of our roof—an agitated kind of buzzing. I never knew if my mom told my dad what happened. As an adult, I can see her being upset about our having an unsafe car and him being upset that we’d violated one of the rules he’d laid down about not opening that door. We were the type of family who kept things to ourselves, so it doesn’t surprise me that I have no recollection of my dad coming in to check on me. I also realize today that things could have turned out far worse than they did. My mother didn’t lecture me on being careful or talk about what might have happened. The incident was quietly filed away. In my family we didn’t speculate much, at least out loud, on what might have been or expend much energy on what-ifs. The here and now and what to do about it took precedence over pondering unproductively.

The next day I was back up and around, and I didn’t really give the incident much thought. The car door continued to be a problem, but none of us needed to be reminded that we had to be careful. Sometimes, you have to take one for the team, and that may have been my role that day. While I still have a scar on my knee, it’s barely noticeable. I wasn’t scarred psychologically either. Within the next week or so, I was back to doing daredevil tricks on my bike. I can’t say that I’m an overprotective or worrywart parent as a result of my experiences and knowing what could happen to my kids. Tatum’s cancer put a scare in us, but at least it happened at an age when she won’t have any memory of it. I know from psychology classes that the brain is a pretty amazing tool and that a lot of people who have gone through bad things have no conscious recollection of them. The brain knows what to protect us from without our telling ourselves to forget unpleasant or painful experiences.