Returning home to my dad’s house on the Night Bus was a transition. I felt like a different boy. And to be certain, I was. I went from being a timid kid who thought he was lazy, worthless, and stupid, to a kid who was coming out of his shell, beginning to gain confidence in who he was and his place in junior high and the greater world. I was able to dress and wear my hair like the other kids in my class for the first time in my life, and I no longer feared getting beaten every day.
My dad being out of work meant that he was home a lot, when he wasn’t out plowing driveways or doing the odd construction job. My aunt Nancy, his younger sister, had moved in with us, which helped with expenses. We only had a two-bedroom trailer, but we converted the dining room next to the kitchen to a small bedroom for her by putting a curtain across the full width of the trailer. Nancy was closer to my age than my dad’s age. When I was 13, she was 22. My dad was 34. She worked in Traverse City, a half-hour drive away, at Grand Traverse Auto. She was a secretary, and she would come home, telling us stories about working in “the city,” And to us, Traverse City was just that. Mesick had a stable population of 376, according to the 1970 census. Traverse City had over 18 THOUSAND people living there!
We travelled to Traverse City fairly often, especially when it was time to do laundry. My grandma had a small washing machine, but no dryer, and in the summer, she would do the wash and hang it all on a line outside. It came back in smelling like fresh Michigan air. But in the winter, we would make weekly trips to the corner laundromat at the end of 16 Road to use the coin operated machines. But about once a month, we would go to Traverse City to do laundry at one of the big laundromats. There was one on the south side of town, right next to a 7-11. While the loads of wash were running, I became introduced to the Big Gulp. I would have an occasional can of Coke at home, or Mountain Dew if I was working for the Amidons. Otherwise, I was allowed two 12-oz. cans of Meijer-brand soda per day. But on laundry day, I got to drink 32 ounces of whatever I wanted! I was high-energy by the time the wash was ready for the dryers.
These trips were also fun, because they would include lunch at a restaurant. My grandma, my aunt, and I would settle in at Chicken Coop quite often, which was just down Hammond Road. We could eat our whole lunch while the wash was in the dryer. But it was a special occasion when we ate Chinese food.
What you have to understand about the 1970s is that Chinese food in America was less Chinese than it even is now. La Choy was a brand that you would find in stores, and my mother had been a fan of La Choy Chicken Chop Suey. There were even painful commercials that sang, “La Choy makes Chinese food swing American!” But there was a Chinese restaurant in Traverse City that served food closer to what we have now in American Chinese restaurants and my grandma loved it. Born in 1914, my grandma had dropped out of school after 10th grade to help support her family. She worked in a Chinese-owned restaurant in Battle Creek in 1930, which of course was during the Great Depression. She had a special affinity for the culture and the food, but she had never made any in my presence because my grandpa and dad, I’m sorry to say, called it “Chink food,” They were pretty free with their racism against the Chinese, and every other non-white race, for that matter. My dad claimed that he had tried Chinese food but it “tore him up” and would insist on a cheeseburger. So, when it was my grandma, my aunt, and me, we were free to get what we wanted. That patriarchy thing ran strong.
My first love was egg rolls. Mind you, I hated cooked cabbage. HATED it. Whenever my mom made it, it stunk up the whole kitchen. But in an egg roll, I found it delightful. And when I discovered hot mustard, I was done. I could live on egg rolls for the rest of my life. I tried everything they put in front of me, but I always ordered egg rolls. This tradition helped me bond with my grandmother even more, if that was possible. It was legitimizing something she loved that the other males in the family made no secret of despising.
Coincidentally, a comic book that had been released at about the same time as my return from my mother’s house put quite a different spin on race. All-New Collector’s Edition C-55 came out in January, and it quickly became one of my favorite comic books ever. Once again, it was one of these great treasury-sized comics, and the cover, to this day, is still my favorite of all time.
