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.
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.
