By SCOTT SAALMAN
Scaramouch
March Madness is here, a time when people in these parts are bonkers for basketball.
I could not care less – sacrilegious sentiment, I know, for someone living in Indiana 55 of his 57 years.
That I’m 5-foot-6 might explain this indifference. Sometimes I’m 5-foot-7. It just depends on who I’m trying to impress.
To make the game more inclusive for us short guys, during play, the basket should automatically raise higher and/or drop lower depending on the height of the approaching ball handler. You can’t tell me such technology doesn’t exist.
It’s not that my life has been totally void of basketball. I was an avid IU Hoosier fan once, but lost the passion when Bobby Knight left. Watching IU without Knight was like trying to imagine Jaws without the shark. The game lost its teeth.
My first basketball goal was a First Communion gift, the wooden post nothing more than a trimmed telephone pole (the backboard was also wood), and perhaps because of the lingering cardboard aftertaste from the inaugural Host placed on my nervous tongue earlier that morning, my basketball goal, which brought to mind a wooden cross, was rich with religious symbolism as I airballed my first backyard shots. I often blamed my missed jump shots on sudden visions of Jesus hanging from the net, the orange rim a thorny crown.
In religion class, when forced by Sister Ernestine to read the Book of Mark, my brain couldn’t help but twist Jesus’ words: “If any of you wants to be my follower, you must turn from your selfish ways, take up your cross, and follow me . . . but first, how about some hoops?”
Supposedly, my dad was a standout middle-school player. His ambition was altered though when he broke a foot during scrimmage. Likely, he was relieved. Basketball was interfering with his true passion: Smoking cigarettes beneath the bleachers. Had the Indiana High School Athletic Association added a smoking team to its interscholastic competitions, I think Dad would’ve gone pro. Mom also smoked. Both parents were hellbent on stunting my growth, as if their dream was to have a son sit the bench.
I was guilted into trying out for the seventh-grade team at our Catholic school. Mom took me to buy sneakers and shorts – and horror of horrors, my first jockstrap – while I secretly prayed that the necessary sizes of each were sold out, thus disqualifying me from tryouts. The only jockstrap remaining was way too big, and I feared I would trip on the court.
Tryouts involved dribbling around demonic mazes of cafeteria chairs. When we actually attempted a real game, though, I froze in mid-dribble without those chairs being on the basketball court. The chairs had represented the perfect opponent for me, inanimate objects without arms and hands to steal the ball. Now, there were actual humans playing defense. Suddenly, basketball wasn’t fun.
I made it to the final day of cuts. I likely would have made the squad had it not been for my buddy Greg. He was cut early but was still part of the team – as STUDENT MANAGER. Greg convinced me that the consolation prize of being STUDENT MANAGER was the way to go. You still took the bus rides and were in the team photo, but you didn’t have to shower with the boys. “More importantly,” he said, with an it’s-good-to-be-king air about him and a devilish Wilt the Stilt glint in his eye, “Girls LOVE student managers.”
I intentionally missed my layups, bobbled my dribbles, and subsequently, I was invited by the coach to be ASSISTANT STUDENT MANAGER UNDER GREG.
Greg never mentioned the word ASSISTANT to me beforehand. In essence, I had sold my basketball soul to him. Even worse, it became very apparent early on that girls weren’t fond of ASSISTANT student managers after all.
In high school, I played on an intramural team called Taylor’s Pest Control, the only team to have a mascot. A friend wore a full-sized rat costume and lumbered up and down the court, looking like a crazed, mutant rodent. Sometimes, if someone needed a breather, he would sub. Unfortunately, the costume’s humongous rat head was as inflexible as a deep sea diver’s helmet, making it hard to see incoming passes. Our mascot should’ve been nicknamed “Turnover.” Even an animatronic Chuck E. Cheese would’ve displayed better on-court dexterity.
When my own son turned eight, I succumbed to the Hoosier dad obligation of buying a basketball goal, one of those Walmart beauties with the water-filled base, wheels, and adjustable height feature. As he grew taller, so did the rim. That’s how we Hoosiers measure the height of our children – the rest of the world resorts to pencil marks on doorframes. The goal hogged half the driveway.
Later, when it was no longer cool to play H-O-R-S-E with me, I willingly put my Hoosier identity on the chopping block: I sold the basketball goal to create extra parking space.
In a state where basketball is religion, the sport has never been a big part of my life. That’s not to say I don’t experience insatiable guilt over my act of Hoosier heresy, especially when I hear the neighbor boy down the street dribbling, each ball bounce sounding like the beat of a tell-tale heart.
Banish me, ye Hoosier brethren, if ye must.
Consider this my mea culpa.
Email Scott at scottsaalman@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @SaalmanScott.
Scott Saalaman did it again; he made me laugh in his story about Hoosier Basketball starting out with a perfect solution for short people playing the sport, “To make the game more inclusive for us short guys, during play, the basket should automatically raise higher and/or drop lower depending on the height of the approaching ball andler. You can’t tell me such technology doesn’t exist.”
Sharing his anxiety about finding a jock strap that fit was hilarious especially with the comment, “The only jockstrap remaining was way too big, and I feared I would trip on the court.” And what a Hoosier Redneck way of describing how Hoosiers measure the height of their children in using the height of a basketball rim instead of marking on a door frame using a pencil. And with all seriousness, IU’s Basketball Days are not the same without Bobby Knight.