All-New Collector’s Edition C-55
This cover, by artist Mike Grell, was something I studied for hours. As you can see, it’s a double cover, illustrating on both front and back, and on the front cover, you see Superboy in the sweet spot, as he should be, as the titular character. But the composition also puts Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl, and Cosmic Boy, who I knew were the three founding members of the Legion of Super-Heroes. Oh, sure, Karate Kid is in the background there, too, but I assumed that was because he was popular enough to merit his own short-lived title back in those days. Now, the problem is, all those yellow guys they’re fighting? They’re Lunarites, and this is going to get a bit ugly.
Yikes.
In this comic, the future has been altered so that the United Nations disbanded in 1978, and various nations went to war. The “Chinese Empire” left for the moon and over the next thousand years, became the Lunarites. The writers of the Legion books had long had a whitewashing problem, as just a few years before this, they explained that all the Black people in the future had gone to an otherdimensional island called Marzal that was only sometimes on Earth, off the coast of Africa. DC Comics was going a long way to explain why there weren’t any people of other races depicted in the 30th century setting of the Legion of Super-Heroes, and they did it poorly. I’m hoping that this coloring was supposed to be understood as some kind of evolutionary change, but it’s possible that it was just laziness.
Regardless of the racial undertones, the cover of this book was a textbook in anatomy, perspective, and inking, especially feathering and hatching. I learned a lot while studying it.
Possibly the worst film I ever saw in my life was one my dad took me to see in Traverse City at the State Theater, downtown. On the heels of Star Wars, we would go see anything with a science fiction-sounding title, and Starship Invasions fit the bill. Starring Robert Vaughn and Christopher Lee, this movie stank up the place.
Movie poster
I am just going to quote this summary by viewer Paul White: “Captain Rameses and his Legion of the Winged Serpent brigade are out to claim Earth for their dying race. Out to save Earth is an alien guard patrol located in the Bermuda Triangle, the League of Races. LOR leaders warn Rameses that he’s breaking galactic treaty rules. The alien villain responds by launching an invasion which telepathically drives Earthlings to suicide. The LOR implore UFO expert Professor Duncan to help them. Eventually, the two alien forces battle. Will the Earth be saved?”
Yes, you read that correctly: “…telepathically drives Earthlings to suicide.” This is one of two things that stand out in my memory about this film. A terrible-looking flying saucer, shooting little bolts of lightning at our planet from its central antenna. Cut down to Earth to see people killing themselves. This horrifying scene, and the worst robot effect ever made. I could literally have made a better robot in my Grandpa McClain’s garage. Zero stars, both thumbs down, and the only reason I bring it up is because it was so horrifyingly bad.
But I got to see a movie with my dad, so everything was okay in the end. We laughed all the way home.
One reason I didn’t see my mother very much after I went to live with my dad was that we lived so far apart. My mother and stepfather had settled on living in the upper peninsula of Michigan, and my dad and I were in Mesick to stay. It was a three and a half hour trip by car. What you have to realize is that in 1977, there was a nationwide speed limit of 55 miles per hour that was instituted during the Ford administration in 1974 in response to the oil embargo the nation was facing at the time. That made trips back then interminably long. So, my mom and stepfather picked me up on their way down to their parents’ houses for Christmas and brought me back with them for visitation on the way back. I got traded for my brother on the way down, so he got to spend some quality time with my dad and grandparents without me there. We picked him up on the way back north.
As I mentioned before, my stepfather’s parents were great, treating me exactly the same as any of the other grandchildren. Christmas at Steve’s parents’ house was fun, with a houseful of step-cousins. I still remember the clamor over Star Wars among the kids. Each of them was given a little knockoff wind-up robot to play with. There were no Star Wars toys for Christmas that first year, but the market was definitely there. We duelled with lightsabers in the form of gift wrapping tubes. I wasn’t given a wind-up robot, but I had fun watching the younger kids play with theirs. I was the oldest, and that year, I was given not a child’s gift, but a young adult’s gift. I received my first tape recorder!
