The Basketball Diaries

I was not an athletic child. I ran around, of course. Played tag, freeze tag, any other kind of tag you could think of, capture the flag and games too numerous to mention, but athletic? No, that wasn't me. I preferred the company of a good book and a nice quiet bit of solitude to scrapping with people on the field or on the court. People who played sports were fundamentally different than I. They were popular, I was not. They were, well, usually dismissive, arrogant and every other teenage stereotype you could imagine. That's not to say I wasn't my own bundle of teenage stereotypes at the time, but I lacked the drive, the interest and the general cockiness that seemed to infect all athletes. It's an ingrained part of my personality: if I drop a ball or miss a basket, it's not the end of the world. I'm not going to beat myself up about it- it is just a game, after all.

That kind of laid back attitude would not have gotten me far in sports, I think. Yet despite being a spectator more than a participator, I've recently amazed myself with just how deeply sports have been ingrained in my psyche. Take basketball for instance: growing up, I couldn't stand basketball. With other sports, like dodgeball, soccer or pretty much anything else I had a decent chance of making some good shots, but basketball? No way. I sucked at basketball. I was beyond terrible. It was my Mortal Kombat: everyone else could do all the cool moves and all I could manage was a weak kick or a randomly thrown punch to the proverbial head of the sport.

Yet my earliest memories of Iowa sports are not of frigid afternoons in late October and early November in Kinnick Stadium, but rather of Carver-Hawkeye Arena and going to watch NCAA Tournament Games in 1993 and getting caught up in the excitement as the Iowa Women's Basketball team stormed to The Final Four. I remember day that in 4^th Grade, when the ice was coming down in sheets and the entire town was stunned at the tragic death of Chris Street. I remember in high school, when Dr. Tom Davis was fired by then Athletics Director Bob Bowlsby only to have the Men's Team storm to the Sweet 16, their best showing in what seemed like years in response…

And yet what I know about the niceties of basketball could be inscribed on the head of a pin.

This past week though, I'd like to think that began to change a little bit. You see, I'm convinced there are moments of clarity that pop up and slap you in the face, just to get your attention. (Exhibit A: Topics In Luso-Brazilian Culture, one sunny afternoon, where the Professor, bless her conducted the class entirely in Portuguese at 65 MPH and it was exhausting just to try and keep up. But one amazing day, I was sitting there, totally relaxed, spacing out and suddenly realized that I could understand EVERY SINGLE WORD she was saying. It was awesome.) This past week, I had the rare pleasure of seeing not one, but three games in a row at Carver Hawkeye Arena (the men ground out a win against UNI, the women THUMPED Iowa State and the men came up juuuuust short against Iowa State, respectively.) I came away convinced of a couple of things: first, if the Iowa women stay healthy and Morgan Johnson stays out of foul trouble, then look out! Second, the Iowa men are one, maybe two years away from climbing out of the ass-end of the Big Ten and potentially causing trouble for all kinds of people. They may not win a lot of games this year, but I can guarantee that blowouts and walkovers are going to few and far between with this bunch. And with experience, they'll only get better.

The place seemed different too: I worked my share of basketball games last year, both men's and women's and Carver Hawkeye just seemed grey, dismal and dreary a lot of them time, as if the building itself had caught the ennui that affected the men's program (with it's slow, ponderous style of play) and the women's program (frustration at close games and plagued with injuries), but now, there's a heartbeat again. The student section (although lacking at the women's games for some frustrating reason) has sprung back to life and 9,000 people showed up to watch the women thump Iowa State.

I still miss most fouls if I blink too fast. I don't understand half of them, if I'm really honest. I know what travelling is, what a charge is, even what goal-tending is, but an aficionado of the roundball? Not so much- and I'm fine with that. I know good basketball when I see it now. I can see defensive schemes, whether they're zone or man-to-man and love how one step in the right place to the right point on the court can leave a player wide open to take magnificent shots at the basket, some of which go in, some of which don't. A glorious realization, a moment of clarity that has me wondering when the snow will melt, so maybe, just maybe, I can find a basketball and a nice court and perhaps attempt a free throw or two.