Fire in the Straw by Nick Lyons

Author:Nick Lyons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2020-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

10

THE LAST GAME

Sometime in my late forties, I glanced at myself in a mirror and saw that I had been transformed over the years into a hippopotamus. I made a few furtive walks to the Riverside Park basketball courts and in time it came to me that I might have a few games left in me. With faint hopes and dreams, I thought of that time when I weighed 150 and lived for the hoop.

I had bloomed late. Though I had not played any high school ball, I fought my way onto the freshman team at Penn, past recruited ballplayers and men who had made all-state in high school. And then I spent three long years on the varsity as a sub-sub, my chief pleasure watching Ernie Beck, my friend and classmate, make All-America and lead us to the Ivy League championship in 1953. Dick Harter, who later became such a superb coach, was on that team, too, always talking basketball—and I remember Dick Dougherty’s wise body-wit and Don Scanlon’s jumper, some extraordinary left-hand drives by Bobby “Kangaroo” Brooks, Tim Holt’s lithe speed, and the day Howie Dallmar arranged a scrimmage with the Minneapolis Lakers and Slater Martin scooted around Vern Mikkelsen and Jim Pollard and George Mikan and made me feel as though I had two broken legs and blurred vision.

Ernie used to pray and cross himself in the locker room before each game—and then get twenty-five points. I began to pray for Howie Dallmar to put me in. It didn’t work. Once, when our game aired on television, I dribbled downcourt by myself, in those familiar last two minutes when all the subs go in and chaos reigns, and threw the basketball neatly over the backboard. I finally won a full letter in my senior year, and the Bill Wollman Award for the Best Junior Varsity Player (though there wasn’t a JV then); my name is still on a plaque in the Palestra. But in my entire dubious career I scored only three points. All on foul shots. All at Dartmouth, during Winter Carnival. I had given the game every ounce of will and passion I could muster at five foot nine, with no high school experience behind me, but I had not gone nearly so far as my colossal dreams dictated.

In the Army, in my early twenties, I suddenly came into my own, a couple of years too late. If only Howie could have seen me burn up the league in western France that year! At 148 pounds, just out of basic training, I could touch the rim, average twenty-two points a game, and lead a no-bench team from the dingy little post at Croix-Chapeau to a divisional championship at Bordeaux and into the All-France playoffs in Paris. That had been a double elimination tournament and we had played SHAPE first, a team of ringers collected by some egomaniac sports colonel. They had two guys who later made All-America (one of them six foot six), an ex-Globetrotter, and a five-foot-eight kid who jumped center and could dunk.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.