JC Penney cassette recorder
It may not seem like a big deal now, but it sure was then. My step-grandmother had been thoughtful enough to include a three-pack of cassette tapes and off I went. I recorded everything that was happening, using the included condenser microphone. And as was usual back then, my imagination soared with ideas of how I could use this wonderful gift. When we arrived at my Grandma B’s house, I asked my cousin Peter if we could record some of the old-time radio shows from my Uncle Mike’s reel-to-reel player that we had listened to a few years before. I went home with a cassette tape with War of the Words on the first side and half of the second side, and the origin of The Lone Ranger following that. I’m pretty sure everyone was wishing they had bought me an earphone too at that point, because I was playing it non-stop.
On the way back up to the upper peninsula, we stopped to pick up Jeff, and I ran to my room to retrieve my earphone. It was just a little one-piece earphone that came in a small leather case. I had bought it at a garage sale for 10 cents, but it worked great! Now I could listen to my recordings and not bother anyone. I grabbed some batteries from my grandparents too, so I could listen to it in the car. Thank heavens for prepared grandparents. They always had extra batteries handy.
I had a nice week with my mom and brother and sister. I treasured those few moments we got each year, being together as a family. My mom surprised me with my very own track suit. It was blue, with red and white stripes down the sleeves and the sides of the pants. And she embroidered my name on the back. I thought that was super cool.
When it was time to go home again, they had a surprise for me. I was going to go Greyhound…by myself. The plan was for Steve to take me to the bus station in St. Ignace, a 45-minute drive, and then I would ride to Cadillac on the bus, where my dad would pick me up. The problem was, the bus left at midnight. I was kind of scared. What if I fell asleep? I’d never stayed up all night before. They assured me that it would be all right. So, armed with fresh batteries for my tape recorder and the novelization of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I got on the bus in the middle of the night and rode five hours home. It’s only 4.5 hours now, but you can drive faster now than you could then.
The Route of the Night Bus
Can you imagine sending your newly-minted 13-year-old son on a bus by himself without even a cell phone or even identification in this day and age? It was an adventure. The bus driver assured me I could go to sleep and that he would wake me up in Cadillac, but it was too exciting.
The Greyhound SceniCruiser
The bus trip was uneventful. My dad picked me up early in the morning, and we went to the Big Boy for breakfast before heading back to Mesick. I asked my dad for a quarter to play the jukebox at the table. That’s one of the cool things about Big Boy back in the 70s; there was a mini-jukebox at every single booth. You could play three songs for a quarter. Fleetwood Mac was on the jukebox, as well as the disco version of the Star Wars theme by Meco. That was hilarious.
Tabletop Juke Box at Big Boy
I started going over the menu, since this was such a rare treat to have breakfast at Big Boy. We’d shared many a lunch and dinner there, but never breakfast. My eye was drawn to something that sounded wonderful: the Mexican Fiesta Omelet. It was an omelet filled with chili and American cheese, with diced raw onions and tomatoes on top. Its origins as Mexican are sketchy. It’s questionable whether chili originated in Texas or northern Mexico. Be that as it may, that’s what it was called on the menu. The flavors of this omelet exploded in my mouth. It was one of the most wonderful dishes I’d ever eaten. And it came with hash browns? So much the better! To this day, it remains one of my favorite foods.
When I told my dad that I had a recording of the very first radio episode of The Lone Ranger, he got excited. The Lone Ranger had always been his favorite fictional character. We used to get up at 6:30 in the morning on Sundays just to watch it on TV together. When we got home to the trailer, I crashed for a while, and then when I played the radio show for him and it was fun to see him as excited about something as I was. He was equally excited that now we didn’t have to go to my grandparent’s house to listen to music. We could listen to cassette tapes at home. It’s funny, growing up without a lot of money. You tend not to take things for granted after that.
While I liked spending time with my mom and brother and sister, I was now finally back home again where I belonged. I had a home where I was safe and warm in my tiny room with my sleeping bag. I had a snowmobile. I had my comic books and trading cards and magazines. But most importantly, I had my dad, my grandparents, my aunt, my dog, and my friends and teachers. And I had just traveled a couple of hundred miles, alone. The timid, beaten boy who had gone to live with his dad a year before was gone. At the end of 1977, I was someone else, entirely. And I liked him.
