Chapter 3 The Task of Basketball
Being in the seventh grade made me feel from time to time like an actual adult. It was a pleasant if short-lived illusion. My parents allowed me to choose my own clothes, even though the most outrageous fad for boys in 1958 was cotton slacks in colors like red, lime green, and orange. The slacks were not denim material, so the school accepted them as appropriate garb as long as belts were worn and shirts tucked in. Color combinations became pretty dazzling, considering especially that boys think little about color coordination. The result was, for example, orange slacks with a red shirt, which for a boy is fair game as long as the clothes feel good. There was even a brief fashion flirtation that year with the boys wearing their dads’ neckties, especially the wide ones from the 1940’s. I wore my dad’s beige silk tie with red hearts on it. The thing was four inches wide at the base and had to be clipped to my shirt so that the tie wouldn’t slap me to death in a high wind. Now I can understand why teachers rolled their eyes in apparent disgust when we entered classrooms wearing that stuff. We must have looked like the Shrine Circus.
It was at that time that Mrs. Delaney, teacher of Home Economics, convinced the girls to be creative in their grooming and to experiment with hair styles. Carolyn Catterton took this advice to heart by coming to school with a different hair color almost every week. It should be remembered that this was 1958! When Carolyn came to Mr. Erwin’s homeroom with pink hair, he put his hands to his temples, saying in his most serious tone that Carolyn was in true danger of becoming bald. That was the last of the experiments with hair color. Though the other girls continued to try various new hair styles, including the currently chic French twist, no one of them ever approached the level of Carolyn’s bravado by dabbling in unconventional colors. Carolyn was ahead of her time (a head of her time?), but we didn’t know it yet. I remember admiring her for having such a liberal mom and wondering what it might be like to have parents who gave carte blanche for any old thing. It was something I never found out.
As I was leaving his classroom that day, Mr. Leslie stopped me to ask if I might be interested in playing basketball during the lunchtime intramural games between homeroom teams. It seemed that my “yes” to his question about my having basketball shoes sealed the deal before I knew what had occurred. Suddenly I was on Mr. Erwin’s homeroom team and scheduled to begin practice after school the following week. The funny thing was that I knew nothing whatsoever about basketball but was too shy, proud, or embarrassed to ask about how to play. It looked simple enough, so I decided to copy whatever I saw other players doing and fake my way through the season. All I really knew was that two teams tried to get the ball through their own baskets. Trying to fit in, I went virtually unnoticed the first couple of practices. As with many other junior high kids, my true gift was blending in so as not to be seen at all.
It was at our first game that it became clear to all and sundry that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing when I became disoriented and began blocking my own team members from making shots. Helen Keller would have known, had she been in the bleachers. With no more awareness or sense of direction than the pinball in a machine, I went blindly from one area of the court to another in constant but useless motion. The comedy of it all was not lost on the crowd either. Mr. Erwin’s team lost the game but achieved more laughs than the Harlem Globe Trotters ever dreamed of. Mr. Leslie had the biggest smile of all, as he had accomplished a little bit of revenge, which I didn’t understand until many years later.
After a month, Mr. Erwin had a quiet talk with me about the glaring fact that basketball was probably not my milieu. That’s when I began dreaming several times of being an astronaut, able to get as far away from the earth as possible. It was 1958 and Sputnik was in orbit, where I too wanted to be. The final blow came when in class one day Mr. Leslie compared Sputnik to a basketball with antennae.
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