I had spent 11 solid months living with my dad, and at last, as of December 5, I was officially a teenager! This was the first birthday I’d spent with my dad and Grandma and Grandpa McClain since I turned six. My grandma made a cake, of course, and on Monday night, we had dinner, followed by cake and ice cream. My dad had unfortunately lost his job at Suburban Furniture earlier in the fall, and had started a new job selling Case tractors at a dealership, and by winter, that job had evaporated as well. He was now doing odd construction jobs for our neighbor and landlord, Dick Amidon, and was helping my grandpa plow driveways.
My grandpa had a 1966 Ford Bronco with a big yellow plow on the front, and spent his retirement winters plowing driveways for people. In northern Michigan, snow fell much heavier than it usually did in other places, and there was always work to do. He’d get up at 4:30 in the morning and plow until seven or so, and then he’d go down to the restaurant for his usual coffee and roll. While my aunt Nancy lived in an apartment in Traverse City, her malamute/samoyed mix named Nikki stayed with my grandparents. Grandpa would take Nikki plowing with him. She loved riding alongside him in the Bronco and kept him company. I remember my grandpa teaching me to plow. It was a blast. First of all, the Bronco was a stick shift like our van, so there was a lot to do besides put the Bronco in gear and move forward. It was clutch, shift, gas, brake, clutch, reverse, clutch, gas, brake, clutch. It was not a boring activity!
After my birthday dinner, my dad had a special surprise for me. He and Grandpa and Grandma gave me a snowmobile! My dad and Grandpa had bought a used Arctic Cat Panther that had been in disrepair due to an engine fire. Together, they got it running enough for me to use. They repainted the engine cowl purple and presented it to me. I was near tears. I had wanted a snowmobile for my whole life. For those readers who don’t know, snowmobiling is a way of life in Northern Michigan. I had been riding snowmobiles with my family since I could sit on one. Usually I rode with my grandma because she wouldn’t go too fast and scare me. Don’t laugh. Snowmobiles can really fly, some easily doing over 100 miles per hour. My Panther topped out at about 50, which was good enough for me. I couldn’t wait to take it out for a long ride, but with basketball practice and games, that would have to wait for the weekend.
A lot of my friends were in band, and though I loved music, I had never been allowed to join band. Try not to be too surprised. My dad, of course, encouraged me to join band. The band teacher, Mrs. Carnahan, said that I had the lips of a tuba player, and started me out in a near-soundproof practice room, learning to play baritone. She explained that baritone music also played using bass clef, and so reading the music would be good training for tuba. It was also a lot easier to carry home for the half-mile walk to the trailer.
A rare photo of me in 7th grade! Ladybug is assisting in baritone practice.
I practiced for about a month, and then started on the tuba, and was able to join the rest of the junior high band soon after. I loved playing in band. The whole idea of listening to what others were doing and then contributing your part in concert, if you will, made me feel a lot less alone and odd. And when I started playing tuba, I could hear my horn filling the room with rich sound. I was the only tuba player, so I often carried the bass line by myself. There was nowhere to hide if I made a mistake. I sat in the back row with Margaret Saxton and Angie Alberts, who played baritone saxophone. And Margaret didn’t punch me anymore, so band was a win-win all around. The band was doing a fundraiser that winter, selling World’s Finest chocolate bars. I was given a case of them to take home and try to sell for a dollar each. And I knew just how I was going to get out of my own neighborhood where Kellie Amidon, who played trombone, would have a stranglehold on the market.
On Saturday, I dragged my snowmobile out of the garage, primed it, pulled the cord, fired the engine up, and off I went. Zoom! I drove the snowmobile across the back field and into the woods where we had been snowmobiling since I was six. I took it across a scary ridge and down into the Glengarry area out in the rural area that no one would ever attempt to cover on foot, where no one else had even tried to sell candy. I sold the entire box in one afternoon! I broke down the empty carton, stored it under my seat, and drove my snowmobile into town. You could do that with snow-covered roads. My mom had sent me a check for my birthday, and earlier in the week we had opened my first bank account. I had deposited five dollars of it in the bank and kept the other five dollars to spend. I went to Jack’s market and bought Firestorm #1. I couldn’t believe it. A new #1 issue of a hero I’d never heard of! I had just missed the beginning of Black Lightning earlier in the summer, and I was not about to let this one slip past me!
Firestorm #1
I bought the comic book, a Marathon bar, and a pack of Star Wars trading cards, total cost 75 cents plus tax. I didn’t want to spend all my money at once! I raced back home, put my snowmobile away, and went inside Grandma and Grandpa’s house to enjoy my finds. This was the quintessential experience I think of fondly whenever I remember this part of my life. I sat in my grandma’s recliner with headphones on, listening to music, while reading and eating a candy bar.
Thanksgiving weekend arrived, and I thought I was finally going to get to spend one with Grandma and Grandpa McClain. I was wrong. Part of my mother’s and father’s visitation agreement was that I would spend the major holidays with my mother and my brother would stay with my father. So, on their way down from Naubinway, in the upper peninsula of Michigan, they stopped in Mesick and swapped sons. Jeff stayed with my dad and I went with Mom, Steve, and my sister Wendy down to west Michigan to spend the holiday with their parents.
Somehow, it always worked out the same way. Steve was the oldest of six brothers and sisters. His family celebrated Thanksgiving during the day, while my mother, the second oldest of four, celebrated with her mother and siblings in the evening. The logistics of family holidays always fascinated me. Mom and Steve would leave from work on the Wednesday before, pick me up and drop Jeff off at around 8:30 or 9:00 at night. Then they would complete the three-hour drive, ending up at Steve’s parents’ house around midnight. Then, all the Hammonds would stand around in a circle in the kitchen, drinking and catching up, while we kids would go to bed in our respective spots. We all had assigned places in the old farmhouse and we knew where to go.
Everyone in Steve’s family was always kind to me. I can’t think of a bad thing that I would ever say about them. They loved my mother, and out of respect for her, they treated us kids well. We would literally wake up to the sound of roosters crowing in the morning. Steve’s dad had been a farmer, but then worked for DeNooyer Chevrolet as some kind of mechanic. I knew that very well, because “The Stick” that Steve beat me with was a promotional item that he had gotten from there. It was a 14″ ruler because DeNooyer would go the extra distance, or some such. I doubt you could even read any lettering left on the wooden side of The Stick, because it had been blistered into my rear end so many times. Steve’s mom was an acerbic lady, and much to Steve’s consternation, smoked. Steve was a rabid anti-smoker, and railed against anyone who did that, especially my dad.
We got up in the morning on Thanksgiving Day, and the women, my mom included, would start breakfast. Mom and Steve always brought milk, bread, and eggs so that they wouldn’t be putting Steve’s parents out too much by feeding us. The men would all go out deer hunting, because deer season was in full swing by Thanksgiving Day. I wanted to go too, even though I was still only 12. I had taken hunter safety, and I had hunting clothes, but you had to be 14 to get your deer hunting license. It dawned on me that day that I would miss next year, too. Gun season ended on November 30 and I wouldn’t turn 14 until December. I was mad. I wanted to be part of the group of men very badly, but they wouldn’t let me. “Maybe next year,” they said.
A word on hunting: I know there are people who are dead set against it. Sorry, I’m not one of you. Steve’s family subsisted on hunting. At his family’s house, I had eaten rabbit, squirrel, raccoon, deer, and just about anything else that walked on four legs. I’m pretty sure we ate opossum once, but I can’t swear to it. They ate what they killed and I just don’t see anything wrong with that.
While we kids would keep ourselves busy and out of the women’s hair, they prepared Thanksgiving dinner. After putting the younger kids, Wendy and a few of her cousins, on the floor in front of the TV to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, I found myself in the den, as I always did, pulling out the coverless copy of Batman #203 that I kept stashed there. I read it cover-to-cover, as I always did, put it carefully away again, and then looked for something else to read. Steve’s mother always had a treasure trove of trashy novels, but I would occasionally find something interesting. And I did. I found a paperback copy of Peter Benchley’s The Deep. I had read Jaws when I was a year younger, even after being traumatized by peeking at a particularly gory scene in the movie from the back of the station wagon when I was 10. Despite that, I liked Benchley’s writing. I asked if I could borrow The Deep to read it, and Steve’s mother laughed at my being somewhat precocious, a 12-year-old asking to read a fairly serious bestseller like that, and she told me that I could have the book. I couldn’t believe it! I thanked her and off into a corner I went.
By the time the men came back, empty-handed but in good spirits (they drank while hunting too), the football game was about to start. Watching the Detroit Lions play on Thanksgiving Day was a Michigan tradition, and it was no different in the Hammond household. I watched the game too, though to be honest, I had only a rudimentary understanding of football, thanks to hanging out at the games in Mesick, and cheered for the Lions as well. The Bears beat the Lions 31-14. I don’t actually remember the score; I just looked it up.
After a delicious turkey dinner, I helped clean up the dishes just like I did at home, and then we packed up to go to my Grandma B’s house. If there was anything better to my 12-year-old growing self than Thanksgiving dinner, it was two Thanksgiving dinners. Grandma B only lived a short 35-minute drive away in Otsego, and I looked forward to seeing my own aunts and uncles and cousins. Everyone was usually already there when we arrived, and we split off into our peer groups, as usual. I was the oldest, then Eric followed, younger by only 10 weeks. Then Peter and Cathy, just a bit more than a year younger. Then came the second wave, with Scott, my absent brother Jeff, and Dennis, with Wendy and Melissa bringing up the rear. My cousin Masami was in their group too, but was not often with us even for holidays. Her father, my uncle Norman, was in the army and was stationed in Japan, where she was born. Uncle Norman had married a Japanese woman, my Aunt Naeo, so Masami was half-Japanese.
Eric, Peter, and I would always read comic books or play pretend games, but we were getting older now, and such games were beneath us. So, we just kind of hung out, talked about the usual pre-teen woes and stuff, and probably Star Wars. Everyone talked about Star Wars. We kept an eye on the younger kids as they played out in the back yard. This was a different experience compared to times past, when I had to curb my behavior for fear of Steve. He had done nothing even remotely threatening toward me the whole time we had been together. I didn’t trust it, though, so I kept my behavior in check anyway.
After dinner, we said our goodbyes and headed back to Steve’s parents’. There wasn’t enough room in Grandma B’s house for us to stay. On Saturday morning, after Steve and his dad came back from an early hunt, we loaded up the car and headed to Battle Creek. Mom wanted to do some Christmas shopping and go to the movies. She asked me what I wanted for my birthday, which was coming up in 10 days, and instead of choosing some fanciful thing I knew she would never buy, I asked for something sensible: a digital watch. She asked me what I meant, and I explained that there were now watches with the same kind of LED (light-emitting diode) display that her calculator had. We found one at a reasonable price and she bought it for me.
We had all seen Star Wars a number of times, and Smokey and the Bandit as well. But there was a new release from the guy who had directed Jaws, Steven Spielberg. It was called Close Encounters of the Third Kind. We were all kind of excited to see it, and my mom got us a big bucket of popcorn to share and had me sit by her. I had missed my mom a lot, and was glad to be able to spend time with her outside of all the holiday festivities. She had to poke me a few times during the movie, though, because I kept checking the time. You had to press a button on the side of the watch. It didn’t just stay on all the time. I couldn’t help it, the novelty of the watch took over. If you pressed the button twice, the date would come up. If you pressed it a third time, there was a running count of seconds, which would remain unless you pressed the button a fourth time. The directions warned against doing this very much because it would drain the battery. Eventually, I got settled in, but I still remember thinking, excitedly, that we lived in the future!
Texas Instruments digital watch
There were a few times when I caught my mom sniffling and even tearing up during the movie. I didn’t think that it was a particularly sad movie, but later on, I figured out why. She missed me. And darned if I didn’t think about her every time I checked my watch.
Most of the autumn passed with me still feeling like an outsider, someone without a place in the community I called home. Basketball changed all that. I had arrived in Mesick too late in the summer to join a new Little League baseball team, so the kids in my class never saw that I could play sports. Most of our PE time was spend playing either dodgeball, volleyball, or floor hockey. We even did trampoline jumping. But when basketball came around, I wasn’t very good.
I had never played organized basketball outside of one practice in sixth grade in the upper peninsula. I had asked if I could join the basketball team, and Mom and Steve said I could, as long as I kept up with my daily chores. Well, I didn’t shovel the driveway cleanly enough for Steve’s tastes, so I was forced to quit after the first practice. It was a trap even Admiral Ackbar could have seen coming, but I was too naive to know that I had been set up to fail. They just didn’t want to pick me up from basketball practice.
When it came time to try out for basketball in Mesick, I had little experience. I had no shooting form whatsoever. I pushed the ball with both hands together in front of me. The only thing I had going for me is that I was tall and I could jump. I even shot layups off the wrong foot. But after practice one day, one of the eighth graders took me aside and taught me to shoot, how to support the ball with my left hand and shoot with my right, with my middle finger centered on the ball, and to follow all the way through with a loose wrist at the end to put the proper backspin on the ball. It was simple, but it worked. My grandma agreed to buy me a basketball as an early birthday present, and I knew which one I needed.
1977 Spalding Basketball Ad, art by Jack Davis
This ad appeared on almost every comic book in 1977, and it was effective. I got a rubber ball and I would lie down on my back and simulate the mechanics of the shot I had learned, over and over and over again. I would probably practice that a thousand times a day, lying on the bed in my tiny bedroom. I would dribble it all the way to school (I walked) and back.
I know I’ve mentioned this before, but believe me, it bears repeating. I sweated. A lot. I had to be careful of how active I got in the gym after lunch, when we would gather to blow off steam, because I would pit out my shirts in just a few minutes. I tried to avoid playing basketball full-tilt, instead playing Horse or Pig, or just shooting free throws. But at basketball practice, there was a lot of running and there was simply no way to avoid it. It didn’t matter to anyone because I was playing hard. It wasn’t until we had a game one time that I even had to think about it.
Our uniforms consisted of simple orange t-shirts with black numbers on them. Nothing fancy for junior high. We wore whatever shorts we owned. For me, that was cutoff jeans. I had never owned any other kind of shorts. And coincidentally, the conference our school was in had two other schools whose colors were orange and black. That’s right, three out of eight teams had the same team colors. Well, we were playing one of those teams, Kingsley, and their eighth graders wore the same uniform t-shirts that ours did. So, to be different, our eighth graders had to wear our seventh grade uniforms after the game was over. I gave up my orange t-shirt, only to have the eighth grade coach hold it up in front of the whole crowd, showing the gigantic dark circles of sweat that I had left under the arms. I was embarrassed and angry. What else was I supposed to do, not play as hard as I could? That was (and is) not me. When I went to do something, I went all out. I left it all on the court. And if I was going to be humiliated for this effort, I was done. This soured the whole basketball experience for me.
After the season ended, I didn’t want anything to do with basketball, ever again. I didn’t even attend the season-ending banquet; in fact, I didn’t tell anyone in my family they were having one. The next Monday at school, all of my teammates were on me, asking why I didn’t go to the banquet. I said I didn’t want to play basketball anymore, and there wasn’t much point. They told me that I had received the “Most Improved Player” award in my absence. Me? I had won an award? They reassured me that I had done a great job during the season and that I was as much a part of the team as anyone else. I had found acceptance.
I went to talk to the coach and he was also surprised that I hadn’t come to the banquet. I explained that I didn’t think I was any good, and he told me that I had improved so much that I had gone from being almost the worst player to the third-best player in just six weeks! Everything about being embarrassed by the sweat stains was instantly forgotten. That’s how important honest praise was to me back then. I thanked him profusely and promised to try even harder next year.
And how did that turn out? Well, just six years later…
Never underestimate the power of sincere praise for a kid with low self-esteem.
